Rochelle PotkarNovel Summary
The lives of three women are unknowingly stitched together by a single brown coat, as it moves from a factory floor in Bengaluru to the sweatshops of Dhaka and to the dazzling runways of New York traversing the path of global fashion. In New York, Adharshini Shenoy — a young model chasing size-zero perfection pushes her body to fit the world of big brands. In Dhaka, Beli Rehman works long hours in sweatshop silence, sewing clothes to support her children and survive. And in India, Gita Hangal fights to finish her interrupted education and rise to the role of Export Manager, while struggling to rebuild a bond with her son — a child born of violence. This powerful saga reveals a story of resilience, survival, and transformation against the complex landscape of global fashion where fabric meets flesh, trauma triumph and a memorable journey of interconnectedness unfolds through every other seam.
Pages: 336
Price: 449 INR
Published by Clever Cocoon Publishers, UAE
Available on Amazon and select bookstores – Dogears Bookshop, Goa | Carpe Diem Art Gallery, Goa | Fictionary, Mumbai | Exceller Bookstore, Kolkata | BooksonWheels, Indore
Excerpt
In a few days, her photos were up in print on a magazine cover — her body almost unrecognizable.
But Adharshini let the lava inside her moltenize until all the congratulatory messages and calls she received from the fashion world ceased. Seeing her Instagram photos Aaee said. “Is that you, Sona?” She being concerned meant something truly had changed. That meant she had moved orbits and gone into higher leagues. Her mother’s concern was the world’s revelry.
In Victoria’s cabin, Adharshini now viewed the wall mounts of the new citizenry of the TQM Talent Management. Every few months, the wall refreshed to immortalize current clients — the models-in-rage, who had battled the weathers and temperaments of the season. And now her face adorned a frame on the wall too! It was a moment of quiet redemption for her.
“I am overbooked, Vic!” said Adharshini, flipping through her call book.
“Well, sugar, that calls for champagne, doesn’t it!” Victoria rushed to pour some bubbly into two flute glasses. The rouge over her cheeks was enough to tell that she was proud of her cub. All her blunt words were under the carpet now. “Fabian’s got you walkin’ for Charpentier, Deschamps, Ricci, Gallo-Rizzo — the man’s got magic in his DNA. Chinese-French, and I swear he was born with silk in his veins. Am I proud of where I got you, Ads? You bet your glossy little self I am!”
Adharshini sipped the taste of success, the piquant liquid slicking her throat. She let the drink buzz through her head and battle her empty gut, that made her feel surreal. A cloud-bursted abdomen was like a galaxy blasting the unforbidden apple of early evolution: genesis, beginnings, and the becomings of human, woman, Eve. “I was wondering, Vic, when would I get to catch my breath.”
“Then here’s to breathlessness, darlin’! Who needs air when you’ve got headlines?” said Victoria sipping the champagne and raising her eyebrows, “You heard about Carra Nightingale? Body-positivity preacher, runs that blog House & Street. She’s been runnin’ her mouth again — wrote some self-righteous gibberish about you. But hey now, don’t go losin’ sleep over that. She’s got a petition goin’, but it’s nothin’ that’ll stick.”
“Petition?”
“Uh-huh. To ban all ‘skinny models,’ whatever the hell that means. Bless her heart!”
“But… why me? And why now?”
“Why you? Honey, look at you. You’re the damn standard. Plus, a seventeen-year-old fainted backstage last month — heart attack, they’re sayin’. Carra’s milkin’ that for clicks. But this kinda noise dies fast. You keep quiet, stay graceful, and this too shall pass. That’s the game. We live a century in a day, don’t we?” Victoria shook her head, snipping through the pages of her booking diary, “Now, hold your breath — or don’t, since you’re already breathless — ’cause you just landed Jana Davidson’s Fall Collection in Paris! They called me, honey. I didn’t chase this one.” She beamed with twinkling eyes.
Adharshini felt happy but also doomed. She had wanted some refreshing change every weekend, weary of the four walls of her lived-in cage of a life, but now this was going too fast. Her success was running ahead of her and she chasing its shadows, trying to catch it like a speeding bus. But if this was bitter chocolate, she was having all of it with the liqueur.
Later that evening, she boarded a bus to Derek’s apartment, typing in another message to him, ‘Need to talk urgently’, and settled into a top-tier seat of a double-decker bus. No happiness came without sadness. No success without the threat of defeat, but who was this bloody Carra Nightingale and why was she trailing her now? With the wind blowing into her hair and her face, it gave Adharshini the same swatch of freedom she enjoyed on the train rides of Mumbai. She googled Carra’s blog and read her latest post.
A Desperate Measure
‘Size zero’ women sashay around, making the whole of womankind feel inadequate. We secretly celebrate just one kind of beauty: Western, tall, and thin, that now models of color with different body types, carved by their ethnicities, try to emulate and fit into this much-stereotyped shoe and corset. They should be removed from cat-walking queues. And it should be mandatory for them to provide a medical certificate, stating their overall health and body mass index.
However, fashion house Ekbata set a good example by mounting full-figured models on the runway. There have to be deeper values under the veneer of glamour. May the real brown girl, please stand up? May the real Adharshini Shenoy please stand up?
Adharshini found her picture on the blog amid the bleak skinny models, and the ground beneath her feet slipped away. The comment section was fast filling with dismissive ungainly remarks. A debate she hadn’t started had ended up on her. She felt like a tumultuous new leaf in the eye of a storm. The collateral damage to arm-chair collisions. The new fodder for the gristmills.
The litany of comments read:
She’s talking about body image rather than body type.
She thinks banning ultra-thin women from working is the same as body-shaming larger-sized women.
Girls should get to discover their own style and clothes. They don’t need to be told what to wear. They should know and own their bodies.
Skinny models on the catwalk do not cause eating disorders in girls!!
Body positivism has become a spelled-out obesity-positivity option.
Such pressures kill our daughters who seek endless validation and approval and never get any.
Is Carra advancing the “fat” activism movement? Propagating unhealthy, lazy lifestyles and eating habits?
Why is the world always dictating to women – what to wear, how to look?
Carra is the new world messiah who sees through this fake and shallow fashion world.
Why are beauty standards so strict and stringent that women have to die for it?
Adharshini waded through other pages of the House & Street blog that held equally disturbing headlines.
1. Criminalize the hire of dangerously underweight models
2. Down to the Bone: NO MORE!
3. Ban Size Zero models
With her face flushed, she stared at the inky sky through the bus window, taking in deep breaths to recover from the quiver in her chest. She shut her eyes. The world was not supposed to understand. Who was this attention-seeking Carra? A senseless blogger who needed sensational scoops to stay in the news, with her fan-base drying up and a last-ditch effort to rescue her dying career?
She thought of the epidemic of negativity that online armchair bloggers had created. Watching the shop windows, fast delis, and the inert homelessness of rough sleepers, through the bus window, Adharshini realized there was a place for everything. Even the dispossessed. But who was she? Who would she be remembered as? Top Asian model of the 21st century? Or one of the many faces? And how would she like to remember herself?
She thought of mythology that had made home in her heart in the worst of times. The focused-way-of-existing by the Mahabharatan epic-hero Arjuna, who aimed at the bird amid the foliage. When guided by his guru Dronacharya to propel his arrow and shoot from his bowstrings, he aimed at the bird’s eye. Later, even over the reflection of water, Arjuna first and only saw the fish’s eye, as he aimed his arrow toward the real fish hanging and revolving above his head. He focused on nothing else. Fish-eye, fish-eye, fish-eye. Never caring for ripples. Never caring for noise and foliage.
As sharp as the peak of a crystalline iceberg, Adharshini realized how the world remembered a person. By your body of work and your body—if that was part of the work. Because the earth suffered Alzheimer’s, forgetting faster than it registered, where reality was but passing fiction. It was only our bodies that remembered everything like an archive of every blemish, pimple, crease, surgical nick, and stitch.
Her mobile screen lit up again with calls and messages, but she looked away, leaving them unanswered.
As the bus stopped, she answered Aaee’s persistent calls. “Sona, are you sick? Are you okay? I saw your latest pic…”
Smarting with tears, Adharshini cut the call, and typed in, ‘Aaee, if I have to be a pro, I am a pro! No two ways about it. You don’t have to worry. Take care of yourself and I shall be fine. These are my work demands.’ She then switched her mobile phone to airplane mode.
The world was changing headlines every day. Victoria was right. Lie low and let the hailstorm pass. She would have to make an adamant resolution to meet herself at the highest points of perfection, performance, and wisdom. No small talk, no dead ends, no petty scrambles to feed the buzz of the day.
When the bus screeched to a halt, she marched to Derek’s apartment building, tugging along a heavy shopping bag of apples and diet colas that she picked from a deli, and entered his house with a spare set of keys.
