The One You Cannot Have by Preeti Shenoy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another love missile from Preeti Shenoy for her fans.
A beautiful love story with a happy ending but not which ends with the lovers to have each other for their life time but their memories faded away over a period of time, stuck themselves in totally different relationships with someone else.
Aman Mathur, the one of his kind males left in this ugly world, meets Shruti Srinivasan in an inter-college event, and deeply falls in love with her, over a period of time. The love degree is so intense that they cannot even imagine of living a single moment without each other. But since Aman is from North India and Shruti being South Indian, their marriage proposal is dumped by Shruti’s parents and she is forced to marry Rishabh, under the pretext of ill-health of her mother. Aman is devastated over this development, after Shruti walks over one day and stops responding to Aman for over two years. He later moves on to UK to keep himself busy and finally comes back to Bangalore, on a job offer from his old mentor. Here he meets the attractive columnist Anjali, who prompts him to forget Shruti and move on to her. Rishabh one day happens to come across Shruti’s relationship with Aman before marriage and feels cheated for not being told about it. He maintains a silent distance with Shruti which tortures her emotionally day in day out until the time she decides to go back to Aman and pleading innocence. This is when Aman, the superior male, rejects Shruti’s offer and sends her back to Rishabh, thus taking his sweet revenge on her, for leaving him in the middle of a tempest and walking away, for her own reasons, without even thinking about what could happen to him.

The book is a lesson to many youngsters of today, who get into spontaneous physical and emotional relationships, so early in life, and later get separated due to unavoidable circumstances. Then are the times when they find it very difficult to adjust with their new and forced relationships, wherein their pre-marital affairs surface someday to haunt them for rest of their lives. Very few men exist today like Aman, who do not pounce on opportunities to grab women for sex, and also, there are too many women like Shruti, who find it difficult to adjust with their husbands, unable to forget the time spent with their lovers pre-marriage. The way the young urban India is changing its thought process about love, sex, marriage, divorce, friendship etc imitating the West, would be somewhat upsetting the elders of the country, who go through this story.
The author’s self styled jargon of phrasing sexual feelings of both male and female characters towards each other, at appropriate time, is superb and is at its zenith.

BTW, if someone wants to know about “Revenge Spending” find it in this book. An interesting, to-be-noted fact about angry and neglected wives.


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