The Hindu Business Line : Of sugar and spice...

The first woman Sales Manager in HLL, Noor Bhalla flounders initially, but soon learns that the best way to do her job is to use her inherent strengths as a woman.

The five women in the Gujarati distributor's house spend most of their time in the kitchen, and are the first to rise and last to sleep. Says the grandmother with obvious pride: "Feeding a family of 15 is like feeding an army".

Earning the Laundry Stripes
By Manreet Sodhi Someshwar
Publishers: Rupa & Co
Price: Rs 195

The most appealing aspect of Manreet Sodhi Someshwar's Earning the Laundry Stripes (published by Rupa & Co) is that it can hold a reader's interest at different levels. The author has transferred her real life experiences — sometimes fulfilling but most often harrowing — as the first woman ASM in sales at Hindustan Lever Ltd — to the protagonist Noor Bhalla. An engineer-cum-MBA (IIM, Calcutta), Noor finds herself in a man's world of sales and is totally at odds with a milieu where her male colleagues watch porn films before presentations or attack liquor with gusto at office parties.

At one level it is a racy narrative which can engage you through the journey of Noor across India's dusty and chaotic hinterland with their loos (hot winds of Central India), distributors with their own set of idiosyncrasies who are totally taken aback at the prospect of having to deal with a woman in sales, and the `policeman' More, who blackmails her saying that the man she had thrashed with her handbag filled with a couple of kg of Rin bars, because he had molested her in a public transport bus, was in a coma and might kick the bucket any day.

Noor's journey is interspersed with sexual innuendos from her colleagues and distributors alike, beginning with an old man in Sales at Bombay HLL lecturing her on what misfits MBAs would be in rural sales, and how the "trade — retail/wholesale — is manned by men." As he holds forth on how sales is a "frontier province that requires lean and keen men", he suddenly stops to inquire about her name. `Noor' would make her a Muslim, but `Bhalla' was obviously Punjabi; this puzzles him.

Here is what Manreet's Noor wants to tell him, but of course doesn't: "I am a Punjabi Sardarni who chews screwballs and spits them out. For fun. But what if I were Muslim? Hanh? Hanh?"

Such passages display the female sales executive's chagrin at personal questions being thrown at her all the time and the communal divisions that rule people's heads and hearts.

The feminist angle

Along the way, as she takes on a myriad of HLL distributors in the hinterland, or accompanies a firang HLL executive with élan around Bombay, impressing him with her competence and knowledge, she is devastated to discover the little value that her gender has in rural India. To the extent that in a village in Uttar Pradesh when asked about the number of children the women have, the reply given includes only sons; daughters, apparently, don't count as "children". As their local companion Ram Singh explains: "Daughters are paraya dhan — from the day they are born all their fathers can do is to collect their dowry... Out of helplessness, some resort to datura (poisonous seeds to kill them)".

This is another level of the book, where Manreet the feminist comes through with a sharp focus. Take this passage when a senior colleague gives her another lecture on how incompatible it would be for a woman, "whose whole life" revolves around marriage and children, to be in sales, and advises her to opt for "market research" instead!

When he learns she has a South Indian boyfriend, he goes into a tizzy and says: "You have a penchant for problems", following it up with a bhashan on how men are different as boyfriends and husbands.

But as a woman sales executive Noor faces moments of triumph too. In the Gujarati distributor Govindbhai's house, after a meal when she resorts to her trump card of being able, as a woman, to go to the kitchen and talk to the women, she finds that there are five women — between 17 and 70 — there. They spend most of their time in the kitchen, and are the first to rise and last to sleep. The grandmother informs her with obvious pride that "feeding a family of 15 was like feeding an army", and how she is preparing her granddaughter studying in Class VIII for the task of taking over the kitchen in her husband's house some day!

But Noor is delighted when Govindbhai tells her the girl "is keen to meet a real lady manager as she has never seen one before. You see, she wants to be an engineer when she grows up." And Noor is reminded of the little girl in Etha, UP, "who at eight years, is a surrogate mother and housekeeper; a girl child who will neither get a chance to be a girl or a child".

Communal polarisation in India

Yet another layer of the book mirrors the author's distress at the increasing communal polarisation in India. At an HLL distributor's place in Bombayshe runs into Imran, the child who had watched his entire family being electrocuted to death in the Gujarat riots. The shock turns him into a mental retard. But imagine her horror when the distributor bitterly tells him that he had put his nephew away in a home because the terrorists wanted to use him as a suicide bomber. "The riots had already made the boy an idiot, they claimed. Why not put him to good use? Strap a belt of explosives around him, leave him in the middle of a crowded market and remote-detonate the bomb. Then watch the Hindus die."

Noor also has to contend with communalism at home; her mother is against her marrying the Hindu Siddharth, and says: "Marriage is different from friendship. After blood ties, the ties that count are those you make within your own community. Daily we are seeing riots in India: Hindu-Muslim, Hindu-Sikh, Hindu-Christian because the majority community wants to impose their faith on the minorities. Do not abandon your faith."

Her mother's desperate plea leaves her with many emotions, a prominent one being of the "little boy (Imran) who had screamed in my face and drilled a hole forever in my heart. A little boy who was graded `ammo' in yet another fight for faith."

These are the passages that elevate Manreet's novel from a mere narration of a woman sales manager's travails in a man's world, to a sensitive, searing account of the complex realities of an India divided along gender, communal, class and regional lines. Her ability to deftly mix sensitive and serious issues like gender and communalism with a lot of masala, such as finding herself staring into the eyes of a crocodile as she is stranded in a Sumo in flooded Baroda street, her encounters with the colourful More, tales of her batch-mate Kalpana's boyfriend pawing other women, etc, makes the book an absorbing read.

But the punch line is in her discovery that as a woman she can bring special insights into sales and had floundered because she had been looking at it all along from the male point of view. In her learning to "play off my inherent strengths — a woman is just so much better than men at some things" lies her nirvana.

Response can be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in

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