India's Cheeky 'Chick Lit' Finds an Audience

Kala's protagonist works in a five-star hotel, smokes and drinks, can "name old and new wines with great elan, and can tell my cheeses apart." She turns to her two friends with problems involving her nagging boss or with her mother, who gives her "umbilical cord whiplash," phoning with the names of candidates for an arranged marriage.

One of the men her mother presents is an Indian who works for McKinsey & Co. in New York. He is a conservative Hindu vegetarian who has one condition for a bride: She must not eat garlic and onion. Kala's heroine, Aisha, wonders if she should develop her own set of dietary demands for a prospective groom. "No problem, Ma, just make sure he is on high proteins and no carbs," she says. The mother chides her for showing disrespect to other people's traditions, and Aisha fears she might be missing out on the nuances of ancient culture in her "desire to be a liberated Indian woman."

The cover of Kala's book features a woman in a red sari, the traditional Indian garment for women, and red Reebok tennis shoes. The sari, in fact, is often treated as a metaphor for the traditions that weigh so heavily on the heroines of chick lit. In Kala's book, Aisha wears jeans under her sari in one scene.

During a shopping expedition in the novel "Piece of Cake," the protagonist does her best "to drape the six-yard length of fabric, and emerged holding up the various folds that keep getting tangled in my feet." She calls the sari the "strangling folds."

Many Indian women live in worlds that bear no resemblance to those in chick-lit novels. Nearly two-thirds of the population here still lives in rural areas, where girls grow up in families that provide many opportunities to boys but none to girls.

"I am keenly aware that my book represents a sliver of Indian society, but it is a growing sliver," said Kala, who says she learned what it was to be poor during her student years in the United States, when she cleaned dorm toilets and had to choose between a meal and a large Pepsi.

Now, Kala is single and lives with her parents in New Delhi. She wears a ruby ring that her family astrologer recommended for creativity. She says he predicted her book's success and forecasts that she will get married "very soon."

Kala's publisher says that while Bollywood movie plots and television soaps continue to dish out regressive roles for women, post-feminist chick-lit heroines are showing up in the Indian editions of magazines like Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Elle and Marie Claire. Building on the success of "Almost Single," Vogue invited Kala to write a column. The Hindustan Times newspaper in New Delhi runs a weekly column called "Single in the City" by a female writer.

Recently, a group of 40 Mary Kay representatives from the United States were presented with copies of Kala's book while staying in a New Delhi hotel. One of the women, Jennifer Isenhart of Wilmington, N.C., said she enjoyed the book so much that she contacted Kala and asked her to sign 25 copies so that she could take them to friends back home.

"The book showed me that young women are the same everywhere. They have the same problems of boyfriends and bosses. They drink coffee, love to shop and have fun," said Isenhart, 28. "To enjoy life is empowerment, too."