Image used for representational purpose only. (File Photo)Anuja Chauhan brings her deceptively mild-mannered sleuth, ACP Bhavani Singh, back with her second murder mystery, The Fast and the Dead. The book has everything fans of her work like and look for: enough red herrings, a slew of interesting people with enough motivation to make the cut as suspects,
a sprinkling of romance, loads of witty exchanges and a denouement, which holds the required quantity of last-minute surprises.
Bhavani is holidaying in Bengaluru, when he is instructed to turn his sharp gaze on a murder that has taken place right in Habba Galli, the Shivajinagar street that holds the B&B the policeman and his wife Shalini are staying in. The story is largely driven by coincidences as many murder mysteries are. The suspects are all denizens of Habba Galli, their lives intertwined in ways simple as well as intricate.
Adding to this pot, which is simmering rather than melting, is the issue of street dogs, with those looking after them pitched in a forceful battle against those who consider them a collective menace to the area. And so, when a couple of people die, we find those with motives to kill comprise virtually all the characters we come across in the Galli.
The first victim is a jeweller, who wouldn’t have won a place in any popularity stakes; even the members of his immediate family can seamlessly pick up their lives and carry on after his demise. The second is the local gossip, a woman with a virulent tongue and equally virulent thoughts, and her only, not too deeply affected, the mourner is her widower spouse.
Even as Chauhan goes about laying down the plot, making all the small reveals, the well-rounded characters take over the story, warts, eccentricities, charm offensives and all, relegating the murders to second place. Yes, of course, the readers do want to know whodunnit and why, but reading about Jaishri Rao, former member of Bengaluru’s haute monde; her vet daughter Jhoomer aka Jhoom, once the belle of Habba Galli; Hadi Sait, the Bollywood hero, who has been nursing a crush on Jhoom; Hadi’s beauteous mother Ayesha; the mixed-bag Kedia family; and even the loud TV anchor with a tendency to shriek “bloodshed most galore in Bangalore!” seems equally enjoyable.
The Bengaluru patois rears its head sans frills in everyday talk in an endearing manner. Saraswati, the cleaning lady in the house of one of the murder victims, does so much galata (fuss): “Peter saar is jushtu shy”; someone else slips an andhre, meaning ‘and so’, casually into the conversation. Hadi gets a hilariously cool intro describing a Rajni-esque sequence from his film Majnu Mechanic; we watch a new bahu (who has her husband down as ‘Pati Babe’ in her phone) set off a rebellion in the Kedia household, much like Rocky’s Rani did in the KJo film. Chauhan has also taken a hot local topic—Bengaluru’s twin camps of those who love and loathe strays—and used it as a possible motivational device for the murders. The topic isn’t treated too lightly, either—we read of Jhoom wistfully hoping for proper equipment for her veterinary clinic, so she can perform cataract and heart operations on canines with quixotic names like Tiffinni, Darponk, Roganjosh and Macho.
The reviewer’s only beef, and it’s a small one, is that not all the localising devices fly. The Marwari jeweller probably was born and brought up in the ‘ooru’, but even then, we read of him breaking out into Carnatic ragas when he gloats, and it is a stretch. Also, when Bhavani attempts Kannada, particularly slang like chill maadi, it jars. There are numerous references to chance pe dance, and one (doubtfully) wonders if it’s a popular phrase with Bangaloreans. A typical area native, Krish Chetty, puns on sona and a sunhaar; Jhoom talks of aukaat casually. These aren’t impossible references, but come off sounding implausible.
Then again, to balance that, we have members of the Mangalorean Catholic community speaking absolutely on-point, we have the word ‘simply’ used in a way familiar to Bangaloreans—to signify ‘what rubbish’. Senior Mrs Kedia earnestly assures the ACP that she is not a ‘lookist’, and believes “one-two” fat friend should be there in a group to add variety.
Notwithstanding the minuscule setbacks, the book is a fun read. And there’s more of it ahead. Soon, we will get to watch Bhavani, who uses the old-fashioned hum instead of the main as a first-person singular, solving these crimes on Netflix.
The Fast and the Dead
By: Anuja Chauhan
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 409
Price: Rs 499