Earning the Laundry Stripes
Manpreet sodhi someshwar
Rupa & Co, Rs 195

Young engineer-mba Noor Bhalla is the first woman to be recruited into the Sales function at Hindustan Lever Ltd after a gap for over two decades. This novel is the story of her initiation into the world of selling soap and earning the laundry stripes. Manreet Sodhi Someshwar draws on her own training as engineer, IIM-C graduate and, yes, the first woman recruited into Sales at HLL after two decades, to produce this first novel in the breezy, mostly unpretentious style of post-Chetan Bhagat fiction. Not literary fiction, that is, but unapologetic and often irreverent narratives about the practical aspects of upper middle-class life in changing India: getting through college, surviving the job search, ignoring parental overtures for arranged marriage to “the nice boy from Canada”, warding off the groper in the bus, pataoing a partner, and so on.

At its better moments, Earning the Laundry Stripes serves up a refreshingly different look at the very masculine world of Indian corporate life. Different because it is the perspective of a woman who misses none of the not very subtle sexism around her: such as the senior colleague who gives her advice that will “lubricate your passage”; the peers who are busy playing a porn video before a review meeting; the creep who tries to grope her in a bus. Kithe phas gaye? Noor asks herself gloomily at a review meeting where she is the first to eat and the first to leave while the others — all men — are still sitting over their drinks. However, there are many happier experiences – such as meeting Sam Balsara, the elderly Parsi Sales Officer who takes her under his wing and, over Berry Pulao at Britannia Café, reveals to her that there was a time when he was known as Vanaspati Raja of Gujarat. Balsara shepherds her across his entire beat, including Kamathipura, Mumbai’s red-light area: “We sell here?” asks an incredulous Noor. “Rubbish question. We sell everywhere,” replies Balsara.

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