Anuja Chauhan colours politics with streaks of passion in her joyous, funny and rollicking ride of a second novel, Battle for Bittora (HarperCollins). It’s a “facelift” that makes people in the proverbial corridors of power agreeable, adorable and loveable in varying degrees due to their varying character traits. The book both teases and titillates, but, most of all, it engages and entertains. No mean task, this.
In one of George Harrison’s beautiful tracks, Beware of Darkness, Leon Russell croons:
Watch out now, take care
Beware of greedy leaders
They take you where you shouldn’t go...

Battle for Bittora’s not-so-greedy (not, at least, in the material sense) young leaders of Young India take you where you are happy to go. This page-turner of a racy romcom draws you right into the throes of a battle for ballots where two twenty somethings fight for a Lok Sabha seat even as they find themselves in the throes of love, reigniting old sparks, clinging defiantly to each other under public glare, causing the media to go berserk.
In the badland of Bittora in Pavit Pradesh, caught in the maddening frenzy of election are Jinni, short for Sarojini Pande, the reluctant heir of the illustrious Pande dynasty (Pragati Party), and Zain Altaf Khan, an idealistic ex-royal of Bittora, contesting on the hardliner Hindu outfit Indian Janata Party’s ticket. Think of the Congress. Think of the BJP.
The contest gets its share of spice by the fact that Khan makes his rival go all week at the knees when he is around. It’s a strange situation. Khan, Jinni’s childhood friend, becomes a “frenemy” as the election unfolds. And while she drools over him and is besotted with him, Jinni must do everything to defeat his bete noir at the hustings. As electioneering campaign fervour gathers momentum, love finds its own feverish pitch. The marriage of power and love is the stuff political potboilers are made of. And Battle for Bittora is an intelligent and unabashed potboiler that both lampoons our political system and, at the same time, elevates it with a lofty, though idealistic, emotion: love. It shows just how love can bloom even between two arch political rivals. And, just how, in the end, it is love that triumphs, conquers all.
When I call up Anuja to fix up the date for an interview, she is in Bengaluru. (The book was launched there on October 8, followed by a launch in Mumbai on October 14. It will be released in New Delhi on October 28). “I am reading the book. And I quite like it,” I tell her during the course of our conversation. “You like it! And you are a man!” she tells me, sounding elated.
I could guess what she means. Perhaps it’s a little odd, though not so unlikely, for a man to enjoy what many perceive as chicklit (even though Anuja’s novel doesn’t have a “pink” cover). Besides, Battle for Bittora is, on some level, also a battle of the sexes and the winner, to give away the plot a bit, is a woman.
We meet at her luxurious apartment at the sprawling Ambience Islands that overlooks the Ambience Mall on Gurgaon Expressway (NH8). When her maid opens the gate, it’s Anuja’s three children — daughters Nayantara Violet and Niharika Margaret, and son Daivik John — I meet first. Then, Anuja breezes in. She is every bit the author of the “laugh-out-loud” novels that stand out for their particular brand of wit and humour. If you know the voice of her novels (her debut, Zoya Factor, written in first person, was the story of Zoya Singh Solanki, a sassy advertising executive, who trails the men-in-blue wherever they play as she is considered to be their lucky mascot), you kind of know her. Solanki is little different from “Keetanu Queen” Jinni Pande, who works at an animation and special effects studio in Mumbai, animating germs and keetanus for a living — till she is pulled into the heat and dust of an election campaign by her legendary grandmother, three-time Lok Sabha MP (MP3, that is) Pushpa Pande, who pronounces is as ij.
Anuja is unfailingly charming, brutally frank and has a light-hearted air about her. And, much like the narrators in her two novels, she talks the lingo of an average young person in India, often resorting to words in Hindustani that lend a certain flow and spontaneity to her conversation. If she has fun writing her novel, it seems she has some fun while talking about them too.
Having worked in the advertising sector for a decade and a half, coining such catchphrases as “Yeh Dil Maange More” and “Oye Bubbly”, when Anuja set out to launch her career as a writer, she had two ideas to start with: One had to do with advertising and cricket (“it has a huge scope for humour”), and the other with politics. And she had to pick cricket first because of the 2008 Cricket World Cup. Like most first-time writers, Anuja drew on her own experiences as an advertising professional to add the feel and the flavour of the frenzy (“the insanity”) around cricket (“All is fair in love — and cricket” was Zoya Factor’s punchline).
Cricket was one “religion”, politics another. For the second book, Anuja makes use of a different kind of access. With senior Congress leader and Uttarakhand governor Margaret Alva as her mother-in-law, she has had the ringside view of politics and makes the most of it in Battle for Bittora. “I thought it was high time someone wrote a book about politics that makes it accessible, young and immediate as against the dark, weird and crazy world where nobody goes,” she says, adding that the book is an exercise in giving some sort of a facelift to politics.
When you deal with politics, you know that it is a serious issue. And Anuja was aware of it: “I passionately believe that young people should be involved in politics in whichever way they can.” Without making light of the heavy-duty subject of politics, Anuja is trying to be a bit funny. She says: “I know that politics is a heavy issue. But I feel if you talk about it in a light way then people don’t mind reading it,” she says. Her effort is to talk about moral sense in the political arena without sounding in the least bit moralistic.
While the novel is about the suchness of today’s politics, it also, in some ways, shows how our politics should be: “May be, in some ways, it is like wishing that our politics were like this.” Anuja’s mother-in-law tells her how, in all these years, she has hardly met any “handsome young prince” fighting against her. The lustworthy male character she creates is an exercise in wish-fulfilment. After Zoya Factor, many people asked Anuja, “Who is this captain?” She said he was the captain she wished we had. Ditto for the politicians in Battle for Bittora: “They are the kind I wish we had.”
If you find a lot of Hinglish in the book, it is because the characters normally speak in such fashion. But there is a caveat: “The trick is to use such words in the context that you know.”
Does Anuja worry about how someone not familiar with the Indian contexts will respond to the book? Does she have an average Indian on mind as her reader when she writes? She says that if you have to make a lot of money, you would want that the book should go international. “But I am thinking that I will sell the rights for films and make money,” she laughs. Even though she doesn’t think about readership that much and writes “shamelessly for myself”, Anuja feels that if there are enough people like her, the book will work.
The only thing she, as a reader, expects from a book is that it has to be unputdownable: “I generally don’t have the various categories — literary fiction, chicklit, dicklit and pata nahin kya kya — in mind. I don’t get involved in that.” This is reflected in her reading list — from Georgette Heyer romances to Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and Meg Cabot, from Joseph Heller to Vikram Seth — which has books and authors that are unputdownable.
She likes black humour. She declares Catcher in the Rye to be the best first-person narrative ever. She thinks there is a lot of affection in the way Vikram Seth writes about the old ladies, the spinster aunties and the cool poets: “He creates very lovely characters.” She says: “There are only writers you admire, and writers you don’t admire. There is nothing in between.” Anuja says she doesn’t quite care about what slot her novel falls into.
Anuja says she likes the sense of power and hold that she has as a writer.
On a sabbatical from advertising and enjoying her stint as a full-time writer for a while now, she will soon be working on yet another novel. “It will be pretty different. I may have a love story, but it may not be the first-person narrative,” she says.
Meanwhile, Zoya Factor is all set for screen adaptation by Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment.