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| Sheep in whodunnit's clothing |
| Kishore Singh / New Delhi Jun 12, 2009, 00:09 IST |
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When the “high status” Agarwals advertise for a suitable partner for their “vegetarian and cultured daughter” who though born in 1983 “looks much younger” and is “engaged in business” but “not inclined to [a] professional career”, presumably a lot of suitors apply, from which the family picks Ramesh Goel, but with less than a month to go for the wedding, the need for caution creeps in. “You would not invite a stranger to your house. Why invite any Tom, Dick or Harry into your family?” Vish Puri asks them. Vish Puri is a detective, India’s “most private investigator”, and using his staffer, Facecream (I know! I know!) he unearths Goel’s diabolic scam to make off with the dowry, which would have resulted in “leaving the female in disgrace”, and a scandal is avoided.
Alexander McCall? You’d think so, but this is Tarquin Hall, writer and journalist who has lived and worked in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the US, and now makes his residence in Delhi and London, and equally as a writer of detective fiction teeters between the seriously funny and the funnily serious. The writing makes clever note of Indianisms and the way the country’s middle class speaks and lives, but then loses steam when it turns stuffy instead, or more old-fashioned English than currently Indian. But that’s getting ahead of the plot…
…which here revolves around Puri being hired by Jaipur-based lawyer Ajay Kasliwal who is accused of seducing and then murdering his maidservant Mary. “I tell you, drivers are making hanky panky with maidservants,” Mrs Kasliwal tells Puri, but when a body is found it turns out that it is Mr Kasliwal who is accused by others of making hanky panky with Mary, while the lawyer confesses to the detective that any hanky panky he does involves not Mary but “takeaways” or mistresses that come and go, and that Puri should find the real killer and get him off the hook.
Vish Puri — “Chubby” to his wife — is a fast-food addict and self-confessed capsicum junkie, who treasures his chilli plants, and while tending to them on his Gurgaon terrace finds himself shot at, but it is not the bullets but the door to the staircase flung in his face by his servant Sweetu that downs him. He recovers in the loving care of his wife Rumpi, some khichri and a Test match on television, to find his sojourn ruined by the arrival of Mummy-ji, who enjoys playing detective more than her son does. “There are clues?” she asks, greedy for information, “Empty cartridges?” Finding none, she declares, “I’ll be staying for some days. It’s my duty to remain, to make sure you are all right, na? I am your Mummy after all.”
Missing (possibly murdered) Mary and Mummy, Handbrake the driver and Facecream, Rumpi, Vish Puri, the Kasliwals, Tubelight and the genuinely murdered Munnalal, the police and the judiciary all come together in this breezy romp that connects Delhi and Jaipur and, briefly, Jharkhand. Tarquin Hall is a good observer, and finds humour in oddities that spring out of the book, but they begin to pale because of the inconsistencies in tone, not quite humorous, neither compellingly page-turning. For a murder mystery, the book is surprisingly sterile. Possibly because, instead of remaining routed in the genre, Hall decides to add his observations like a layer over the book, such as Puri’s move to Gurgaon coinciding “with the explosion of India’s service industries in the wake of the liberalisation of the economy” so that “one by one, the local farmers sold up and their little fields disappeared under the trucks of bulldozers and dump trucks”. As a consequence, “concrete superstructures shot up to the horizon like great splinters of bone forced from the body of the earth” that were “built by armies of sinewy labourers who crawled like ants along frames of bamboo scaffolding”. Not quite what gets detective pulp fiction moving.
And as a result you don’t concern yourself too much about why Mary was murdered (if she was murdered), or Ajay Kasliwal was framed (if he was framed), or how the case played out in court. But I did wonder why Hall didn’t send Puri more often to the Gymkhana Club in Delhi where, among the koi-hais, there was at least always something amusing to discover — and if it wasn’t the lunch menu that promised “Toad in a Hole” and “Pinky Pudding”, or warned that “Rubber souls causes squeeking [sic] and annoyance”, then it was a notice addressed to gentlemen that declared that “the difference between a shirt and a bush shirt is clarified as under: unlike a shirt the design of the upper portion of the bush shirt is like that of a safari”. Phew, at least that’s one mystery solved.
THE CASE OF THE MISSING SERVANT
Tarquin Hall
Hutchinson
312 pages; £5.50
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