Anita Nair the best-selling author of The Better Man and Ladies Coupe takes a walk down the ladies' hostel and dispels age-old myths For most people, a stint in a hostel is a part of the growing-up process. It is that halfway home between the 
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Ladies club: Many notions of a ladies' hostel have always been based on hearsay or what one read or saw in movies.u00a0 File Pic</td></tr></tbody></table>embryonic warmth and safety of one's parental home and the wide world outside with zero tolerance for your personal whims and eccentricities. A hostel technically was the place you threatened your children with, when they didn't behave. It was guaranteed to knock the corners of you and leave you a more whole being. Since I never had the occasion to ever spend time in a hostel, these perceptions have always been based on hearsay or what one read or saw in movies. Hostels represented an extreme state especially the girls hostel. They were either nunneries with its inmates cloistered creatures. Or they were dens of iniquity where everything from cruel ragging to recreational drugs to lesbianism prevailed. Nine by Nine by Daman Singh is set in the Maheswari Devi Hostel for Women somewhere in New Delhi, housing Masters and PhD girl students of an unnamed university. And within its walls are rooms nine by nine in size and it is here the lives of Anjala, Tara and Paro are played out. So the first admirable aspect of Nine by Nine is how it shatters these notions with an easy hand. If in the beginning the novel is halting and even banal at times with its classification of mess attendees, twanging bra straps and rum-drinking sessions, the narrative gathers gusto and vigour soon enough. Anjali is not just the brilliant scholar of much rectitude and great ambitions. Neither is Tara the eccentric free spirit or Paro the pretty girl whose only aspiration is to make a good marriage. Dimensions slowly emerge and with those the shadows that cripple what will be their lives. Anjali suffocated by her mother's overwhelming need to keep her family around her perhaps is the one who gets away with minimal collateral damage to her spirit. While Tara whose eccentricity had always been seen as a corollary to her brilliance starts displaying worrying changes in her behaviour. All of which comes to a head when on a New Year's eve night, Anjali goes away to a party, Tara who has a penchant for musical rooms usurps Paro's and the tranquil Paro smarting from a broken engagement allows vanity, desperations and her own accommodative nature to wrest her very breath away from her. Paro dies for want of an inhaler. Thereafter what began as a lighthearted account of three girls in a hostel acquires somber and even grim tones. Perhaps it is here in Part 2 as the lives escape the nine by nine and emerge into the wider world, the writing and plot falters. Nine by Nine is a skilful first novel. Perhaps it could have been done with a little more leisurely playing out of situations, with a more rounded character growth. Nevertheless, that is just the critic in me. As a reader, it is a novel I found both enthralling and entertaining mostly. For the rest, don't we skin and seed a mango before we relish it? Why should books be treated any differently?

Anita Nair the best-selling author of The Better Man and Ladies Coupe takes a walk down the ladies' hostel and dispels age-old myths

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