An Excerpt from 'The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta'

Intelligent! I didn’t want to be only intelligent. Intelligence was not everything. In the final year of school there had been the prize for the best student. It was also called the All Rounders Trophy. I had thought I would get it. The Minister of Agriculture had been called to give away the prizes. The prize had gone to another girl. This girl got it because she used to do folk dance very well. She also played table tennis. The teachers liked her because she was polite and well-behaved. Her father was a brigadier, breeding shows, they said. I could have got it but I was not so well-behaved, also I was too proud…besides, I had the advantage of having parents in academics, also studies are after all only a part of one’s personality….
I wanted to dance too but I was too tall and awkward to dance. You have no grace, you can only become the boy in the dance, the dance-teacher would say whenever I tried to participate in the dance performances held in school. My mother had been very keen on my learning to dance. She employed a teacher to teach me dancing when I was fourteen but that was way past the age when I should have begun. I did not at all like Manak-sir. He never came on time. He would come when I was out playing baddy (badminton) with my friends. My mother would send the gardener’s son to fetch me. Manak-sir was reputed to be ‘half-mad’ in Desertvadi. He had shoulder length hair that he would toss around while playing on the tabla. He told me I should feel beautiful while dancing. I giggled at that. He tried to teach me the ‘panihari’ dance where Krishna is flirting with the woman who goes to fetch water from the river. Move your waist, he told me, you have a pitcher on your head, and look at Krishna with love and anger. I glowered at him and tried to jiggle my waist at the same time. Not like this, he said and enacted the scene. Manak-sir had protruding teeth. He looked at me from under his eyelids, like this, he said and danced in between our worn out sofas, swaying his hips. There was a peal of laughter from Shugni Bai who was bringing in the tea. Is he a hijda, she asked me afterwards. I can teach you better dance, she told me. She was surprisingly agile. I used to dance so well, she said, this damned husband has beaten all the spirit out of me.

The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta

Born to an academic, middle-class family in a small town of indeterminate character where there was nothing to do except cry, make a phone call or masturbate’, Geetika Mehendiratta struggles to understand her own private world of intellectual intensity and uncontainable sexuality which is being subsumed in the dusty world of Desertvadi.

Coming to Lutyenabad ostensible to pursue an education that her parents deem absolutely essential for women in the present times, Getika does manage to get ‘highly educated’ though perhaps only in the truer sense of the phrase. Researching she finds that the only way to hold on to anything is by relinquishing the position of the ingénue, committing an action and being committed to it.

In this forthright first novel, the often comic and sometimes heartrending aspects of Geetika’s life on the campus are communicated in a prose that has texture, an intuitive verbal intelligence and a very Indian bilingual sensibility.

Praise for the novel

The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta

Anuradha Marwah Roy’s remarkable first novel, intelligently crafted, touchingly told. Free from stylistic affectations, her fluent prose is devoid of the subverting impact of pleonastic frills – a virtue few debutante-writers can claim to possess. Reflecting a bilingual sensibility, what emerges as a very obvious concern is her desire to be recognized as a natural storyteller.
Bishwadeep Ghosh in ‘The Sunday Times of India’.

What is not to be taken for granted are the clear flashes of insight into character, the incisive use of dialogue to pad out the even tone of the narrative style, so that Geetika becomes unforgettable not just for her polysyllabic name (which she hates) but because she has been so believably and recognizably put together – the new Indian woman coming to terms with herself in an Indian society from which she can expect no quarter and to which she will grant none.
Carol Andrade in ‘The Metropolis on Saturday’

The book is wholly modern and yet Indian enough, is fluently written and easily read.
Muriel Wasi in ‘The Hindustan Times’


It is a charming story, written blandly and without excessive emotion, about growing up. The style is reminiscent of Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole series.
Prita Maitra in ‘Sunday Magazine’

Geetika, the girl, the teenager, the post-graduate student rings true. You delight in her discoveries and share her pain.
Sunil Mehra in ‘The Pioneer’.


Geetika traverses the geographical and mental space between a small town in Rajasthan and the national capital. First novels are notoriously unreliable for future projection, but collectively these books point to an indigenous state of good literary health.
Meenakshi Mukherjee in ‘Far Eastern Economic Review’