NEW DELHI: Author Nilanjana S Roy's new offering "Black River" is a fast-paced police procedural which explores themes of friendship, love and grief.
In the village of Teetarpur, a few hours from Delhi, Chand's peaceful life is shattered as he is forced into a dangerous quest for justice. The body of his eight-year-old daughter Munia was found hanging from a tree. Chand was the world to Munia. She used to talk only to her father - telling him everything, the conversations she overhears, stories she has made up.
Quiet with strangers and with family, Munia was an explorer at heart, fond of illicit excursions, absorbed in the games she invented, and played with birds and insects. Chand was left shell-shocked when he saw his daughter "with a rope around her neck, her feet dangling far above the earth, hanging from the jamun's thickest branch".
He tries to call her but his mouth is dry from shock and from the heat. He forms the syllables of his daughter's name and whispers it into the heavy air.
Kneeling on the ground, his white salwar streaked with dust and mud, he holds on to Munia's limp feet, crying like a child, his breath rasping and hard.
"The girl's eyes are closed, her lashes resting lightly on her cheeks, purple stains on her curled fingers. She could be holding her breath, except for the tilt of her neck, the coil of rope, the swing dangling at a crazy angle, a heavy wooden counterweight. She will open her eyes, her father thinks, she will smile at me and put out her arms to be helped down, and then I will carry my Munia inside one more time," the book says.
At the police station house whose jurisdiction extends to Teetarpur and the neighbouring villages, sub-inspector Ombir Singh, who has known Munia since she was born, wrestles with his conscience and the vagaries of his personal life as the increasingly murky case unfolds under the watchful eyes of the 'Delhi boy', SSP Pilania.
Meanwhile, in the rough bylanes of Bright Dairy Colony, Chand's old companions Rabia and Badshah Miyan fight for their right to home and country as the politics of religion threaten to overwhelm their lives.
According to Roy, there is nothing Teetarpur is famous for.
"The older residents say proudly that their village is not known to have inspired a line in a film song or even a 'mithai', has never produced so much as a celebrity or a famous politician. They cherish its anonymity, though the younger generation would have preferred a more rousing history," she writes in the book, published by Context, an imprint of Westland Books.