Book: Diary of a Married Call Girl

New Delhi: A business which has a client list, a target quota, innovations, advertisements and investments. Maintenance costs are high but very necessary. And customer satisfaction is a high priority.

Sounds like any other ambitious business? Well, that's exactly how Tracy Quan describes New York's call girls' operations in her latest book, Diary of a Married Call Girl.

The book's not a sympathy seeker sex worker's saga. The book's intention is anything but to evoke pity. Rather, this book has two missions.

One is to sell like hot cakes, what with explicit details of a number of pornographic encounters. And secondly, to make a statement about sex work, seeking equal footing with other professions.

The book is a diary written by Nancy Chan, who is a woman in her thirties, happily married for a year to a guy, who doesn't know about Nancy's profession of a hooker.

What's interesting is that Nancy doesn't hook because of financial constraints – in fact, she hails from a well off family and is married to a successful investment banker.

The reason she hooks, and that is reiterated a number of times, is because she wants to be a full time professional making her own money, who has her own apartment and bank account.

The book looks into the lives of professional call girls who juggle between family lives and their professions.

Competition is hard in this profession and success is highly counted for. Interestingly, there are castes and levels among hookers and they distinguish on the basis of their own rules and ethics.

The author Tracy, who was a call girl herself before she took to writing, is maybe telling her own story through the novel's central character, Nancy.

Sex sells and that's well portrayed in the book which shows the booming market in the world's oldest profession.

Tracy takes advantage of that market and includes a lot of sex scenes in the book, which are quite unnecessary to the general plot and have been included primarily to titillate.

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But not all is well on the emotional front for the ambitious heroine, who has to regularly seek a shrink to discuss about the complications that arise out of her duplicity and her efforts to keep her husband from knowing the truth about her.

Despite having no issues with her chosen profession, the author shows how a call girl knows that not everybody, not even the man she loves the most, may understand this part of her life.

The profession, the ethics of this business, the emotional dilemma are all well explored but one thing lacking is the abuse factor.

It's hard to believe that in this business, the girls are always able to avoid the risk of abuse and violence. And if they do have a strategy to handle that, it's not very clear.

The story is kind of new but not refreshing – it makes you think a little about hookers' lives but fails to leave a long lasting impact.

Often the chapters remind you of the fast paced lives of New York girls – working, meeting friends for coffee and gossiping about their sex lives, all in typical Sex and the City style.

The book too is like the soap and doesn't have a beginning or a conclusive end. The author never meant it to be that way. It's a series she started with Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl and plans to continue with more.

Diary of a Married Call Girl, Author: Tracy Quan, Publisher: Harper Collins.