Lifestyle GM Cotton Trap Tulipland Digital Vibes Dwelling Deeper Women & Society A Day in Coal Miners' Lives Entertainment Book Review Health Prev Issue Next Issue

Level 1

Book and Author Name:Page 3 murders — A Lalli mystery by Kalpana Swaminathan Illustrator: Rahul Chaudhury ISBN: 81-7993-051-3 Cover price: Rs 295 Publisher: India Ink, Roli Books Pvt Ltd.

It’s here, finally there’s light on the horizon. Definite signs of a breakthrough. But is it too early to celebrate? Indo Anglia’s done most things, except produced a counterpart to Agatha Christie or PD James. Apart from Ashok Banker’s murder mysteries few come to mind. Most writers prefer to jump onto the literary fiction bandwagon and stay there, scanning the horizon for prizes. It is therefore a delight to meet an unabashedly crime directed author. Kalpana Swaminathan introduces her heroine Lalli to the annals of crime. Every Homicide file, we are told, has one last blank page marked LR. That page is meant for Lalli…

Sixtyish and silver-haired, she's officially retired from the force, but she's still their Last Resort when it comes to solving a murder…Not that anyone knows what the R in her surname stands for. That irritates people, or at any rate it does when the murder tension is boiling to explosion point.

Lalli’s niece is the narrator to a reluctant Dr Watson to the whole thing, a jobless, out of love and luck girl who dreams of Lucite Manolo Blahniks and is as nameless as the heroine of Rebecca.

This is the first of the Lalli mysteries and Swaminathan sticks closely to the tried and tested murder formulae. Instead of a country house she substitutes an old Parsee home stuck out on a bluff at one edge of Mumbai, cut off from the rest of the city by an impossible winding road. Hilla Driver, a pediatrician who has inherited the home from her miserly wicked uncle decides to invite an eclectic bunch of people to spend a weekend with her in true Mumbai page 3 style. Since it is Mumbai, the group has to include a model, a gossip columnist cum novelist, a jazz dancer, a controversial doctor and his millionaire wife and an industrialist. Lalli and her niece are included among the guests.

Driver hires Tarok Ghosh, a suave chef, whose menu for the party raises more than just eyebrows. A Bangladeshi refugee from the pavements of Mumbai, Tarok is dedicated to the cause of authenticity as opposed to meaningless haute cuisine. He serves up a brief history of India in a menu where each dish is given a date and place of origin starting with some century BC – as for example, Pomegranate Nectar Harappa 2500 BC. And where each dish has some significance to the life of a guest present at the banquet. Of course, there is more to all this than meets the eye.

A storm isolates the Page 3 people in Driver’s huge house. Voices come and go in the night on the huge terrace that looks out to sea. Strange intense conversations are overheard and a woman vanishes leaving a silver heeled strappy slipper behind. (That terrace, perhaps too much happens on the terrace in the moonlight. Admittedly it's convenient.) The scene is perfect for murder and a murderer strikes with serial effect. Swaminathan weaves a compulsively entertaining page turner with literary pretensions. Agatha Christie she is certainly not and she unconsciously gives away the murderer’s identity fairly early on in the mystery. Apart from the fact that a dedicated thriller fan would probably find the actual murder taking too long in the coming. However fans of Mumbai and deft word spinning are unlikely to be too choosy. More Lalli mysteries are definitely welcome.

View and Post comment on this article