Half Girlfriend
Chetan Bhagat
Rupa
R176
Pp 260
Love is in the air?crazy foolish love. And that is exactly what you expect even before opening the pages of Half Girlfriend, Chetan Bhagat?s new book. High on love, drama and suspense, the book makes for a perfect Bollywood film script.
Bhagat, the author of bestsellers like One Night @ the Call Center, Five Point Someone and 2 States: The Story of My Marriage, places his male protagonist, a small-town boy, in the elite corridors of St Stephen?s college in New Delhi in his new book. He uses the culture gap and social awkwardness that Madhav Jha encounters to weave a story that talks about two people in love, even though they come from very different social, economic and cultural backgrounds.
Madhav is the son of the flailing royal family of Dumraon village in Bihar. His mother runs a school for the children of the village and he wants to help her. So he comes to Delhi to study in the famed college. Riya Somani, the female protagonist, is a rich girl from a Marwari family based in New Delhi. However, she hates her family and their fixation on money. She yearns to learn music and live a simple and happy life. Madhav and Riya come close owing to their love for basketball, a game they are both good at. Madhav wants Riya to be his girlfriend, but Riya is unsure. She offers an alternative: she will be Madhav?s ?half girlfriend?.
But life has something else in store. Riya walks out of Madhav?s life?and later the college?after a tiff and Madhav is left heartbroken. A year later, she marries Rohan, a guy her family picked for her, and moves to London.
Madhav completes his course, ditches a high-paying corporate offer and moves back to his village Dumraon to help his mother run the school.
But fate has other plans. In Patna on an errand for the school, Madhav runs into Riya, who tells him that she has divorced Rohan and is working with a firm in the city. The two get drawn to each other again, spending as much time together as possible. Madhav even takes Riya to Dumraon to see the school and meet his mother. All seems to be going well when one fine day, Riya vanishes into thin air.
Reading the book, one feels that it has been written with a cinematic adaptation in mind. At the beginning of the book, Madhav meets Bhagat in a hotel in Patna. There is a flashback before the book cuts back to the present?a classic Bollywood approach. In his defence, Bhagat has always said he doesn?t wish to compose a literary masterpiece, but be an author for the common masses. Bhagat has, in fact, dedicated the book to the ?non-English types?.
All in all, Half Girlfriend is a good read, a book you may carry with yourself while travelling or vacationing. And if you have had a break-up recently, it might just be the perfect medicine for your broken heart.