'Razor Sharp' book review: Melange of Murder
Detective fiction is riddled with flawed cops. Ian Rankin’s DI Rebus, PD James’s Adam Dalgleish, Charles Willeford’s Hoke Moseley, and—closer home—Anita Nair’s Borei Gowda: all prove, in their own way, that fictional detectives need not be paragons. If anything, a detective with weaknesses and flaws is perhaps better equipped to understand a flawed world, and to make sense of the chaos with which they must deal.
Prakash ‘Kutta’ Kadam, debuting in Ashwin Sanghi’s Razor Sharp, is one such cop. Though he’s extremely sharp and possessed with an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth (thus the epithet kutta: a canine sense of instinct, here), Kadam is, in many other ways, far from perfect. A former DCP in Mumbai, he was suspended a few years before the story begins. Since then, he’s been teetering on the edge, just about managing to avoid tilting back into the alcoholism that once plagued him. He has antagonised the powers that be, and all he can tell the psychiatrist, to whom he goes (grudgingly) for therapy, is that he is a killer. Tormented by nightmares in which a young man is being tortured, Kadam finds it difficult to live, especially with himself. His lawyer daughter Ketul, who has been living with Kadam ever since her mother left her father, is his anchor, the one person whom Kadam cares for.
But it is this man, a bundle of insecurities and nightmares, volatile and impatient, whom the authorities are forced to turn to when confronted with two baffling crimes. A man is found murdered—his wrists bound with nylon rope, stabbed to death with a Finek brand knife, and his mouth stuffed with raw wheat. That would have been a puzzle in itself but when, some days later, in another part of Mumbai, a completely unrelated person is killed in exactly the same manner, things start hotting up. Kadam’s old friend, Special Commissioner of Police Sharad Rane, pulls him in to help.
This is not, however, a straightforward case of investigating a couple of murders. Soon, the body count is mounting. And soon too, Kadam is up against the corrupt system: the nexus between politicians, the underworld and the police. But, the story is more than just Kadam and these cases. The hundred chapters of Razor Sharp come at breakneck speed, quick, staccato, switching swiftly from one person to another; one perspective to another. There is Kadam, of course, and his fraught-with-tension relationship with Shinde, who he’s deputed to work with. There is Ketul, trying to help her father, as well as fight for justice for young girls trafficked and forced into prostitution. There is Nirmal, the ethical hacker, who is Ketul’s friend but aches to be much more. And, there are all those who people the grimy world of crime, business and politics—criminals, big and petty; godmen; drug-dealers; slimy cops looking for promotions in exchange for favours. Sanghi’s language, riddled with expletives, realistically peppered with Hindi and Marathi words, evokes the grittiness of the seamy side of Mumbai very well, as do his characters.
Kadam makes for a memorable protagonist: sympathetic and, in his way, admirable, even though so flawed. His staunch refusal to be part of the corruption that surrounds him, his deep love for those he holds dear, his sense of guilt over a long-ago death: all of these mark him as a man who has much greater depths than may seem apparent at first.
Besides its sharply-etched and interesting central character, Razor Sharp is marked by meticulous plotting. Initially, the story may seem to go every which way, zeroing in on characters and episodes who appear to have no connection to Kutta Kadam’s investigation of the murders, but eventually it all falls into place. Every detail, every conversation, helps in some way or the other to either offer a glimpse into Kadam’s character and past, or to weave the background of the story. The clues are all there, the red herrings clear and present, and Kadam’s deductions are impressively clever.
If there is one lack, it is in the level of description: the locales of Mumbai may have been evoked with more detail; its squalor and its luxury etched more vividly to act as a backdrop for the story. This, however, is a minor niggle. The descriptions, as they are now, do not impede the enjoyment of what is an extremely satisfying thriller. Hopefully, much more of Kadam is in the offing.
Razor Sharp
By: Ashwin Sanghi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 313
Price: Rs 399