Review of ' Kolkata Crimes' by Krishnan Srinivasan, former Foreign Secretary
Mohan Gulrajani
The latest in the Marco-Deb series is a feast
The collection of seven crime thrillers by the former diplomat turned writer is at once deliciously dark and thought-provoking.
The Kolkata cityscape with the famous Howrah Bridge in the background
Krishnan Srinivasan, former Foreign Secretary and an astute commentator on foreign policy issues, periodically diverts himself and his readers with stories of crime and detection. His detective series features the unlikely duo of Michael Marco, a dour retired Somali diplomat temporarily based in Kolkata, and his associate Koel Deb, a feisty former police officer turned private detective.
Deb left the police service following a shooting incident that left her with a prosthetic left arm. Equipped with a Glock-17 and a Harley Davidson, she later sets up a remarkably successful detective agency. Her services are much sought after: senior political leaders, her former police colleagues, and on occasion, prominent businesspersons come to her. Marco and Deb have already appeared together in two novels.
Kolkata Crimes is a collection of seven short stories featuring the detectives. The book can be viewed as a three-course meal, with the first three stories constituting the hors d’oeuvre, the next three the starters, and the final story, with over 120 pages, the main course. Given the sordid people and events that dominate these stories, there is no scope for dessert.
The hors d’oeuvre pieces are short but complex puzzles. “Death, Where is Thy Sting?” has an adulterous husband who fears his wife is trying to murder him and so seeks protection. In “The Political Angle”, two political rivals on the eve of an important election are enmeshed in a mysterious murder and in the complex impulses of those close to them. The third, “The Eyewitness”, seems to involve the eternal triangle, but then, nothing is what it seems.
The three stories in the starters group are longer and more complicated in terms of the personalities and the convoluted motivations driving them. “All Bets are Off” brings together diverse characters dealing with threats to a prized racehorse on the eve of the Kolkata Derby. “Art and Craft” takes us to the world of upmarket art sales and forgery, while “Burden of Guilt” centres on different personalities who are part of the same theatre group but are divided by guilt, thwarted desires, and avarice.
All these stories are presented in simple and clean prose, frequently embellished with quotations from diverse sources—the Bible, ancient Greek, and English literature—that are always apt for the occasion. But the best bit, which gives these stories their life, relates to the incisive observations related to looks and dress.
Slaying it
Sample these. A female character “parted her lips in a smile but barely a muscle moved beyond her mouth”. A man has “heavy and twisted lips, such that he always looked as if he was sucking a bitter lemon”. A policeman’s “sardonic laugh was more like a donkey’s bray”.
Seven cases are investigated in Kolkata Crimes
We see Deb wearing “a fawn, sprightly coloured waistcoat over a blue long-sleeved untucked shirt, baggy chinos and blue Skechers”. Later, she dresses for dinner in a “shiny silver fish-net long-sleeved top and a dark-brown leather midi skirt”, with matching SaintG tan boots and a Versace Red Medusa handbag. At the same dinner, Deb’s hostess “wears a black business suit over a white dress shirt with five strings of medium-sized pearls, gold cufflinks, several gold bangles and a watch with a face as big as the moon”. Whew! This delicious spread of hors d’oeuvres and starters leads to the main course.
“The Unravelling” takes us into Kolkata’s sordid underworld, peopled both by lowlife characters and sections of the elite, whose depraved cravings find outlets in these squalid spaces. The story is harsh and gritty but also thought-provoking.
No sense of redemption
Drawing from several recent incidents of young girls being violently abused and killed in different cities, this novella has at its centre the murder of an 18-year-old girl, Yulia, whose badly mutilated body is found in a sleazy part of the metropolis. Not only has she been cut and slashed everywhere with a knife, many of her ribs are also broken and her heart is missing.
After the police fail to make progress, Deb and Marco lead a joint investigation over several weeks. They meet the bereaved father, a retired Swiss diplomat and now a renowned authority on the languages of the north-eastern region. He is cold, distant, austere, and far too orthodox to have allowed his teenage daughter the freedom she needed. They also encounter members of the city’s elite—some of them school friends—and several lowlife characters, including bouncers, managers, and women who people Kolkata’s sleazy bars and brothels. Deb and Marco slowly wade through this slime until the carefully hidden truth is unravelled and the victim gets some justice. There is, however, no sense of redemption: Yulia’s murder is only one more instance of the wanton crimes against women all over the world.
At the end of this story, Deb tells us that the person she would like as a partner is one “who is kind and gentle more than possessing any other quality, a man who is tender and who will look after me when I am ancient in years”. If this is what women want, why do men fail so often to respond supportively?
Talmiz Ahmad is a former diplomat who delights in crime thrillers.
https://frontline.thehindu.com/books/kolkata-crimes-krishnan-srinivasan-review/article70490044.ece
Professor (Dr.) M. L. Gulrajani F.S.D.C. (UK)
Former Professor and Dean (I.R&D), IIT Delhi
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