A skeleton at the foot of a magnificent banyan tree, known to the family as Le Patriarche. A cigar-smoking matriarch called Fishy, and a family feud so hilarious, it could only unfold in a mansion in Kolkata. Hemangini Dutt Majumder’s The Scratch and Sniff Chronicles takes the old trope of Bengali Gothic literature, contemporises it, and serves up a whodunnit that is some parts funny, some parts macabre, and all parts engaging.
We are dropped without ceremony into the lives of the Chaterges (yes, this is the spelling). At the centre is Basanti—fondly called Fishy by her adopted daughter Ellora/Laura and her orphaned niece Olympia/Ollie, named after a Manet painting. Fishy belongs to an old, wealthy family that owns a mansion in Chandan Nagar outside Kolkata. She is locked in a property battle with her widowed stepmother, the larger-than-life Labanga Latika, and no fond nicknames here, thank you very much.
Into this potent mix tumble several side interests: Labanga Latika’s paramour, the shifty priest Shankar; the archetypal meek cousin Rupa; chemistry teacher Danish Mirza with a penchant for mints (and for Ollie); several cooks and maids with studied eccentricities; and a pair of cops—Deputy Superintendent Pramanik, with his scientific temper, acting as foil to his junior Sujoy Halder, whose sympathies seem to lean towards Labanga and Co.
After the skeleton is found, other bodies duly appear, including that of a crow, which may or may not have been poisoned. While the mystery chugs along, sometimes hilariously inchoate, it is the roster of characters that provides the real meat to the story. Every one of them has been neatly developed, including the narrator, the spirit of a dead woman (no spoilers here). There’s Ollie, a sommelier and beverage consultant with a sharply developed nose that gives her extraordinary sensitivity to smells, enabling her to inhale information at any given time. “I can really smell… you see, in a way I’m like Batman. Minus the butler,” she quips. There’s Laura, once an underage maid at Neelbari, now a promising architect. And then there is the family cat Habeas Corpus, as well as Fishy’s sharp-tongued aunts, Tuni Pishi and Muni Pishi. At one point, Ollie’s late father tells his wife there isn’t much difference between a sushi roll and a maach bhaat roll, the mustard or shorshe factor adequately replaced by wasabi. These Wodehousian characters and their shenanigans keep the reader chuckling even as the murder mystery unfolds.
The feminist twist is subtle but unmistakable, with the women holding matters firmly by the reins, even when they unwittingly become victims. “My aunts aren’t gentlemen,” says Fishy wryly. In this story packed with women, it is significant that not one of them shows squeamishness or collapses when things turn grisly.
The novel is steeped in atmosphere: gargoyles, angels, and demons at Neelbari; ceramic figurines in the parlour, the sinister Gombaj Ghor. It’s also funny. Danish, marking a chemistry paper, lets his heartbreak bleed into scathingly personal comments, only to quickly amend them when it seems like his love life is looking up. Or when Halder links Ollie’s use of the word poisson, in conversation with a French friend, to poison as a murder weapon.
Yes, there are slips—too many commas in the wrong places, an excess of apostrophes, some awkwardly worded sentences, a few Bengali dishes explained while others are not, and a denouement that relies heavily on exposition. But pointing these missteps out would be mere pedantry. Because what Majumdar ultimately delivers is a richly comic Gothic tale with a sly feminist bite.