Band, Bajaa, Boys! breaks clichés in Indian writing in English. The story is set in a small town. The smart 20-year-old Binny Bajpai wants to choose her match from a range of quirky characters. It is peppered with the language we speak, i.e. Hinglish. And the book is packed with humour, something of a rarity in India. Rachna Singh says this book is closest to her heart.
“When I started writing humour, it was mostly anecdotal. I had initially started to write a serious book with a lot of psychological undertones to it. But then Shinie Anthony called to meet me. She said ‘why would you want to write something so serious? If you are good at humour, stick to it.’ The other advice she gave was not to give myself away in small pieces. I took up the challenge and wrote one chapter and from there the story flowed.”
The journey of writing the book was, however, marked by a difficult period in Rachna’s life. She was diagnosed with cancer. But that did not deter her. “The book had me smiling through my chemotherapy. I found that very cathartic. There were times when I held my stomach and wrote with one hand. I wrote the book during my nine months of cancer treatment. The week my chemotherapy ended, I finished writing the novel.”
The Bengaluru-based Rachna hails from Allahabad and has set her book there. “The story will make anyone from a small town laugh. You can take a person out of a small town, but not a small town out of the person.” She adds that a lot of what happens in the book happened around and to her. “I had actually seen a fashion show in a boy’s hostel and wrote an entire chapter around that. The character of Raja Singh was borrowed from a person I knew who took English tuitions from my dad. But the boy couldn't speak a word of English,” says Rachna who works as an HR and marketing consultant and has four published books, including Dating, Diapers and Denial and Nuptial Knots .
The theme of rejection runs through the book as well. “Raja Singh’s father wants him to become a government-job holder. The system, however, rejects him. The Raja I knew in real life eventually returned to his village,” Rachna tears up at this point. “He died of illness at a young age because he didn't get adequate treatment.”
Even Binny faces not being accepted. “I was born a girl when my parents wanted a boy.
Binny Bajpai is also coping with rejection. She is proto-typical of a small town girl. She is educated in a Hindi medium school. She has the dichotomy — can’t we get the good guys even though we don’t speak English? She wants to conquer men. Every encounter is a conquest. It gives her a sense of achievement and victory.”
The book is an out-and-out comedy.
“If I don’t make a person laugh in every two or three sentences, then I know I haven’t achieved my aim.”
Band, Bajaa, Boys! is an Amaryllis publication.
