Swear You Won't Tell?
Page 19
Nine
1 Not all are born equal. Some are born in luxurious birthing suites with attached guest rooms. Others are born in maternity wards—one huge room with several women in labour lying side by side on beds, taking turns to dilate their cervices, like the world’s most horrifying assembly line. True story.
2 Proctologists are probably the butt of all jokes in the medical fraternity. And that’s unfair. Because it’s a shitty job, but someone’s got to do it. They’re probably great people, always ready to watch your back and stuff.
Ten
1 Anybody who had ever driven a vehicle in Mumbai is well-versed in the fine art of bribery. One does not simply flash money at traffic cops after being pulled over. They are not nautch-girls. You fold a hundred-rupee note twice or thrice, then slip it under your driving license when you hand it over for inspection. This works nearly every time unless you chance upon an honest traffic cop a.k.a one who refuses to understand the subtext of the words, “Saheb, can’t we reach some kind of … compromise?”
2 A Satyanarayan pooja is like a keg party for Maharashtrians. Just replace the beer with sooji halwa and a keg-stand with lying prostrate before the Lord. Avantika has been formally banned from attending such poojas in the homes of friends and family since the day she had chanted “When you’re happy and you know it, do a pooja’ during an aarti* at an aunt’s place. *The playlist for times when you’re trying to be devout. Or at least appear devout anyway.
Eleven
1 A station on the Central Railway line, known for its famous Ganesh temple. Why? What did you think?
Twelve
1 For a metropolitan that calls itself the financial capital of the country, Mumbai and its suburbs routinely face crushing water shortages. It’s all a big mystery, considering the city actually has enough reserves to meet 100% of the demand. Perhaps one clue lies in the bellies of water tankers, great big rumbling beasts that leak their way across the city, and make a killing from selling water in places where the water pipelines have spontaneously ‘broken’.
2 Like a year book, but girlier. It asked people what their favourite colour was, who their favourite actor was, asked them to write a message for you … come to think of it, it was actually Facebook, but with glittery stickers.
3 In pre-globalisation India, anything middle-class morality deemed just a bit much, was automatically ‘hi-fi’. Dating someone you didn’t mean to marry was hi-fi. Women smoking cigarettes was hi-fi. Gambling on horses was definitely hi-fi. High fidelity audio systems with sweet sound reproduction were … imported.
Fifteen
1 A rice plate is the original value meal, designed to fill the appetites* of working men who hadn’t yet acquired wives or had left the ones they’d acquired back home in the village. What it lacks in quality, it makes up for in unlimited quantities of rice, roti, dal, sabzi and if the rice plate house is particularly posh, a chunk of roasted papad.
* Well, at least the stomach-related ones.
Sixteen
1 A distant suburb of Mumbai, newer than Bombay, but not very Bombay really. Natives and civil servants refer to it as Navi Mumbai. South Bombay residents or ‘townies’ don’t refer to it at all.
Nineteen
1 This remains an effective tactic well into adulthood. Ask anyone who’s tried pizza and giggling.
2 A common misconception. Nobody is ever privy to the workings of the male mind. If someone is, perhaps they could explain the success of WWE to womankind. Large men in tights pretending to hit each other for the benefit of a paid audience? Kind of a biggie.
Acknowledgements
Some books just write themselves. Allegedly. This one didn’t. And without the support and sometimes ass-kicking of a few wonderful people, it may never have seen the light of day. So here goes, in no particular order, a vote of thanks:
Vahishta Mistry, you are the best first-draft reader a girl can hope for, all praises and positivity, with just the right way of pointing out glaring inadequacies so that I don’t feel like slashing my wrist with a sharp-edged A4 sheet.
Pavitra Jayaraman and Alok Pandey, thank you for entertaining out-of-the-blue phone calls and ridiculous questions regarding your professions. I’d say there won’t be more, but why make promises I can’t keep?
Ishita Desai, Ahana Chaudhuri, you are jewels among commoners and the most magnificent beta readers this side of Paradise Talkies.
Nishant Pratap, I cannot believe you took the time to read and review this in the first month of your new job. Your multitasking game is very strong, my friend.
A quick shout-out to the girls of the batch of 1997 of a school that shall not be named. Thank you for making high school so educational for me.
To Swati Daftuar, my wonderful editor: thank you for taking a chance on a book so many had turned down and for not changing it much. I’m truly grateful.
Irawati, my love, this book was conceived just weeks after you came into the world, but while I love both of you, you should know you’re my favourite. Now if you could just start sleeping on time again, so I can write some more?
And Arjun, you are an exceptionally demanding reader who keeps expecting me to write better, be better, do better. Thank god for that.
About the Book
DEAD BODY, CHECK. DISILLUSIONED REPORTER, CHECK. DARK AND SINISTER SECRETS, CHECK.
When Mumbai Daily journalist Avantika Pandit is asked to interview her childhood nemesis Aisha Juneja, she knows it will be like an express bikini wax—painful, but quick. Then Laxmi, her former best friend, shows up dead. And suddenly Avantika finds herself turning into the reporter she used to be—a nosy little newshound with the self-preservation instincts of a dodo.
Now, she has to meet old acqu aintances she’d hoped never to run into again, try to unravel the puzzle of Laxmi’s death, and ask the questions nobody seems to be asking—who is the man Laxmi was in love with? Why hasn’t anybody heard of him? What does he have to do with her death?
The answers could get her killed. But if the choice is between death and writing listicles, dying might not be that bad after all.
Featuring schoolyard rivalries, the Backstreet Boys and a fat dollop of 90s nostalgia, Swear You Won’t Tell? is part thriller, part whodunit, all fun.
‘Snarky and breezy, with enough corpses and nostalgia to keep those pages turning and wow, it’s 2 a.m. already!’
ASHISH SHAKYA, AIB
‘A cracker of a story … I couldn’t stop.
This should be a Netflix series.’
ANUVAB PAL,
COMEDIAN, SCREENWRITER, PLAYWRIGHT AND NOVELIST
About the Author
Vedashree Khambete-Sharma is an award-winning ad-woman in her mid-thirties, which is okay because mid-thirties is the new mid-forties. Or something. For the past twelve years, she has peddled everything from moisturisers to magazines, like some kind of one-woman corner shop. Before that, she was a freelance reporter for several newspapers and wrote on a wide range of subjects from student suicides to types of boyfriends. Yes, that’s right. Throw in a middle-class Maharashtrian upbringing, a convent education and an English literature degree, and you get, well, confused mostly. But also, inspired to tell the stories nobody else is telling.
She lives in Mumbai with her husband, daughter and the niggling feeling that she has forgotten something.
This is her second book.
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First published in India in 2018 by HarperBlack
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
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Copyright © Vedashree Khambete-Sharma 2018
P-ISBN: 978-93-5277-672-6
Epub Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 978-93-5277-673-3
This is a work of fiction and all characters and incidents described in this book are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Vedashree Khambete-Sharma asserts the moral right
to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Cover design: Manoj Gorde & Gopal Rechwad
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