Social satire and the Indian murder mystery

I’m a great fan of Anuja Chauhan’s romance fare, which formed a central part of my thesis on Indian chick lit, so I was a tad disappointed when she turned to the detective genre. Nevertheless, in her portrayal of the typical gymkhana in Club You to Death, her characteristic eye for the idiosyncrasies and types of Indian society was very much in evidence, and in ACP Bhavani Singh, she created a detective who I wanted to see more of. There was even a romance plot, although it may not have turned out entirely satisfactorily.

It took her three years to get out the sequel, The Fast and the Dead. By now, she has been ensconced in Bangalore for several years, and so felt ready to set a novel in the city, rather than in her literary comfort zone of Delhi. My initial thought was that her attempt at conveying the Kannada-speaking milieu was too try hard, but as her scope broadened slightly, it began to work for me, although she probably got some cultural nuances wrong.

The action is largely set in one lane, Habba Galli, off MG Road. which becomes her microcosm of India. Because I have realised this is really Chauhan’s project, irrespective of genre. She is here to underline the diversity of India, not in saccharine but in affectionate and quasi-absurd terms, a reinforcing of a Nehruvian ethos that is now under threat, if not entirely the material of nostalgia.

A sonorous aarti rises from a small Manjunath temple and, at the same time, an azaan warbles up companionably from the minaret of the green-domed dargah opposite, reminding Jhoom of why, power cuts notwithstanding, she loves her neighbourhood.

While the obvious political rivalry in India today is Hindu/all else (but particularly Hindu/Muslim), Chauhan zeroes in on a very contemporary urban Indian phenomenon – the neighbourhood wars over street dogs. This is ostensibly the source of the conflict that leads to murder, though in the end, it turns out that, as is often the case, it comes down to the rot at the heart of a family. There is the “pilla party” who feeds and cares for the street dogs – the descendants of a matriarch called Roganjosh – and those who see them as a menace.

On one side is the veterinarian Jhoom Rao (“rich, Brahmin, forbidden, unattainable”) and her eccentric feminist mother Jaishri, once well-heeled but now fallen on hard times, Ayesha Sait, the mother of Bollywood star Haider who has long had the hots for Jhoom, and Mehta(b), the Kashmiri carpet seller. On the other side is mongrel-hater-in-chief nouveau riche Marwari jeweler Sushil Kedia, and Doodi Pais, a mad old woman with a gun. Given that in my own building in Bangalore, there is a running feud over the tatti of pooches in the building compound, Chauhan’s choice of metaphor seems particularly apt.

When Tiffani, the Weimeraner puppy that the Kedia scion, Harsh, gifted his wife Sona, “grew into a fine young lady ready to socialise with males of her own class” and brought forth not “the slender silver-grey golden-eyed litter the Kedias had been expecting” but “a plump snub-nosed brood in variegated-patches of brown, yellow, black and white”, evidence of (gasp) love jihad, all hell broke loose.

The dogs themselves are symbols of a disruptive force that cuts across class barriers.

We think it is because stray dogs have a total lack of respect for established human hierarchies – they tend to grovel before beggars and bark at billionaires

ACP Bhavani Singh

I disagree. My own observation is that stray dogs often tend to adopt the class system of the humans with which they live, barking at poor, shabbily dressed people and letting the well-heeled pass with a twitch of an eyebrow. And that the furore over these dogs in communities is also due to an overdeveloped middle class sense of hygiene and fear of animals, possibly dating to childhood. Bhayani’s thesis is interesting nonetheless.

Meanwhile, in the Jhoom-Haider romance are shades of Bonu-Samar pairing of The House that BJ Built, complete with shades of Bollywood and unrequited crush vibes, but also of the “love jihad” that Chauhan so delectably presented in Battle for Bittora. This plotline underscores one vector of Indian stratification – the religious one- just as the dogs underline the class divide.

The action starts on Karva Chauth, a north Indian festival that curiously seems to have been taken up with gusto in this South Indian lane. And it is here that the dissension at the heart of the Kedia family becomes clear. Sushil Kedia is mean to his wife and children, and his daughter-in-law is not amused and subtly makes this known. On Karva Chauth, his wife has her rebellion, not only putting a teeka on the dog Roganjosh, but breaking her fast to feast on a seven-course meal. The next morning Sushil is discovered dead, a gunshot wound to the head, in his studio.

Enter Inspector Bhavani Singh who is on an “annual honeymoon” with his wife English-teacher wife Shalini and conveniently staying in an AirBnB down the road, run by Krishna Chetty, childhood buddy of Haider Sait with political aspirations and son-of-the-soil pride, who bears traces of the slightly shady Steesh in The Pricey Thakkur Girls.

Chauhan does not entirely gloss over the dangers of the religious fanaticism that has reared its head in modern India. In the quintessential Indian aunty, Mrs Charu Tomar, she gives us one of the possible psychological underpinnings of the phenomenon at the individual level: insecurity.

But the trouble is that being fat as well as poor made her unhappy, so she became holy, and being holy made her narrow-minded, judgemental and bossy.

Mrs Tomar seems harmless, but she is a subscriber of a dangerous ideology couched in the ranting of a busybody:

Arrey, Gandhiji’s own sons pleaded with the government to spare the life of his assasin, Nathuran Godse! They knew Godseji was in the right and Gandhiji was in the wrong!”

And when news of the murder leaks and the lane attracts a media circus, Haider’s director friend advises him to move his mother away because at such times, it is less than ideal to be Muslim.

Both Sushil Kedia and Mrs Tomar are unpleasant characters and one can’t feel too sorry about their fates. Eventually, ACP Bhavani Singh has his day, and the identity of the murderer did come as a surprise to me.

And while this might be the culmination of the novel, it actually ends on a happier note, when the disruptive power of love wins outs. Here again, as in Battle for Bittora, love not only triumphs but by harking back to past innocence – a love that began over a girl saving a street dog – holds out the promise of a nation united across differences.

Best lines

“He’s become like that Bheeshma pitamah, Christian version”

“She’s started making evening appearances on her balcony nowadays, like she’s the Pope or Shah Rukh Khan, and heckling the dogs till they bark at her”

“Sparshu, a human tapeworm who needs to eat every forty minutes”

PS: Club You to Death is out on Netflix as Murder Mubarak. It’s got a star cast (Karisma Kapoor, anyone?) and is pretty good, better in fact than the screen versions of any of Chauhan’s other novels, but while the casting was spot on, I’m not happy with how Bhavani was portrayed as a little kitsch while the old money of the club came across as one-tone Punjabi loudness.
Have you watched it? What did you think?

Dating app detective

Title: The Verifiers
Author: Jane Pek
Published: February 2022, Vintage

The Verifiers is not chick lit, it’s a detective novel. Why I include it here is that it has some chick lit tropes – the single woman (although this one is clear), the pressure to get married (Asian parents, y’all) and the commentary on modern dating (from an unusual perspective).

Claudia Lin works for a secretive dating detective agency. Veracity handles referrels-only clients who suspect something is not quite right with the people they meet through online dating apps. The sleuthing is largely tech driven, though sometimes they have to engage in recces IRL.

Claudia is a fan of Jane Austen and mystery stories, so the job is the perfect mash-up. Then one client ends up dead.

Claudia’s attempts to get to the bottom of what happened struck me as frustratingly naive at times – confronting not one, but two, suspects, for example – but this is framed as a parody of the fictional Inspector Yuan series. By its end, the novel takes a dystopian turn – in turning over our data to matching app, data related to our most private, and arguably most important desires, we are offering AI and those who behind it a huge amount of control.

As for Claudia’s own love life, she is gay, so in addition to the futuristic edge and the family drama, the novel also queers the detective genre. She is not a fan of dating apps, but follows them through her gay roommate.

Romantic closure is not the point of the novel, and there were many twists and turns before we get to a pretty satisfying conclusion.

An Heiress’ Guide to Deception and Desire

This is the sequel to Manda Collins’s very entertaining A Lady’s Guide to Mischief and Mayhem. In that novel, we joined Lady Katherine Bascomb, owner of a newspaper, and Inspector Andrew Eversham as they investigate a murder that takes them to he the country estate of a friend of Kate’s friend Lord Valentine Thorn. Kate’s friend Miss Caroline Hardcastle also shows up, with her temperamental cat Ludwig, and it turns out that she and Lord Thorn are acquainted.

The mystery behind the tension between Caroline and Val is explained in an Heiress’s Guide. It turns out that they were once betrothed and then broke up when Caro was deemed “too much” for the aristocratic Val. They are once again thrown together when Caro’s friend, Effie, an actress, is kidnapped. It turns out the friend was having an affair with Val’s cousin.

The novel opens with the normally freewheeling Caro chaffing at the attitude of her parents:

They’re behaving as if I haven’t been on my own, managing my life, for the year they were in Paris.

Caro is “well past the age at which most young ladies of her class were married with children”. She has been involved in her father’s business, written a cookbook, helped Kate investigate a murder, and now runs a literary salon at which women gather to discuss sensation novels.

Her mother, however, has decided it is time she settle down, and prefarably with a peer.

Meanwhile, Val’s elder brother, who was to be the heir, has died, and his family’s expectations of him have changed. His duties now included marrying a suitable woman and producing an heir.

But Val, working with Caro to find Effie, realises that his feelings for her have changed. The novel is really a masterclass in how to conduct a feminist courtship. Val basically has to stand up to his family, and this he does.

He also supports Caro in the investigation, realising that in trying to protect her, he may have missed insights she could have provided. He realises Caro and Kate are capable of solving the mystery and taking care of themselves, even against fairly hardened criminals.

And he realises that he will have to share Caro with her cat.

Honestly, I felt this was more romance than mystery, but it was a very satisfying read.

A Victorian Indian detective story

Title: The Widows of Malabar Hill
Author: Sujata Massey
Published: January 2018, Soho Press

I expected a quaint murder mystery when I picked this up, but I got more, so much more.

Perveen Mistry is India’s first woman solicitor, practising in her father’s law firm. She is part of an illustrious and wealthy Parsi family that has a booming construction business in addition to a reputed law firm.

Mistry Law is handling the estate of Mr Omar Farid, who died leaving behind three wives in purdah, three daughters and a son. Perveen notices that all three widows have signed over their inheritance to a charity. She is determined to ascertain that that is what the women really want.

As a female lawyer, Perveen is not allowed to argue cases in court. She works behind the scenes, handling the paperwork. But in the matter of Mr Farid’s wives, she is at an advantage. She can go where no man can – the zenana.

And when the Farids’ family agent is murdered, she can assist the police in questioning the widows, though she remains firmly on their side.

We are thus introduced to the mysterious world of the zenana, but to Massey’s credit, she does not resort to the stereotypes of the oppressed Muslim woman, nor does she paper over the problems with the zenana arrangement that have been brought to the fore with the death of Mr Farid. Massey’s portrayal of the zenana reminded me of Indu Sundaresan’s Mughal trilogy, in which we are given a view of the lives of Muslim women that is one of gentle glamour, cultural refinement, power, joy and, yes, challenges.

Each of Mr Farid’s wives is an individual in her own right, and Perveen’s perception of their situation evolves as she gets closer to them.

One of the most interesting sociology classes I attended during my college days were those dealing with personal laws. Because of the general discourse around Muslim marriage in India – which makes much about polygamy being permitted and the practice of talaq – I had internalised some stereotypical views of the conditions under which Muslims marry. I was surprised to learn that Muslim personal law is perhaps the most progressive because marriage is viewed as a contract – there are laws governing the return of the bride price in case of divorce and what a widow is owed upon the death of her husband. There are several kinds of divorce, and these are not just available to men. In many ways, these laws were more progressive than those available to Christian women in India under their personal laws.

The complexity of Muslim personal law is explained in the novel, but also the vulnerability of women who are secluded to the men of the household in handling their money. The eldest wife, in this case, was made the executor of the family wakf (trust) but she was still ignorant of many financial matters that affected her.

The narrative relating to the murder mystery is interspersed with flashbacks that gradually reveal to the reader that Perveen’s achievement is the result of a tragic history. While Parsis are considered one of the more progressive communities in India, Perveen falls victim to the conservatism that often lies beneath the veneer of sophistication. On the other hand, the way her own immediate family stands by her would put many in today’s world to shame.

Another strand of the novel is the relationship between the British and prosperous Indians, and the fledgling independence movement. The Parsi community was seen as being close to the British – they were requested by the British to move to Bombay from Gujarat and contributed to building the city as we know it today – and this made them suspect amid the struggle for independence.

Massey depicts the nuances of colonial racism and the complexity of interacting with the British overlords, particularly through Perveen’s relationship with Alice, the daughter of a highranking British official, who she befriended during her studies in England. Even the British are not monoliths in their attitudes to Indians, as each member of Alice’s family reveals. And neither are the British freer from patriarchy than the Indians they look down on – Alice is under pressure to settle down, more so because she is queer.

The book is set in the 1920s, but evoked profound nostalgia for present-day Bombay in me in its descriptions of the Fort neighbourhood, Irani cafes and of course the tonga ride down Hill Road, Bandra, to bandstand where it appears lovers were canoodling even in our grandparents’ generation.

I look forward to reading the next two novels in this series.