Book Review: Anuja Chauhan's 'Club You To Death'

Decided to update the blog in the new year, with pieces I've written in the interim. This is a book review I did for Scroll in 2021 and hadn't put up here. Some of you might still find it of interest, especially since ACP Bhavani Singh's career continues with Anuja Chauhan's more recent book, The Fast and the Dead (Oct 2023).

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Anuja Chauhan’s new novel may be a whodunnit, but its people are its pleasure, as usual

In ‘Club You To Death’, the popular writer with a perfect ear for conversation uses crime as a vehicle to portray the ‘beautiful people’ of Delhi society.

Early in Those Pricey Thakur Girls, Anuja Chauhan’s thoroughly enjoyable novel set in 1980s Delhi, there’s a scene where the retired Justice LN Thakur and family pile into the khandaani Ambassador to see off their daughter Debjani aka Dabbu for her first day as a newsreader at DeshDarpan (an obvious fictional stand-in for Doordarshan). Chauhan’s latest book, set in present-day Delhi, opens with a charming display of similar familial intimacy, squabbling but deeply affectionate: the retired Brigadier Balbir Dogra and family, four generations “stuffed into a rattling, eight-year-old Maruti Swift”, head off to play Tambola.

The similarities don’t end there. In Thakur Girls, Debjani’s glamorous job (DD newsreaders were then the acme of fashion) had the family dhobi excited to iron her sari and the Bengali Market chaatwala refusing to charge for golguppas because he had seen “Baby” on TV. In Club You To Death, the fetching young lawyer Akash “Kashi” Dogra is flaunted proudly as a customer by his Nizamuddin street barber, plays cards with the drivers parked under his house and chats affably about politics with old security guards who call him Kashi Baba.

The feudal quotient is a smidgeon less – it is 2021, after all – and Chauhan has moved a teeny tiny bit leftward in the transition from Hailey Road to Nizamuddin, making her new protagonist a jhuggi-defending lawyer. But Kashi enjoys much the same cosy relationship with the world as Dabbu did. He’s just woke enough to express some discomfort with it.

The privileged insiders

With his rented shared barsati and JNU-trained activist-architect girlfriend, Kashi Dogra may think he’s stepped away from privilege. And maybe he has travelled some distance from studying at the Doon School and dating a rich industrialist’s daughter. But Chauhan is too smart a writer to let even her likeable hero rest on such self-congratulatory laurels. When Kashi judges someone for having made up a new name and identity, Chauhan is quick to have another character reflect privately “that it is only people with great privilege who can afford to think like this”.

In this obliviousness, ironically, Kashi is following in his father’s footsteps. Brigadier Dogra belongs to that class of people that’s more than comfortably off, with their children attending the best schools (often the same schools they themselves went to), swinging the best jobs (sporting the old school tie does no harm) and generally getting a much better shot at success than 99% of the rest of the population. But they remain convinced they’re not the elite, because – as Brigadier Dogra splutters “Elite people go to five-stars and seven-stars”.

The Dogras? They go to the club.

Anuja Chauhan’s heroes and heroines have always come from the tiny sub-section of India that’s privileged enough to measure its privilege in memberships rather than money. So it’s perfectly fitting that her new novel is set in an institution emblematic of that class: a club that sounds a lot like the Delhi Gymkhana, dealing with a political milieu that sounds a lot like the present.

Speaking the language

As always, Chauhan knows her characters inside-out, turning out pitch-perfect comic set-pieces where pretty much everyone comes in for some needling, from pompous military heroes to poor little rich girls from The Vasant Valley School. But almost everyone also gets a degree of understanding. It helps that Chauhan is adept at dialogue, rendering each character in a suitably Englished version of their specific Hindi-mixed lingo, endowed with just a little extra colour and cusswords.

“It’s my own fault! I was the one who had bete-ka-bukhaar, and kept hankering for a son in spite of having such lovely daughters!” says a posh Punjabi mother berating her loser of a son. “I wanted to tell him ki listen, behenchod, we have a huge-ass CSR wing and we do a lot!” rants an heiress defending herself against the charge of being rich and oblivious. “Banerjee, apne saand ko baandh [Tie up that bull of yours],” says the friendly male who’s text-warning a woman about her boyfriend’s seductive ex.

Ever the old advertising hand, Chauhan constantly ups the linguistic absurdity quotient in delicious little ways: old Brigadier Dogra insisting on calling his wife Mala-D; a line of sculpted semi-precious stone lingams being called Shiv-Bling, or a potential scandal involving an army hero getting hashtagged as “Fauji nikla Mauji! Hawji Hawji!”

The perfect outsider
In a gleeful departure from her previous work, though, Club You To Death serves up murder as the main course – of course, with a breathy little romance to make the medicine go down. The setting offers plenty of scope for political intrigue, classist snark and just plain gossip, and Chauhan sets to work with relish, plotting the crime onto all its possible social and cultural axes. For starters, the murder is committed on the day of the club elections, one of those sorts of events that occupies mindspace in a proportion inversely related to the power at stake.

The rival candidates, both insiders, seem equally keen on winning. But could either – the retired military hero or the classy female entrepreneur – really want the job enough to kill for it? Or is the murderer just trying to pin the blame on one of them?

Second, there’s the victim, with his own secrets. Was the dead Zumba instructor a self-made Robin Hood, or a devious social climber? Was he playing his rich clients, or were they playing him?

And finally, there’s the wider socio-political context: such unsavoury news doesn’t bode well for a club already in the bad books of Delhi’s new rulers (not least for its connections to the old ones). As new rivalries and old secrets tumble out of the DTC closet, the citadel of Lutyens’ Delhi privilege begins to seem rather doddering and vulnerable. It’s a clever trick – especially when we wonder if it’s just true.

Either way, having crafted this perfect insider atmosphere, Chauhan places the case (and us) in the hands of the perfect outsider. A policeman who’s upper caste and English-speaking but not quite Club Class, ACP Bhavani Singh is somehow observant enough to imagine other people’s compulsions, be they of caste, class, gender or something else. Instead of the Singham-variety cop “who makes the criminals piss their pants”, Bhavani makes “all the crooks leap up grinning, and ask him how his granddaughters are.”

Stolidly incorruptible, staunchly non-violent and persuasively gender-sensitive, the old Delhi Police officer feels even more like a form of wish-fulfilment than Chauhan’s dishy romantic heroes. So, of course, we dearly want to believe he might exist. Much of the pleasure of Club You To Death comes from watching the amicable old policeman piece the case together quietly, his “little grey cells” keen enough not to draw attention to himself.

Under the radar, as Chauhan well knows, is the best way to fly.

Published in Scroll, 10 April 2021.

In the dark of the night

My Mirror column:

The absorbing Raat Akeli Hai stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui as a UP cop learning a little about himself as he unravels a web of murderous intrigue

Radhika Apte in a still from the atmospheric new murder mystery Raat Akeli Hai

The shaadi ka ghar has been a favoured backdrop for the dramatic unfolding of countless Hindi film romances, but it’s likely never been the setting for a murder mystery. Nor has the ubiquitous wedding video been turned into evidence for a police investigation before. Honey Trehan’s slow-burn directorial debut Raat Akeli Hai does both things with delicious conviction, giving us an atmospheric whodunit that feels deeply embedded in the dystopic state of Uttar Pradesh. What makes the film even more satisfying is that Trehan – a long-time casting director who has done films with Vishal Bhardwaj, Meghna Gulzar and Abhishek Chaubey – casts Nawazuddin Siddiqui as his detective hero, and places his unmarriedness centrestage.

Saddled with the near-giggleworthy name of Jatil (literally ‘complex’) Yadav, Siddiqui’s plain-speaking Kanpuriya cop is introduced as a man with some complexes of his own. We first set eyes on him in a photograph that his mother (the effortlessly watchable Ila Arun) is trotting out at a wedding, attempting to convince a female guest that her son is an eligible match. The fair-skinned young woman has her spangly sari draped over a spaghetti strap blouse, but her views on skin colour remain hopelessly unreconstructed. “Rang saaf nahi hai (His complexion isn't clear),” she says, dismissing Jatil at a glance. “Par mann saaf hai (But his heart is),” says Arun, turning away only to be accosted by her embarrassed and angry son.

But while we might sympathise with the fact that Jatil’s dark skin makes him an inferior candidate in a world where Ajay Devgn is the exception that proves the rule, his own views on women reveal a rather muddy mann. “Did you see the clothes she was wearing?” he says to his mother. “I just want a susheel girl.” As the film unfolds, however, Jatil’s socially-learned disgust for the sexually independent woman (“Tumhare jaisi aurat ko apne paas phatakne bhi na dein”) clashes often with his simultaneous attraction to what he acknowledges as courage and honesty.

And no wonder, given the rarity of a “saaf mann” in RAH's grim world. In a scenario with several shades of last year’s Hollywood crime comedy Knives Out, Jatil is called upon to investigate the murder of the patriarch of a well-off family whose members seem not to like each other very much, and who might all have had motives to kill him. Knives Out hid its sharp politics under parodic excess. Here Trehan and cinematographer Pankaj Kumar (Haider, Tumbadd) create a brilliantly atmospheric web of oppressive rooms and half-lit corridors to match a much darker milieu that feels true to present-day North India: corrupt, power-hungry, sexually exploitative and two-faced. When our hero gets there, the terrace and balconies are still lit up for the wedding that has just taken place, of the widowed dead man to his much younger mistress. And the sight of the new wife Radha (Radhika Apte, looking the part but never completely inhabiting it), still in her wedding finery, sitting in her upstairs room with a ghunghat half covering her face, is very much part of the filmi marriage fantasy (from Mother India to Kabhi Kabhie to Tanu Weds Manu) that RAH both evokes and toys with.

What Trehan and his exceptional screenwriter Smita Singh do with elan is to make that image of the marriageable woman the film's recurring subtext. The dogged small-town detective whose Achilles’ Heel is attractive women has been with us at least since Polanski’s Chinatown. Here the mirage-like quality of Siddiqui’s first sight of Radha also reminds one of Manorama Six Feet Under, Navdeep Singh’s 2007 adaptation of Chinatown. But while our cop hero may have a soft spot for the supposed femme fatale, almost everyone else (in the family and beyond) has already decided that she must be the murderess. “Woh ladies rijha rahi hai aapko (She's seducing you),” Siddiqui's colleague says knowingly. When Siddiqui protests that she barely gives him the time of day, the colleague pounces on him with the sort of unsustainable circular logic that otherwise rational men single women out for: “That's exactly it! That's how women seduce you, by not giving you attention.”

The slow accretion of words and images creates a dark picture of this skewed world, in which women are damned if they don't – and certainly damned if they do. From Siddiqui's “duffer” colleague to the dead man's feckless but good looking “hero-type” heir, every man in town is out to make a sanskaari match, while secretly lusting after women whose attraction is precisely that they're not 'wife material'. “Baazaaru se gharelu hone ka safar kitna kathin hai aapko maloom hai?” asks the politician Munna Raja (Aditya Srivastava). And yet the gharelu women, who've won the supposed big prize of marriage and respectability, can end up more patriarchal than the men, resorting to ever-lower measures to guard their practically nonexistent turf.

Faced with this intriguing cocktail of lust and revenge, our UP policeman hero presents himself as “not such a low-level man”. Jatil's striving for moral fibre is real, and yet it is also clear that he must operate within the system as it currently exists. And that system is one where the extra-legal has become the norm, where it is a public secret that only a saffron-hued MLA can risk owning a tannery, and an inconvenient cop is as easily 'encountered' as an out-of-favour gangster. In this post-procedure world, even being a stickler for truth can now mean finding extra-legal ways to uncover it. Whether it's marriage or murder, the show must go on. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 Aug 2020.

Bombay Confidential

My Mirror column:

In a murder mystery set in the film industry 40 years ago, the crime writer HRF Keating tapped into our preoccupation with tinsel town.

Fiction writers are strange creatures. The British crime writer HRF Keating famously did not visit India until he had written nine books featuring the Maharashtrian policeman Ganesh Ghote. Keating didn’t originally intend to stay with Ghote longer than a a couple of books. His first Ghote mystery, The Perfect Murder (1964), won him a gold dagger for fiction from the Crime Writers' Association and commercial success (especially in America). In response to readers’ demands, he obliged, writing nine Ghote novels by 1974, becoming anointed India expert of sorts. 

In 1976, with his tenth book featuring the Bombay-based detective, Keating finally took the plunge into what might be the city's most obvious real-life locale for intrigue – the film industry. Forty years down, Filmi, Filmi, Inspector Ghote's take on Bombay's commercial cinema in the 1970s is perhaps more interesting for Indian readers than it was then. Especially if we treat it not as some sort of documentary evidence of what the industry was like, but of what about this world -- and our relationship with it – seems to have struck a Western outsider.

Keating won points from me with his very first paragraph: “The Deputy Commissioner was reading a filmi magazine. There was no mistaking it. Inspector Ghote had come hurrying into his big airy office in response to a crisp summons on the intercom and he had caught him in the act.”

The scene is set consummately, establishing Ghote's position in the Crime Branch bureaucracy – as well as Hindi cinema's position in the Indian cultural universe. I gesture to the crucial fact that Hindi cinema was, for the ’70s Indian elite, still very much a guilty pleasure — a low-brow taste that many partook of, but that anyone in any position of seriousness preferred not to be seen indulging in publicly. (For years, even filmmakers working on the edges of commercial Hindi cinema made such tongue-in-cheek references to its popularity – Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Guddi, which cast Jaya Bhaduri as a teenager besotted with the iconic Dharmendra (playing himself), was a dissection of the Indian public's besottedness with popular cinema. A film like Sai Paranjpye's Chashme Buddoor parodied Hindi movie romance both in letter and spirit. Guddi, if I remember right, also actually begins by gently mocking a figure of authority – a school teacher – for being immersed in a film magazine.)

The book's plot has Ghote called in to investigate the mysterious death of an ace actor during the shooting of a Hindi film adaptation of Macbeth (something that took another thirty years to happen in reality: Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool). Ghote's character may be a bit off sociologically, but in his disavowal of any knowledge of Hindi cinema and his simultaneous desire to claim familiarity with Macbeth, I think Keating cottons onto something about the split cultural self of the Indian elite. Popular Bombay cinema in the '70s – and its most famous denizens – had a great deal of money and influence and a hold on millions of people, but our Anglophone elite only thirty years after independence was reluctant to grant it any cultural capital.

The book is also interesting as a portrait of a pre-liberalisation economy, in which of course the film world is a shaping influence and participant. We hear of the parallel black money economy in which everyone receives shadow payments, we hear familiar terms like Dearness Allowance and Vigilance and we also hear of how the secret desires of a pre-liberalisation elite are catered to — the importing of cosmetics, “foreign television sets and watches with digital face”, the making of blue films on the sly in Bombay, the smuggling out of the films and the smuggling in of the girls in them.

Keating gets many details right – some extras are described as Ghati women, there is a “tall Pathan chowkidar”. Still he falters often when it comes to words and names. The murdered actor is called Dhartiraj, a rendition of Prithviraj that feels terribly unidiomatic; the Macbeth film, in a rather obvious inspiration from Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, is titled ‘Khoon ka Gaddi’ when it should grammatically be ‘Khoon ki Gaddi’; his use of phrases like “Choop chaap” and “Ek dum” can seem colonial and bizarrely dated. But Keating is clearly interested in linguistic specificity – from the very first paragraph he refers often and without annotation to the “filmi duniya”; he revels in using Indian words like raddiwallah and crorepati; he devotes a section to explaining “chumchas”. And all through, he renders dialogue in an excessive but heartfelt Indian English: “Wining and dining, booted and suited,” “Madam, if you are wanting to see me, I am altogether at your...”, or “But, excuse me, to make a film in bits and pieces only, is that truly possible?”

But to return, in conclusion, to Ghote: whether he is meeting Seth Chagan Lal, the beady-eyed moneybags with threats as cold as his cash, the swaggering Ravi Kumar or the almond-eyed screen goddess Nilima, Ghote finds himself unable to behave authoritatively. It is as if, in his unbidden transformation from stern law enforcer to obliging supplicant, he embodies our relationship to the filmi duniya. However much we might scorn the silver screen, it taps into some part of us that's secretly helpless.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 July 2017.

At the scene of the crime

My Mirror column.

Watching Kahaani 2 triggers a retrospective look at the city’s role in Vidya Balan’s actorly career.

Vidya Balan as an urban working mother in Kahaani 2

The new Kahaani 2 is nowhere near as good as 2012's Kahaani: its mystery is less mystifying, its cops are less attractive, its villains are caricatures who fail to chill. The plot is not a continuation of Kahaani's, and nor do the two films have any characters in common.

There, now, that's out of the way, we can get on to the real business of this column — which is to try and understand what Vidya Balan is trying to do with her star persona. I can hear the surprised reaction already: “But Vidya Balan isn't a star. She's an actor.”

I agree. Balan is indeed one of the few A-list female stars in Mumbai who does not seem to care at all about appearances — by which I mean not that she isn't good-looking, but that she isn't always striving to look her best. In fact, as I wrote in a 2014 op-ed, “Balan is one of the rare Mumbai heroines who enjoys that most basic element of acting: becoming someone else.”

Roles like ones she held in The Dirty Picture (in which Balan played the Southern sex star Silk Smitha with rare physical ease) or the hilarious, sadly underwatched Ghanchakkar (where she appeared to revel in the OTT outfits worn by her fashion-addicted housewife character) would seem to suggest that the actor's plan is to not have a plan.

And yet, since watching Kahaani 2, I have begun to see a distinct pattern in Balan's cinematic appearances. There is a kinship among many of her recent characters that can only be explained as the slow, perhaps organic — and perhaps inevitable — crafting of a star persona.

For one, Balan — in conjunction with her directors, most energetically Sujoy Ghosh, but also Ribhu Dasgupta and Samar Sheikh — seems to have taken it upon herself to craft for the Hindi film heroine a new relationship with the Indian city. (The cities chosen for this project so far are interesting, too: Calcutta in Kahaani, Te3n and Kahaani 2, and Hyderabad in Bobby Jasoos.) Again and again, Balan plays female protagonists who get to traverse the streets of Indian cities with an abandon that is rare in real life — and practically unseen on screen.

Second, unlike the many mainstream heroines whose on-screen explorations in urban space are limited by class and the protective company of men, Balan's indefatigable female characters walk the city alone, and with purpose. What is fascinating is how frequently this purpose involves a crime.

Vidya Balan tracks her sister's killers in No One Killed Jessica (2011)

As far back as Raj Kumar Gupta's No One Killed Jessica (2011), as Sabrina, the sister of murdered real-life model Jessica Lal, we saw Balan slice fiercely through Delhi's fog of fakery, crisscrossing that city's party venues and police stations in search of an elusive justice. As the marvellous Vidya Venkatesan Bagchi in 2012's Kahaani, she pounds through the streets of Calcutta on a mission to find her missing husband, her pregnant belly both attracting attention and deflecting it. With that wonderful double-edged mechanism in place, “Bid-da Bagchi” — as the movie's Bongs pronounced her name — runs riot, using her ingenuity to open doors across the length and breadth of the city, from seedy hotels to government offices, Park Street to Kumartuli.

From the grieving family member who finds herself on a mission against the city's obfuscations, it was a short step to playing a professional solver of urban mysteries. In Bobby Jasoos (2014), Balan enjoyed herself thoroughly, playing a roza-keeping Hyderabadi women whose uber-enthusiasm for her job as a newbie detective also involves a series of disguises: turbans and moustaches, false bosoms, Kanjeevarams and burqas all treated with the same nonchalant panache.

Vidya Balan as a cop on a case, in Te3n (2016)

In Te3n, produced by Sujoy Ghosh, which came out earlier this year, she graduated to becoming an investigator in uniform. Although she landed with the film's least fleshed-out part, Balan's turn as Sarita — the policewoman handling the kidnapping case on which Te3n turns — certainly added to her particular actorly repertoire as that rare Indian woman who traverses the city with ease, so comfortable in her own skin as to seem to our unfamiliar eyes almost belligerent.

From Poe and Conan Doyle, until the present day, the idea of the detective as an urban explorer and guide has run parallel to the idea of the city as a site of criminal imagination. So it was likely only a matter of time before Vidya's urban trajectories turned full circle: from unravelling the city's secrets as an investigator of crime, to becoming the investigated. Kahaani 2, in fact, allows us glimpses of three of these female flaneur selves: the do-gooder urban detective, the heroic everywoman and the potential criminal mastermind. Sadly, Balan's age-old good-girl persona (think Parineeta, Lage Raho Munnabhai, Jessica) prevents her Kahaani 2 character's potential doubleedged-ness from being convincing.

Maybe we need another Ishqiya to bring her dark-black mojo back.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Dec 2016.

The Turn of the Screw

My column in today's Mumbai Mirror:

Meghna Gulzar's gripping filmic recreation of the Hemraj-Aarushi Talwar double murder case is the most convincing intervention in what has been, right from the start, a trial by media.

Irrfan Khan in a still from Talvar

In an early scene in Talvar, we see Irrfan Khan and Tabu (playing "CDI" officer Ashwin Kumar and his estranged wife) initiate proceedings for a mutual consent divorce. In a film so tightly scripted and so single-minded in its attention to the real-life details of the notorious Hemraj-Aarushi Talwar double murder, a subplot about the investigating officer's personal life might seem superfluous. The manner in which the scene unfolds, showcasing Tabu's talent for petulant irritation and Irffan's for deadpan delivery, might also suggest that the filmmakers needed a "light" scene to leaven the otherwise relentless grimness of the material. And to some extent, of course, this is true. 

But what makes Vishal Bhardwaj's script so masterful is that the scene isn't only that. Before the judge agrees to admit the divorce petition, she insists that the couple announce their reasons for separating. Tabu's tetchiness at the judge's morally loaded questions, echoes - in form and in content - the piqued replies given by Konkona Sen Sharma and Neeraj Kabi (playing Nutan and Ramesh Tandon, parents of the murdered girl) when the UP police investigating the case start to insinuate that the crime has to do with the 14-year-old Shruti's immoral sexuality. 

These scenes between the Tandons and the police capture with laconic splendour what director Meghna Gulzar and screenwriter Vishal Bhardwaj, like some critical commentators before them, believe to be the crux of why the investigation turned against the Talwars: An incomprehension based on social class. Among the things that were un-understandable to the police was the dead girl's language: The casual use of what they considered "bad language" but which was, amid this set of cool adolescents, perfectly unremarkable; especially when combined with the overly-emotional tone in which a 13-yearold might apologise to her father for what was, in fact, some minor misdemeanour. "Aur ek galti nahi, teen galtiyan," exults one Noida policeman in the film, gleefully displaying the book that Aarushi happening to be reading at the time: Chetan Bhagat's The Three Mistakes of My Life. 

Linked to this sort of linguistic incomprehension was the police's bafflement about a liberal upbringing, and the chatty, companionate relationship that might exist between parents and daughter. To the paan-chewing, not-particularly-English-speaking policeman who is assigned to the case (a very convincing Gajraj Singh), the idea of a teenaged girl's birthday celebration being something called a sleepover - in which young people would spend a night in the same house, pretty much unsupervised by adults - was unimaginable as anything but a licensed orgy. 

There is also another angle from which class can be seen to be at the centre of this investigation, and thankfully, the film does not shy away from showing it. When Ashwin Kumar (standing in for the real-life Arun Kumar) takes over the case, he is quickly convinced that the parents could not have committed the so-called "honour killing" that has been declared to be the motive, and under which assumption Rakesh has been arrested. He moves swiftly to turn the investigative spotlight on the servants - the murdered Khempal (Hemraj), and his three friends, who may have been in the vicinity of the house that night. Talvar shows how lie detector tests, forced narco-analysis and downright intimidation were used to try and extract - from at least one of them - a confession that would be admissible in court. 

Avirook Sen's book on the Aarushi case suggests that Arun Kumar's past record may have created an impression that cases in which he was involved, the wealthy and powerful managed to get off despite initially being suspects. This was true of two high-profile cases he had handled - the alleged murder of Rizwanur Rahman after his marriage to Kolkata industrialist Ashok Todi's daughter, which the CBI under Kumar found to be a suicide, and the Nithari murders, in which Kumar's initial investigation argued that only the servant Surinder Koli was the culprit, not his employer Moninder Singh Pandher. 

But while clearly showing Irffan slapping the suspected servants around, the film also seems keen to suggest that he is not some posh person with a natural inclination to side with the Tandons: We see him eating greasy chowmein at streetside stalls, sharing a bottle of concealed alcohol with the poor old Nepali woman who works the stall, and playing lowbrow mobile phone games insensitively as the incarcerated Ramesh weeps in front of him. 

In the scene where Kumar intimidates a man he thinks is a witness and thus a potential approver, the film captures the poverty and fear of the stuttering servant - and yet somehow our real protagonist, for whom we are meant to really feel, is the man doing the intimidating. Because we are meant to believe that it is being done in a good cause, the cause of truth. In this, Talvar is not unlike most Hindi films that justify police violence as "tactics". 

Despite having been described as "Rashomon-like" in its depiction of various possible scenarios, Meghna Gulzar's film seems to me to be weighted heavily on the side of the "Tandons". The staging of the sequences in which we see them "commit" (and cover up evidence of) the murders is done in deliberately unbelievable fashion, designed to elicit laughter. In contrast, when it is "imagined" as committed by the servants, the film makes the murder seem taut and terrifyingly believable. Sumit Gulati's impressively sly, venomous performance as Kanhaiya (the real-life Krishna) doesn't aid the objectivity claim. 

The media appears in the film only tangentially, with a flavour of ridicule. But for a case whose history has been so deeply shaped by the media's imagination, perhaps it is only fitting that its final outcome should be sought to be influenced by a filmed fiction.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4th Oct, 2015.

Much too fast and furious

My Mirror column on Sunday:

Dibakar Banerjee's contemporary spin on a 1940s Bengali sleuth is packed full of grungy period detail, but detective Byomkesh Bakshy doesn't look like he can save the world. Not at this speed, at any rate.

The pleasures of detective stories are – or ought to be – two-fold. There is the pleasure of being rowed gently into a world in which secrets lurk beneath the surface of the everyday. And then there is the pleasure of watching a single mind, invariably a mind sharper than most people's, lower a net into these seemingly unruffled waters and fish those secrets out of the depths. Dibakar Banerjee's new film offers plenty of the first kind, having populated its 1940s Calcutta canvas with so many secrets that it feels like watching a particularly atmospheric painting come to life. But Banerjee's Byomkesh feels too callow and too hurried to afford us the second kind: not so much because he nets the wrong fish, but because he hurtles through this storied world without letting us savour what he does uncover.

Bengalis, who were colonized earlier (and more effectively) than most of the rest of India, acquired a taste for detective fiction early. Priyanath Mukhopadhyay, a retired policeman, began recounting his experiences in the Darogar Daptar (The Inspector's Office) series in 1892, around the same time as Arthur Conan Doyle began writing his first stories. Mukhopadhyay's popular series didn't draw from Doyle, but Holmes and Watson certainly had an influence on other Bengali writers of crime fiction, giving rise to many a cerebral detective who solved crimes with the aid of a not-as-clever associate who happened to be a writer. One of these was Sharadindu Bandopadhyay, whose Byomkesh Bakshi first made his appearance in print in the 1930s, accompanied by his writer friend Ajit. The alliteratively-named detective was a dhuti-wearing middle class Bengali man of his time, with a domestic life involving a wife and a child, and a world that extended only till Cuttack and Munger and Dhaka – quite different from Satyajit Ray's rather more cosmopolitan Feluda, a bachelor who spoke fluent English and bore the Anglicised name of Pradosh Mitter (rather than Mitra), and whose travels took him to much farther-flung destinations like Jaisalmer, Ajanta, Kathmandu, Gangtok, places that Satyajit Ray had been to himself. But while Feluda's adventures were always child-friendly, full of antique smuggling and kidnapping, Byomkesh mysteries could often involve crimes of lust and passion and revenge.

Another reason why Byomkesh has endured is that he has been incarnated in many avatars outside the pages of Sharadindu's 32 and a half stories. He has been given audio-visual form by directors as disparate as Satyajit Ray, who cast Uttam Kumar as Byomkesh in the famously disappointing film Chiriyakhana; Basu Chatterjee, who turned Byomkesh into a national household name with his Rajit-Kapoor-starring series on Doordarshan in the early 1990s; Anjan Dutt, who launched his first Byomkesh film in Bangla with the young TV actor Abir Chatterjee in 2010; and Rituparno Ghosh, whose Satyanweshi, starring Kahaani director Sujoy Ghosh as Byomkesh, had to be completed by his crew after Ghosh died unexpectedly while still working on it.

Dibakar Banerjee's Byomkesh, then, is only the latest in a long line of cinematic interpretations. It is fitting, in a way, that Byomkesh should finally find a home on the Bombay film screen, because Sharadindu Bandhopadhyay worked for nearly fifteen years as a scriptwriter with Bombay Talkies, Filmistan and other studios. On the other hand, it does feel slightly odd to watch this picture-perfect world of dhuti-clad Bengalis called Something-Babu having to read Yugantar in Hindi and saying such things as “same-to-same”-- not to mention the jarring dissonance produced by Sneha Khanwalkar's deliberately anachronistic musical score.

There is much period detail that starts off feeling marvellous and on-the-ball—such as the smoky streets of North Calcutta's old Chinatown, festooned with Chinese New Year banners and strings of Chinese sausages, or the way the competitive, education-obsessed, bhadralok milieu is established with effortless accuracy by characters being remembered by their university gold medals, whether two years or 20 have passed since they were awarded. But then, in swift succession, Banerjee flings at us a Burma-born actress who goes by the annoyingly Hindi heartland stage-name of Angoori Devi, a comic Sardar taxi driver, two dumb Bhagalpuri pehelwan guards to provide the Hindustani quotient, a pack of Chinese druglords and a ridiculously fake Japanese villain strutting about with a samurai sword -- and the film began to feel like a mithai too stuffed with mewa to taste anything at all. 

Every possible constituent of Calcutta's 1940s mix is ticked off, except perhaps the Armenians. But by trying to splice together deaths by sword and deaths by strychnine, nationalist party politics and British policemen and the Chinese opium trade and the Japanese bombing of Calcutta, the film refuses to let one properly soak in the smells and sights of any one of these. Each time Nikos Andriatsakis's supremely atmospheric cinematography deposited us at the dark edge of a galli, with opium addicts stumbling out, I craved to be let into the opium den, to see it for myself. But that never happened. Meanwhile Watanabe's house looked like a facade only present for him to prance about in the garden. I enjoyed much of the spectacle of what I do understand is meant to be a genre film, but I felt nothing for any of the central characters -- and less for any of the peripheral ones, even when they died thankless deaths.

As Dibakar Banerjee put it so beautifully in an introduction he wrote to a Puffin edition of three Byomkesh stories in 2012, being Byomkesh was always about doing the right thing. But there was something deliciously gradual, small-scale, sometimes even mofussil about the Byomkesh stories that I remember, which has been replaced here with an action hero out to save the world. It feels like a delusion of grandeur. I hope he'll come back to ground level.  

Woman, Uninterrupted

Today's Mumbai Mirror column:

Vidya Balan's free-spirited performances have opened up a space in our cinema where not just she, but other women, too, might begin to be comfortable in their skin.

In most Indian cities, it is still a rare joy to see a woman out and about on her own terms: walking, working, eating -- just being; a woman who sits comfortably in her skin, not 'adjusting' by squeezing into the smallest possible space simply because the men on either side have spread themselves out, as men do. 

And for me, at least, that joy is amplified when that woman isn't obsessively chronicling her every look, her every laugh and eyebrow twitch in some imagined mirror that is a man's face. 

Within the world of Hindi cinema, Vidya Balan is that woman. And in Bobby Jasoos, you see Balan do again what our film industry, like our public spaces, rarely let its women do: take the centre seat, settle in, and thoroughly enjoy herself. 

After the slow drying-up of Priyanka Chopra's A-for-Ambition appearances (Fashion, What's Your Rashi, Saat Khoon Maaf) -- and up until Kangana Ranaut's Queen (and the disappointing but risk-taking Revolver Rani) -- Balan has been the only heroine with commercial billing to test the Lakshman Rekhas the industry draws around its female actors. 

Having bid a loud and lusty goodbye to her good-girl reputation with Ishqiya and The Dirty Picture, she went on to carry a thriller like Kahaani entirely on her shoulders. 

After some years of grief, Balan has also figured out that her performances are enough to soar above the low-level depredations of the KJo-led fashion police. That liberation from starry compulsions translates into Balan's roles as well - can you think of anyone else in contemporary Bollywood who wouldn't have balked at doing a whole film with a big pregnant belly? Or embraced Silk Smitha's larger-than-life physically, literally spilling out of her clothes, with such joyous lack of inhibition? Or jumped with such gusto into the atrociously loud outfits of fashion-magazine-obsessed Neetu in Ghanchakkar? 

Balan is one of the rare Mumbai heroines who enjoys that most basic element of acting: becoming someone else. And in Bobby Jasoos, she gets to do it in the most enjoyable way possible. As an intrepid, if somewhat inept female detective, Balan's Bobby gets to walk the crowded alleys of Hyderabad's Mughalpura as everything from a turban-wearing beggar man to a young bangle seller with a wispy moustache. Balan looks like she's having as much of a good time as Bobby is meant to -- and I certainly revelled in watching Bobby, disguised as a large Kanjeevaram-clad mami with an impressive shelf of a bosom, suddenly start jumping with joy upon receiving her largest payment cheque ever. 

But it isn't just playing dress-up. For most Indian women, the idea of being able to melt invisibly into the -- inevitably male -- crowd is a pervasive fantasy. Bobby Jasoos taps into that often unarticulated yearning by having its heroine achieve, in multiple forms of masquerade, the freedom she might not have otherwise. 

By making Bobby a roza-keeping Muslim woman who's never without her dupatta, the film aims for a social realism of sorts. This is a conservative lower middle class milieu, in which a woman who hasn't married and borne children by thirty is beyond the pale, and a man having a serious chat with his son sends his wife -- who's massaging his head -- into another room. It is no surprise that Bobby's father can only respond to the gift of his daughter's first salary with the pronouncement that "This household doesn't run on women's earnings." 

Yet when Bobby wears a burqa, it is only as another form of disguise. Her usual uniform is a loose salwar-kameez, her hair escaping an untidy plait and a packet of Parle-G biscuits peeping out of her satchel. Her workaday look is also a reflection of her priorities: we have here a woman whose response to having the car door opened for her by a personable young man is to say caustically, "Mereko aata hai gaadi ka darwaza kholna". Bobby is the elder sister who, when she needs to enter a five star hotel on assignment, gets one of her more feminine younger sisters to do her make-up. 

And yet, even while Bobby (and it's important that she insists on being called that, instead of the more feminine Bilqees) does largely what she wants, she continues to crave approval from her father (and in an interesting mirroring, from the life-changing older man who becomes her mystery client). 

The other remarkable thing about Bobby's character is that she's too busy working to bother chasing men -- and when love does appear, it is gentle and unbombastic. 

Especially for a film that returns us, after an aeon, to an all-Muslim milieu, Bobby Jasoos almost makes no concessions to romantic nazakat Muslim Social style. In fact, it sustains its tenor of comic mystery quite remarkably: if there's any gazing at feet in this movie, it's to look for a man with a missing toe. 

With Bobby Jasoos, Balan gives us a reel-life heroine who's neither a doormat nor a head-tossing rebel without a cause. She'd be a treasure even in the real world.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

The Case of the Punjabi Detective

My Asian Age piece on the mystery writer Tarquin Hall and his wonderful creation: the portly Delhi detective, Vish Puri. 

When the father of a Pakistani cricketer dies of poisoning during a post-match VVIP dinner in New Delhi, the trail seems to lead to an illegal cricket betting syndicate that has bookies in every town on the subcontinent and is headed by an underworld kingpin believed to reside in Pakistan. But because The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken (2012) is the third mystery featuring Vish Puri, the portly and wonderfully entertaining Punjabi detective, we know that sooner or later his Mummy is going to get involved. And the plot will thicken.

Vish Puri, “India’s Most Private Investigator”, first appeared on the literary stage in Tarquin Hall’s The Case of the Missing Servant (2009), complete with waxed moustache, safari suit, signature Sandown cap and an irresistible weakness for chilli pakoras. Having traversed Jaipur morgues and police stations and the uranium mines of Jadugoda in search of a missing maid in the first book, Puri has since solved The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing (2010), a marvellously entertaining take on rationalists, magicians and fake godmen that remains my favourite of the series.

Hall’s long globetrotting career as a journalist has included stints in the United States, Pakistan, India, Kenya and Turkey. He has earlier published several non-fiction books, including To the Elephant Graveyard (2000), an account of a search for a killer elephant in Assam and Salaam Brick Lane (2005), a memoir about a year spent living above a Bangladeshi sweatshop in London’s East End. But Vish Puri is his first fictional creation.

Hall describes Martin Amis and Rushdie as “unreadably pretentious” and prefers “a good story that you can follow, simply written” — though “simple”, he’s quick to add, “doesn’t mean easy”. When he decided to try his hand at fiction, he was only sure of one thing — he wasn’t going to write “terribly worthy” novels. He began writing a book set in a motel in India, but abandoned it when his agent “said it was rubbish”.

The idea for a detective series came, fittingly, out of a journalistic piece. And the idea for that piece came from a conversation with his wife Anu Anand’s cousin. “I was teasing Shikha — she’s from Jammu — about how she wasn’t married, and she started telling me about how she had discovered that she was being investigated by a detective,” Hall remembers. The prospective groom’s family wanted to find out if she drank, smoked, had a boyfriend. Private investigators, it seemed, were doing booming business in India, with more and more people hiring them to inquire into prospective arranged matches. The whole thing seemed superbly story-worthy to Hall, and his interviews with several private investigators led to a long reported piece.

Later, when he was scouting about for fiction ideas, the detectives he’d met came back to him. But what really helped him visualise his rotund, opinionated, middle-aged Punjabi investigator was his wife’s uncles. “They have a certain size to them, they’ve become the seniors in their families,” Hall says. “They sit around drinking Scotch and making fairly bad jokes, but they’re very wily. At the same time they have a sense that there ought to be certain standards in society.” Vish Puri is very much this sort of combination of streetsmartness and pomposity: a pugnacious Punjabi man of a certain age who is used to “telling everybody what to do”.

“In the West, everyone would just tell them to shut up. The age hierarchy was thrown out of the window there long ago,” says Hall. “That has its benefits, but it’s also a bit of a shame — people with a certain amount of experience in teaching, say, or politics, aren’t necessarily given their due.” In the Indian universe that Vish Puri occupies, in contrast, young people tend to respect their parents’ wishes; daughters studying in a different city check with fathers about whether it’s okay to take a low-cost flight back home on Diwali; grandfathers have no qualms getting their granddaughters’ prospective husbands secretly investigated. (This was an important subplot in Missing Servant).

Hall’s narratives are punctuated by stable, wholesome family gatherings where any deep, dark rifts or family secrets are kept out of sight — unless, as in Butter Chicken, they turn out to be crucial in solving the mystery. There’s entertainment provided by mild friction between Puri and his slightly foolish brother-in-law Baggaji, or more integral to plot, between Puri and his redoubtable Mummy — but on the whole, Hall’s version of the North Indian family is a genial one. Whether it’s a grandchild’s mundan ceremony or a family Diwali, everyone seems to basically get along. “Yes, well, I like that side of India,” says Hall. “There aren’t a lot of pleasantries between people who don’t know each other otherwise, which is jarring as a foreigner. So I like it when you go to someone’s house in India and they’re all very cordial.”

Some of this affection for the ways of his adoptive country emerges from an implicit comparison with the one he grew up in. “The family structure in Britain is a mess,” Hall says. “Here, all familial relationships may not be smooth sailing, but everyone recognises that keeping the bond alive is important.”

Hall’s relationship with the Indian city seems more conflicted. The vivid, non-stop action is clearly something he finds attractive. The everyday buzz we take for granted in a city like Delhi, he points out, can’t be matched by a Western city even at its most eventful: London during the Olympics, when there is supposedly so much going on—“everywhere you go there are announcements,” — is actually “really quiet and predictable”. But the brashness and loudness of public behaviour in Delhi still seems to affect him — he mentions with a tinge of quiet despair that he has “a driver who never says sorry or thank you”, and confesses that living in the leafy, quiet, uber-genteel neighbourhood of Nizamuddin East is a way to keep the everyday onslaught of Delhi life slightly at bay.

Vish Puri, not unlike Hall, is happy to avail of the cushion that upper middle-class life in Delhi can provide: he is hands-on when he needs to be, but is driven everywhere by his driver, and cannot live without airconditioning. But he is also positioned as somewhat old-school: he may live in Gurgaon, but his car is still the trusty Ambassador, and the stolid 1980s décor of his Khan Market office is sans glass partitions. The old-school-ness extends to Puri’s family life. Domestic help is aplenty, but his wife Rumpi insists on waking at five in the morning to supervise the running of the house (“No doubt she was downstairs now churning fresh butter for his double-roti”) and keep up traditional homestyle beauty treatments (“Or she was in the second bedroom rubbing mustard oil into her long auburn hair”).

As is apparent, Hall caters happily to a romantic vision of India, strewing the books with references that a British readership would recognise, from the Gymkhana Club and cricket to the Partition, and adding swatches of local colour that might appear in a Did-You-Know type travel show: the diamond-transporting Angadiyas of Surat, or the genealogy-keeping Pandas of Hardwar. And you will either be amused or irritated by the ceaseless “Indianisms” squeezed in to every conversation. The reversed word order of “So engrossed I become” or “He kept all these things where exactly?” is common enough in Indian English to feel accurate. But when Mummy tells a gathering of drivers — with whom she would definitely speak in Hindi in real life — that “Some goondas have done armed robbery of our kitty party”, it seems like we’re in a Delhi-set version of Mind Your Language.

But what is nice about Hall’s books is that his gaze is never sneering. His affection for India — unlike say, William Dalrymple in City of Djinns — transcends the nostalgia-inducing stuff. His clear-eyed look at the contemporary is delivered in a non-judgmental, even-handed tone. Puri’s scandalised thoughts on immoral youngsters may seem a caricature, but there’s always detail when it matters most. We’re told what a young urban professional shells out to a personal trainer versus what he pays his car-washer. In Missing Servant, which has plenty to say about the maltreatment of domestic servants, we also hear a maid bargaining with a potential employer. There’s no shying away from the compulsions of poverty or powerlessness — but there is no weepy sensationalising of them either.

These books are fiction — and enjoyably plotted fiction, too — but Hall takes a sharp-eyed pleasure in the facts that can only be described as journalistic. In the best possible way.

(A version of this piece appeared in today's Asian Age.)

Mumbai Rollercoasters - Not One But Three

A review of three 'young adult' thrillers, published in yesterday's Asian Age. 


  Mumbai has long been the favourite Indian locale for fictional crime. Guru Dutt’s Baazi and Raj Khosla’s CID created a shadowy noir vision of Bombay as early as the 1950s. Contemporary realist depictions of Mumbai’s gritty underbelly really took off with Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya (1998). That cinematic fascination has, over the years, acquired not just justifiably feted successors like Anurag Kashyap (Black Friday, and the much-anticipated 1960s-set Bombay Velvet) but also underrated work by top-class practitioners — Hansal Mehta’s sadly ignored 2002 film, Chhal, Shashanka Ghosh’s madcap Waisa Bhi Hota Hai Part 2. Not to mention such offshoots as Madhur Bhandarkar’s salacious forays into specific underworlds, rising up the class register from Chandni Bar (2001) and Traffic Signal (2007) to Fashion (2008) and back down again to Jail (2009).

While not as doggedly prolific as the Bombay film, English fiction hasn’t done too badly on the Mumbai crime beat. H.R.F. Keating led the way with his carefully imagined Inspector Ghote books, starting in 1964 with The Perfect Murder and creating 26 Ghote books before his death in 2011. In 1998 one Leslie Forbes wrote an inimitable thriller called Bombay Ice, in which the action begins with one character writing to another: “I haven’t seen the eunuch in almost four weeks. Ignore what I wrote you before. No need to come here and rescue me.”

But it was probably the success of Gregory David Roberts’ super-eventful Shantaram (2003) and Vikram Chandra’s epic Sacred Games (2006) that paved the way for the slow trickle of the Mumbai underbelly books to turn into what is now a veritable flood. Much of it has been non-fiction — Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing (2010) reveals the “secret world” of Mumbai’s dance bars, Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2011) is about life in a Mumbai slum, while Meenal Baghel’s Death in Mumbai (2011) looks at small town ambition and the big bad entertainment industry through the lens of the Neeraj Grover murder.

And now we have a new genre hoping to tap into our seemingly inexhaustible fascination with Mumbai: the young adult thriller, inaugurated in December 2011 by Rajorshi Chakraborti’s Mumbai Rollercoaster and the first two volumes of Nico Raposo’s Bollywood Knights series, the rather oddly named Shoot the Peacock (Book 1) and Shoot the Crow (Book 2).

The books make for an interesting contrast. Raposo, a US-based screenwriter with no previous India background, is quite clearly out to capture a potential teenage market assumed to be interested in Bollywood and potentially also in crime dramas. His protagonists are star-offspring, and the plots revolve around the threesome foiling attempts to murder an up-and-coming heroine, or cracking the mysterious disappearance of an established one. Seventeen-year-old Raj is the son of superstar-turned-director Amit Kapoor, while his friends Madhuri and Nagi are the children of another ex-star, Navneetha Swami. This means that the three get to do their sleuthing in a chauffeur-driven (and bulletproof) Bentley Continental, and can jet off to film shoots in Shimla between Macbeth assignments and idli breakfasts urged upon them by family retainers.

The books are peppered with references to “quiet, Juhu residential street(s)” and “the traffic on Marine Drive”, but the world Raposo really wants to take readers into is one they’ll only ever inhabit in their imaginations: an insider’s Bollywood. Given this ambition, it might be considered a problem that Raposo is at least as much an outsider to this world as any of his readers. An experienced scriptwriter with 15 feature film screenplays to his credit, he clearly takes the technical aspects of filmmaking seriously, giving readers fairly detailed — if in a rather idyllic and budget-no-bar fashion — glimpses of what it might be like to actually work on things like background sound, stunts (including pyrotechnics) or costumes on a film shoot.

But his lack of real-life experience of the Bombay film industry is probably what accounts for such feats of imagination as the (unintentionally hilarious) scene in Book 2 shows — Amit Kapoor, struggling to find “something brilliant” for a new actress’ debut, is asked by Madhuri whether he’s considering “rom-com, fem-jep or action”, and is subsequently inspired into a creative “semi-trance” by Raj’s mention of the premise of Milton’s Paradise Lost (“angels aren’t always that good”). Raposo’s fictional universe is Bollywoodish at a more meta level: his poor little rich boys and girls are nice enough, but their only struggle is to be taken seriously as industry newbies despite their inherited privilege. Meanwhile, they can play-act at being bar dancers and escape from the villains using movie stunt tricks. Real life is for other people. Naming the Kapoor family retainer Ramu Kaka is particularly like a knowing wink: Raposo’s knowledge of Mumbai may be more wishful than grounded, but he’s watched his Hindi movies. And really, for most people, aren’t they both the same country?

Chakraborti, previously the author of literary novels for adults like Or the Day Siezes You and Derangements, steers clear of filmi-ness, at least of Raposo’s nudge-nudge-wink-wink variety. Rahul and Zeenat are well-off enough to take cabs half the time instead of the local train, but not so privileged as to escape the standard Indian middle-class anxieties about Class 12 exams, US scholarships and “the future”. They fantasise about stars, not partying with them. But instead of chastely stopping short at heartstopping realisations like Raposo’s truly filmi characters, they actually deal with sex like real Mumbai teens. And when they stumble upon a murder that’s being covered up at the highest levels, they must deal not with Raposo’s mystery villains and posh private security agencies, but with the most realistically fearsome thing that the middle class mind can imagine: the police. Mumbai Rollercoaster also gives us a believable working-class character, even if he’s a little too conveniently young and unobtrusive — the resourceful mali’s assistant Ganesh, who provides Rahul and Zeenat with access to parts of the city that they might otherwise be unable to negotiate.

Chakraborti’s plot, featuring not just a local murder but a secret international cult and a suitably 21st-century paranoia about real and virtual surveillance, is rather more complicated than Raposo’s. This lends the book something of an air of unpredictability, but also leaves us with many more loose ends that Chakraborti seems least interested in tying up: invisible airports, anyone? The overly chatty narrator who wants to tell the tale in nonlinear loops does not help (though there’s a reason he’s there, as you’ll find out at the end

Surface similiarities apart, Mumbai Rollercoaster and the Bollywood Knights books are quite different from each other. A genre has been launched, but the possible variations on it are endless. I suppose one can’t complain.

And Then There Were Two: a review of Ibne Safi's The Laughing Corpse & HRF Keating's Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart

The recent reissue of two detective fiction series reminds you of all that is wonderful about the genre

TWO EXTREMELY popular detective fiction series have been reissued recently: the Inspector Ghote mysteries and four Urdu novels in English translation from Ibne Safi’s Jasoosi Duniya series. The mild-mannered Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID was perhaps crime writer HRF Keating’s most loved character. Keating, who died on 27 March 2011 at the age of 84, had famously never been to Mumbai (or India) when he wrote his first Ghote book in 1961. The decision to set his new detective series in Mumbai was apparently taken while browsing through an atlas, with an eye on the American market, which he believed would warm to an international locale more than it had to his British settings. (They did.)

The Jasoosi Duniya novels, too, are clearly gunning for an international feel. But here it is not the detective — the dapper aristocrat-turned-policeman, Inspector (later Colonel) Faridi — who is foreign. It is the various villains — monkey- faced Finch, of Goan Portuguese descent, once a circus performer in the US; notorious American arch-criminal Dr Dread, known for his knowledge of poisons; half-Chinese, half-Mongolian Sing Hee, who likes to squeeze his victims to death. Then there are other things that create an ‘international’ ambience — like characters dining at a restaurant called the Arlecchino, or flirting with girls at an ice skating rink. All of these glamourous touches, however, seem added — as in generations of popular Hindi films — to try and create a larger-than-life aura around a cultural universe otherwise perfectly recognisable to Safi’s subcontinental Urdu readership. This is a universe in which it is not seen as surprising that an intelligent “small-boned” 18-year-old girl should have been married off to her large cousin with speech defects “to keep the riches in the family” — and yet the incongruity of the match is remarked upon, with Ibne Safi’s gentle humour.

This interest in unpeeling the social world around the crime, the clear-eyed understanding of how class and power operate, influencing even the most intimate relationships, is perhaps the only thing common to these very different styles of fiction. If Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart unpacks the precarious circumstances created by a rich man being asked to pay a ransom for the tailor’s son who has been kidnapped instead of his own, The Laughing Corpse centres around the kidnapping of a “lowly typist” whose unexpected inheritance had suddenly made her the town’s most eligible girl. The staunchly middle class Ghote, who worries about taxi fares, dreams of cold buttermilk when he watches his rich complainant pour himself a Scotch and must muster all the courage at his command to exert a semblance of authority in the face of social superiors, could not be more unlike Faridi, a man with a private income who comes to detection out of a passion for criminology, has a degree from Oxford and owns a palatial house with its own laboratory and library. But in both Keating and Safi, there is that deepdown stock-in-trade of the best crime fiction — an abiding interest in how the world works.

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 8, Issue 18, Dated 07 May 2011