Around India in 100 days with a vague woman

The invite to the book event that arrived in the inbox one day was curiously worded. ‘Readings from two and a half books’, it said. ‘Do join us.’

A close reading revealed that there were, indeed, two and a half books to be discussed: as with couples with children from previous marriages, they were one his, one hers, and one theirs.

While Devapriya’s first novel The Vague Woman’s Handbook was just out, Saurav’s accessible science book, The Upside Down Book of Nuclear Power, had been released in 2010 and the couple happened to be in the middle of the rather exhaustive research they had undertaken for their joint writing project, a travelogue about a back-packing journey taken across India on the rather challenging budget of `500 a day.
The two met at Presidency College, Calcutta and got married “absurdly early” after putting in stints at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi, where Saurav studied economics and Devapriya did a masters in English and an MPhil in theatre and performance studies, and where she is currently working on her PhD at the School of Arts and Aesthetics.

“The idea of the journey was born long before the idea of the book; we had always meant to see India closely,” says Devapriya.

“Saurav has — for a long time now — been very intimately obsessed with the idea of India, and ever since we’ve been together we’ve engaged with questions on what India is really like, what India is really about. We meant to travel cheaply but the logistics hadn’t been worked out… it doesn’t seem easy to take a gap-year to travel when you have jobs and are expected to behave respectably!”

Once their other two books were in the pipeline, however, publishers Harper Collins India were sufficiently interested in the idea to commission them to write this book, so they chucked up their day jobs and started on the journey only half-jokingly inspired by Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries (minus the motorcycle, adds Devapriya).

The mammoth expedition is almost over, with only the last leg remaining while the couple recuperates in Kolkata. During the pilot-run, which was a 20-day stretch they took in January 2010 to assess feasibility, they travelled through Rajasthan and Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh and Western UP. In the main 80-day stretch, they began with a bus-ride from Delhi to Agra, and travelled through Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, mostly on buses covering 12,000km and never staying above a day or two at a particular stop. 

The journey, incidentally, has turned into a social media project. When they created the Facebook group ‘The heat and dust project: a book in motion’, Devapriya and Saurav had no idea it was going to influence the way they travel, but with close to 2000 opinionated members, constantly chipping in with advice and suggestions, the group has ensured this project is a dynamic, collaborative one.

The challenges have been plenty: right from finding buses that run on time to finding accommodation and proving their ‘married’ status to make sure the elusive accommodation is not denied to them in more orthodox parts of India. More than that, Devapriya finds it has been psychologically challenging. “Greater demands are made on the mind as opposed to the body. It’s funny, but we human beings begin to grow roots very easily, we get used to places and create a comfortable routine even in a new place in roughly two days! In this journey, we ruptured that feeling every time it came — and while that can be a very liberating process, on a day-to-day basis, it is rather difficult,” she says.

The book, she says, is shaping up more as a personal travelogue written by two people than a how-to book for Indians wishing to backup through India — though the two definitely hope it will inspire others to undertake similar journeys. At the same time, it is also turning out to be a book about India and the ways in which it is changing from the perspective of two rather hard-up young Indians and not prosperous “studio experts”.

Meanwhile, The Vague Woman’s Handbook has provided them with a break. A breezy tale about two ‘vague women’ – the kind who can’t follow directions and are dangerously irresponsible with credit cards — and their unlikely friendship, the book holds immense appeal for those who like reading books with strong women protagonists but are tired of the usual chick-lit tropes: Looking for Mr Right, obsessing about marriage and breaking up. Devapriya says she doesn’t have a problem with the chick-lit tag, though; in many ways, she says, it’s a very important genre within the tradition of novel writing and reclaims the female roots of the novel, first written for women who were thought unable to cope with more challenging forms of writing such as epic poems.

Essentially, though, Devapriya feels she “wanted to remind (herself) of some of the old-fashioned idealism of Oliver and Jenny in Love Story. What if Jenny didn’t die, was vague and hysterical and had a shopaholic 50-year old best friend?”

She borrowed liberally from her own life and those of her friends — from “whoever came  within borrowing distance”. An early marriage between two independent and spirited young people deeply in love forms a rather important part The Vague Woman’s Handbook. “The economic realities of a young marriage is something that I had always thought was worth writing about —  especially in an age as consumerist as ours is, when one is bombarded with images of glossy homes, designer honeymoons and event-managed weddings all the time,” says Devapriya.

Being one herself, Devapriya rattles off the characteristics of vague women rather easily: besides being hopeless with directions and never knowing when the credit card bill is due, they “don’t usually know how much money they are carrying in their cavernous bags — often, there is a vague hope that if they don’t know exactly, they might be pleasantly surprised at how long the money lasts” and always living with the conviction that “tomorrow they are going to turn over a new leaf: they shall stick to the diet, ‘cleanse’ their lives, learn — and do — yoga, keep an account of how much they are spending…”.

However, the book is not only a celebration of vagueness — but also in defence of it, she asserts. “Most modern women are over-worked and carry to-do lists in their heads that span things they have to do for work, home, children, families. The amount of pressure on them often forces them to be in-control. Being a vague woman is thus also a sort of protest against this system that requires lives to be so planned and organised. And it is only when one allows the mind — and the contours of life — to wander, to be vague, that creativity finds its expression,” she says.