At first blush, Anita Jain’s tale of trying to get hitched in Delhi sounds like classic chick lit. But Marrying Anita is stocked under travelogue, not self-help, and Jain is no Sophie Kinsella. The book is a surprisingly good read. It’s less a Hindu Portnoy’s Complaint than a memoir of a desi American in modern Delhi. Reading this is like hearing the tales of your friends who’ve shipped overseas for New India jobs and marvel at the out-there sexuality of the post-Doordarshan generation.

The tales are delicious. Jain herself is sexually adventurous and tells of a fling reciting Urdu couplets in her ear while they lie naked on a cot, of hooking up in light from Humayun’s Tomb, of the energy in the Nizamuddin hood. Her main clique is an Indian rock band, and they share joints and swigs of Old Monk while careening down hill-station roads. Two of the rockers date firangis who got career boosts from being white in colorstruck India. Jain dates a handsome younger dude with John Abraham hair and is heartbroken when her Adonis turns surly and distant. She finds that men in Delhi are as boorish and commitment-phobic as New Yorkers, less sophisticated only in how they say it.

Jain finds a thriving gay scene in Delhi and slips comfortably into the fag hag role. Her gay friends tell of first coming of age by messing around with the servants. One of her crushes was situationally bi. Though he eventually marries, he’s far more dandyish and erudite than those parked firmly on the straight end of the spectrum.

Some of Jain’s stories make me cringe, like how she spent three summers dating a distant relative, a Bhojpuri film director who’s her uncle’s cousin and is nearly two decades her senior. And she talks about some of the dirty laundry in her family. Plausible deniability is why people write this as fiction! She’s from Ghaziabad, a Delhi burb which Newsweek unironically calls one of the ten most exciting growth cities in the world. (She and I are both from deep Ghaziabad, which is plagued by langurs, dust and kidnappings for ransom. Newsweek’s boast makes us giggle.)

Jain shares with us the tale of the one that got away. She’d had a tempestuous relationship with a guy who was a Harvard grad student when she was an undergrad. And though still unmarried, she decided to stay in Delhi because of the entrepreneurial energy. People are dreaming of opening vineyards and restaurants, while New York seems in stasis.

The cumulative effect of Jain’s prose is honest and intimate, and the anecdotes are fabulous. If you’re at all curious about twentysomethings in India today, Marrying Anita is worth a read.

Update: By the way, the UK cover? Henna hands.

Previously: Marrying Anita