On Valentine’s Day 2013, three sisters went missing from school in Murwani, Maharashtra. Their mother and grandfather went to the police station after 9 pm to register a complaint, but were turned away following an altercation with an inspector. The sisters’ bodies were later found floating in a well. They had been raped and murdered. This singular event put Murwani on the map for a brief period. Among the flock of reporters there, Chitranshu Chitale writes his first-ever front-page report. Six years later, he returns to the unsolved crime, to interview the stakeholders for a book exploring the gruesome tragedy.
Hurda by Atharva Pandit picks on real-life crime to weave a quasi-fictional world—of the tragedy’s aftermath, the people in and around the occurrence and its fallout. The multitude of fissures around such tragedies weave into a narrative that reads more like reportage than fiction and cuts deeper, asserting the quiet brilliance of this debut.
In terms of opinion, the book showcases two kinds of people: one set ponders why a crime involving low-caste village girls should have ministers, police and media flocking to them; the other questions why so little is done when crimes occur on the margins of society. Most readers have always wondered about the backstory of a heinous crime of this nature, puzzled how yesterday’s explosive news quietly fizzles out of public memory. The author takes cue from this as he dissects and lays bare life in Murwani before, during and after the horror.
Chitale is a Mumbai lad and, as the text emphasises, a Konkanasta Brahmin, forced into journalism by circumstances rather than passion. His higher caste highlights the silo within which he exists, a microcosm in which the existence and efforts of people like those he encounters at Murwani are all too alien. Though the story evolves through his eyes and his interview style, Hurda is also a story of the outsider wishing to carve inroads. In other words, not only is Mumbai hundreds of kilometres away, the mindset, social realities, even the same Marathi language is a whole other universe here. And this story fans out also as an inquiry into Chitale’s ineptitude as an urban elite in a locale supposed to bind him through language.
It is virtually impossible to pull off a cast of semi-fictional characters, reproduced almost to life-like perfection. The skilful Pandit presents word holograms of an entire village—its people and lechers, the school, politics, subterranean alliances and enmities with intense realism. The police are power-drunk and pitiable in their incapacity. The male contingent of the village has concerns in business, politics and secrecy that bury all traces of the incident as trivial. And there is always a new figure emerging, who offers a tidbit of information to reorient reality once more. All the while making the reader suspect first one, then another, asking themselves, whodunit.
Women do no better for the sisters. SP Anjali Shukla blames incompetent post-mortem for the rape charge, asserting there was no rape. Yet, sexuality simmers throughout the narrative. For one, the entire blame for the incident is placed on the “sexy” green top the oldest sister wore. No one omits to mention that. Or the fact that she was known to go missing from school and seen talking to men which, to them, somehow translated into an easy and expendable target for rape and murder. In this, she is 14, whereas the real victim was barely 11, and this is stomach-churning though likely true. The mother and their grandmother are at war, flinging allegations at each other and the accusation of murder. Two women are shown sneaking out in the night for sex with unsuitable men in a cameo of oppression and lack of female agency.
Through layers of apathy, diffused focus and a disconnected mob that the village represents, Pandit has carved out a stellar tale of those we forget. While the language is at its sparest, it’s the closest Marathi can be written in English, and delightful in its cadences. The writing offers flourishes of deep wisdom or observation that refine the book into a classic: “The house looks like a ghost, its death an ancient fact.” About the blanket-seller from Rajasthan, Kader Mohammed, he writes: “He read his namaz, but he had always been more interested in the economics of living than the economics of faith.”Hurda is the green grain of fresh jowar, a word the littlest sister said out loud that may link their fate to a grain party among the village louts. Hurda, all too common on central India’s rural landscape, also presents a genre-defying monster of a book we’ve all been waiting for.