I don’t know whether Radhika Vaz will take it as a compliment or not, but I definitely mean it as one. Her memoir, Unladylike, is like reading Judy Blume, Candace Bushnell and Tina Fey all rolled into one. Since I was reading the book to review it, I started earmarking the pages, which I wanted to quote from or refer to. Halfway through, I realised that I’d earmarked pretty much every alternate page of the book. It’s really a delightful read. (Yes, I know. Booklovers never earmark books.)

Now I’ve watched Radhika’s standup performance – Older. Angrier. Hairier. I read her columns in The Times Of India as well. Which is why I had, what I thought was a pretty good idea of what the book would be about. It would be about how she’s broken all the rules, given a damn about society’s diktats about how women should behave and basically lived up to the title – which is that she’s been everything but a lady in her four decades or so. Which is why I was so surprised – pleasantly so – while reading her memoir. I can imagine feminists pulling out their hair while reading large chunks of the book, because it will go against the very grain of their existence. And that’s the fun of the book. Because Vaz proves that just because you feel strongly about women’s rights it doesn’t mean that you can’t want to look pretty or have breasts or be stressed about having the object of your affection not return the favour.

There’s a lot in this book to relate to, especially if you grew up in the late Seventies-early Eighties. The book starts with her childhood and her parents who are not the usual mollycoddling variety and allow her to run amok. How when they shifted to Iraq when she was six, she was not given any education for two years of their stay there – which I found like something straight out of Enid Blyton. One of my favourite parts is how she makes friends with an Iraqi girl by repeating the phrase “Saddam Hussein Zain. Khomeini Zidan Meeuzain”. Which translates to “Saddam Hussein is great, Khomeini – not so great”. That a dictator worked as the glue to bring together two little girls who didn’t speak each other’s language is hilarious.

Vaz is brutally and hilariously honest about growing up in a co-ed school, desperately wanting breasts and to get her periods while her uterus seemed to be refusing to cooperate with her, her first kiss – and the need to feel accepted and be part of the crowd and be all girly. There are gems about how she wanted to be Miss Universe wearing a swimsuit and a sash – “Beauty competitions are to little girls, what porn is to little boys”. How the girls and boys in school looked forward to socials “the way convicts look forward to conjugal visits”. This is Judy Blume – just set in an Indian context, making it all more familiar.

Just when you think it’s a coming of age story, and wonder whether Vaz is getting soft in her old age, you have a chapter on vaginal farts and her introduction to Sidney Sheldon’s “fearless, horny heroines”. Vaz takes you through the trials and tribulations of being asked not to return to Lovedale ostensibly for being a deadly combination of disobedient and horny, seeing her first porn film with friends and drinking herself silly through college.

This is one of the most exacting and honest accounts of a young woman growing up in cosmopolitan urban India in the Nineties that I have read. What’s nice is that there’s no pathos and depression, which is what usually marks any true-life account of people who’ve been to boarding or of women in urban India. Yes, she doesn’t get the first job she applies to, or is particularly impressive in any of her other jobs, and seems to be in love with a man who doesn’t love her back as much. But there’s always something to laugh at through it all. It’s just so refreshing to read someone who can laugh at life and her own stupidities – and not blame everyone else, especially men, when everything goes wrong.

My favourite part of her memoir other than her nomadic childhood and life in boarding, is her great romance with Thaks. And the reason I love her narration of it is because she proves that the most feminist of us behave like absolute fools – who we would mock on any given day – when it comes to the men in our lives. Her behaviour in her romance and her ultimate marriage to Thaks will give any woman stitches in her sides and make you feel a kinship and often a sense of superiority – that at least you haven’t fallen so low in your pursuit of the man of your dreams. She shifts countries, thinks of giving him an ultimatum to marry her and then backtracks because “suicides spike dramatically during the holidays and I suspect they are all committed by people who give their significant other’s ultimatums. There would be no ultimatum, I would rather suffer through a sub-standard relationship than kill myself”. There’s a fabulously funny anecdote about the morning after their “wedding night” in India.

The only disappointment I had with the book was that there are barely three pages on how she got into improv – and I feel she could have spent a little more time on that. But it’s definitely a fun read, especially if you grew up at the same time as Vaz and believe in equality for women, but don’t see why that should mean that you should hate all things feminine. Of course Darren Star and people who felt let down by Sex And The City may not be impressed, but Vaz realizes how “unfeminist” she is when she writes about refusing to cover her head during her wedding and how she had her “feminist awakening right around the time her mostly unfeminist dreams were coming together”.

It’s impressive that Vaz has done what no other comedian in India has – written a memoir, that too in lucid language. It’s honest and funny and contrary to her show, not at all ribald. And most importantly, she tries to find the answer to the question – “Are you really a woman if you haven’t had a child?”.

Read it. You will be entertained.

unladylike. a memoir by radhika vaz is published by Aleph, Rs 299