Description

Trisha Pradhan arrives in Delhi at twenty-six with a National Institute of Fashion Technology degree, a paying-guest accommodation in Munirka, and a single hand-stitched portfolio of her own designs. Within eighteen months she is the youngest creative associate at Anaita Couture — Delhi’s most exclusive bridal house — and the quietly-acknowledged favourite of its founder, the legendary, intimidating, fifty-one-year-old Anaita Mehrotra herself.

And within two years she is sleeping with Anaita’s husband.

Vihaan Mehrotra is forty-eight, charming in the way only old Lutyens money knows how to be charming, and entirely uninterested in his wife’s couture business or his wife’s couture protégé — until one rainy October evening at a Sunder Nursery gala, when Trisha laughs at one of his bad jokes and he, for the first time in a decade, notices a woman.

What follows is a glittering, knife-edged Delhi novel about ambition disguised as desire and desire disguised as ambition. Through suite parties at the Lodhi, after-hours fittings at the Khan Market studio, weekend escapes to a Mehrotra-family farmhouse in Mehrauli, and one career-ending decision Trisha will eventually have to make in the back room of an embassy party, *Shehar ki Bhookh* lays bare the polished cruelty of Delhi’s old elite — and the young women who arrive in their drawing rooms hungry, hungry, *bhookhi*, and walk out either ruined or remade.

For every woman who has ever wondered what version of herself this city was waiting to release.