In the American sitcom 2 Broke Girls, on entering an exclusive members-only domain, one of them confesses to the other, ‘I love belonging to a place where not everyone’s allowed.’ Anuja Chauhan’s latest novel Club You To Death is set in the hallowed space of the Delhi Turf Club, an institution much like an ‘ageing superstar, thoda irrelevant in these times, surviving mostly on reputation’.
Straight off the reader is plunged into a world of nicknames, tambola, low-priced beer, giggly girls with ‘straightened hair and curious eyes’, and the burning question: who will be voted the club’s next president? When a corpse is discovered on its up-market premises, one is not sure what irks the snooty members more—him being murdered or him being a non-member.
Kashi (aka Akash Dogra), the newly engaged lawyer who runs into bachpan ki dost and former flame Bam (aka Bambi Todi) in the club, is insanely tempted to be her BFF once again, even as his pal scoffs him about his ambitiousness in expecting the tigress ‘to crawl obediently into a best-friend-sized cage and stay there’.
The body being thrown into the story fairly early on, the initial reactions are a riot. The objectification of the victim—who used to be a young trainer with mega abs—by the members of his Zumba class is a hoot. As one gym bunny, bemoaning not having looked beyond the late Leo’s hotness, tells another: ‘We just thought of him one-dimensionally.’
As the list of suspects multiplies by the minute, the mystery deepens deliciously. ‘Everybody has criminal tendencies,’ surmises the mild and affable ACP Bhavani Singh, assigned to solve the case and whose entry into a room causes ‘crooks to leap up grinning, and ask him how his granddaughters are’.
His philosophical, almost tender, air is frowned on by his direct subordinate, Padam Kumar, who dreams of a boss like in those Dabangg and Singham movies—‘the type who makes criminals piss their pants when he walks into the room’. But Bhavani goes about winning hearts the slow and steady way; his characterisation remains the strongest.
The wit in this whodunit veers from breezy to biting satire. There are conscious puns: Cookie calls Bhavani Brownie, there is talk of a mukka on Mukki’s face and the mention of a behra Mehra. But the dialogue-driven plot—the characters disperse desi gyan through their conversation—arcs the suspense on a fun note. Jokes jostle with home truths and colloquial lingo, all tightly packed in gossip, blurt-outs and impromptu tête-a-tête. When Bhavani tells a socialite type that ‘murder is always stressful’, her takeaway is: ‘One must burn a lot of calories while killing somebody. Your BMR must go through the roof!’
There are dead men who are not the dead men they are supposed to be. There is a murderer who stands morally exonerated in the end for reasons that cannot be revealed here, whose first-person confession is a chatty mix of mea culpa and an airy ‘I don’t recommend murdering anyone’. There is even true love thrown into the mix unexpectedly.
Chauhan not just keeps the book’s blood flowing into the heart of its core mystery via a droll narration, but also delivers a chortling slap on the cheek of social affectations and snobbery with her impeccable comic timing.