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inviting entries under the theme ‘Journey”. As I started to write the image of a dusty highway, a groaning Ambassador car and a bright, burnished sun came to me. It was a potent reminder of my early corporate days when I worked as a road warrior in the service of India’s largest FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) aka sabun-tel company, Hindustan Lever. I was the first woman recruited into the sales function of Hindustan Lever after a hiatus of twenty-odd years and my presence as a lone woman in an all-boys sales club had provided me with some heartburn, rueful pride, much joy and insights aplenty. I realized then that I was sitting on material that would lend itself rather well to fictionalizing. Also, it would be a unique perspective because nobody had mined it before: an insider’s account of a cutthroat corporate world in contemporary India.
The title, Earning the Laundry Stripes, came to me in the form of a limerick early on – I used it subsequently in the story as I showed the heroine, a flustered Laundry Queen, trying to demonstrate the stain-fighting abilities of a newly-launched detergent bar. It went thus:
Blue to pink, Acid I think,
Pink to blue, Alkaloo,
Ergo, the ASM litmus test,
Never to be taken in jest,
A chance to scrub and wipe,
And earn the Laundry Stripes.
I began my journey then, as any writer does, with a ton of courage that sat squat on the tiny voice, which squeaked occasionally: what if you can’t pull it off? Also, I did with the material what every fiction writer does: I took elements of myself, of my desired self, of characters I have seen and observed in movies, books, life and I put them in a fictional situation – then I started to grow them.
I had been writing for a few years and had found my ‘voice’, which to me means the themes that are important to me as a writer and through which I want to engage with my readers. There were two themes I wanted to weave into my story: gender imbalance and sectarian violence. Growing up in my hometown in Indian Punjab I had witnessed the inferior status India’s most prosperous state accords its girl child. I had also lived through the terrorism of the eighties in my border town. Unfortunately, the two trends were on an incline and I wished to sensitize my readers to the same. However, the first task was to tell a story. For that I needed to take the ingredients I had and transform them into fiction and in the process hope to create some magic.
I created Noor Bhalla, the fiery young protagonist who graduates from Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata and joins Hindustan Lever’s famed training programme. On the first day of her sales stint Noor finds herself riding atop detergent bags while the blistering Loo popcorns the plains of Vidarbha in the month of May. One challenge was to bring the searing heat, from which most Indians escape by taking noon-long summer siestas, tangible as Noor sells soap shop to shop. In turn, the bemused retailer, askance at the presence of a sabun-tel wali, resolutely focuses on the horizon – the bit that extends from Noor’s right ear – as he makes her acquaintance. As I wrote along the character of a policeman came to me. Initially, he was to play a minor role but in the true tradition of an underdog he started to run away with the plot! Constable More who starts off by harassing Noor provided many interesting twists and turns to the plot that eventually became a thriller. The consequent pace came in handy because it ensured that the story never got bogged down.
Since the famed Hindustan Lever training programme takes trainees across India, it provided me an opportunity to illustrate the dichotomy between rural and urban India, especially with relation to women. Gandhi said India lives in its villages; however, in those very villages, women subsist in a nether world. I used Channo, a mysterious woman perennially shrouded in an enormous shawl, who trails Noor around Malan village with offers to help. Only later, as the truth is revealed, does Noor realize the courage it took Channo to be her own woman.
A lot of action in Earning the Laundry Stripes occurs in Mumbai where one of the characters I crafted is Mehmoodbhai, Noor’s Colaba distributor. When Noor first encounters Mehmoodbhai, she is puzzled. Accustomed as she is to bustling distributor offices, she finds the gloom and quiet of Mehmoodbhai’s shophouse unsettling. That is, until she learns the truth. As Noor pushes retail sales of Rinsurfvim through Mehmoodbhai, peddlers of more sinister ware trawl the bylanes of the Muslim neighbourhood.
In the novel, the character who is closest to my heart is six-year old Imran, Mehmoodbhai’s nephew. He sprang at me from a photograph I had seen some years back – a young boy, severely bandaged, seated on a hospital bed, looking into the camera – in the aftermath of the Godhra riots. The young boy’s eyes were a map in which you could traverse all those horror-filled alleys he had wandered through before someone deposited him in hospital. Imran is special to me because he holds a mirror to the madness that is engulfing us.
As Noor attempts to earn her laundry stripes through one year of training, she is shadowed by the increasingly avaricious constable More. Eventually, he tracks her down to Mumbai where Noor has only one card left to play. It could deliver her, or do her in.
Earning the Laundry Stripes is a chronicle of a woman’s journey of self-discovery in the S&M (Sectarian and Macho) world of sales. Even as Noor encounters groin-scratching shopkeepers, a Schwarznegger-idolizing distributor, a goat as bus companion, receives gratis matrimonial advice from colleagues and clients, she discovers an India at once in transition yet mired in the past where a rich urban woman can buy sex while a village woman will get her nose sliced for daring to converse with a strange man; of a people divided by their multiple faiths yet united by commerce.
It captures India’s ongoing transformation from the perspective of a trailblazing woman working in a traditionally male environment. Since Noor is an MBA by training, I peppered the narrative with interesting management “fundas”.
So, go forth on the journey with Noor Bhalla, into the heart of contemporary and corporate India as she figures the regulation life jacket does not work and she must devise her own ways to survive!
To know more about the novel, log on to www.manreetsodhisomeshwar.com
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Manreet Sodhi Someshwar is an award-winning writer (Commonwealth Broadcasting Association, RTHK). Her articles have been published in the IHT, Time Asia and other papers and she does regular book reviews for the
SCMP. An engineer and a Management graduate from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIMC), she was the first woman recruited into the Sales function of HLL (Unilever India) after a hiatus of twenty-odd years.
Earning the Laundry Stripes is inspired by those barmy days of travelling atop detergent bags and selling soap in the 45-degree heat of upcountry India!
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Courtesy: http://www.sawnet.org |
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Earning the
Laundry Stripes
by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar
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Our Price Rs. 195.00
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*USD 4.40
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