Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
Sudden death in the city of dreams
Politics is not about which party one votes for. Politics colours every decision, big and small. Are the young more vocal? I am not sure. They choose their battles.
My generation was more idealistic. We thought we could make a difference just by crooning Michael Jackson’s anthem: “Change the world... make it a better place... for you and for me and the entire human race...” I still love the purity, the innocence, the naivete of that belief. One should never stop believing.
Seventeen-year-old Tara Mondal has been performing at Mumbai’s dance bars for several years. In 2002, a client asks her to carry out an odd fantasy in exchange for a huge sum of money. Since she is in desperate need, Tara accepts the offer.
The operation involves wearing a blue-sequinned sari at a crowded railway station and disappearing within three minutes. After that, no one sees her again. More than a decade later, her lover, Inspector Arnav Singh Rajput, now involved with a journalist, is still struggling with Tara’s loss. His own story is marred by family tragedy. When he was 13, his sister Asha, a rape survivor, died by suicide after she was denied justice. His parents died soon after.
At the beginning of Damyanti Biswas’s novel, Arnav is grappling with a new case: decayed female bodies are being unearthed from various parts of the suburbs. All have tiny blue sequins on them. It turns out that, over a decade, women have been disappearing around the time of major festivals such as Diwali and Dussehra.
“Somewhere in the city a reallife Ravan prowled, kidnapping women, torturing and killing them.” The first body is discovered near Madh Island, where builder Rahul Taneja is constructing a sea-facing luxury spa for a hotel chain. Taneja has previously been accused of sexual
To be honest, I do not know about their reactions to The Seven Moons... Someone at the Jaipur Literature Festival called it a work of queer literature but I have my doubts about whether it deserves to be seen as one. The truth is that I may not be brave enough to try my hand at queer literature. I was merely exploring the life of this character in my book. That said, my research did involve speaking to gay men who were Richard’s contemporaries and younger gay guys in today’s Sri Lanka who use Grindr to meet.
I gave them parts of the book to read to make sure that I was not being offensive and the character was not ill-conceived. On the one hand, the promiscuous gay is a stereotype. On the other hand, promiscuity is also misconduct. He is engaged to socialite and designer Kittu Virani, best known as the mother of Bollywood stars Karan and Rehaan.
Turns out that dreadful things have also happened to those working on these unsolved crimes. Despite the danger, Arnav, who is particularly interested in cases involving dead, molested or missing women as he believes working on them will lead him to the truth about what happened to Tara, plunges into the investigation. Cut to Tara. 14 years after she disappeared, when dance bars are reopening in Mumbai,
she returns to the city.
“The shivering girl of yore” is now a “frenzied yet defiant woman” with a 13-year-old daughter. She gets a job as the lead bar dancer and choreographer at the revamped and relocated Blue Bar. Of course, Tara and Arnav are destined to meet again.
Biswas draws up a powerful image of Mumbai with its “slums with tin-and-tarpaulin roofs” and “shiny billboards advertising refrigerators and televisions, with posters featuring building-sized
Damyanti Biswas 395pp, ~1,306 Thomas and Mercer faces of film stars”. The prose is peppered with local slang such as pandu (incompetent policeman), supari (contract to kill), and hafta (protection money) and city scenes are vividly described.
Borivali railway station with its milling passengers speaking various languages and exuding a mix of body odours and perfumes especially comes alive. Biswas, whose earlier crime novel, You Beneath Your Skin (2019), was optioned for the screen by Endemol Shine, effectively illustrates the social disparities in the “city of dreams” with its great wealth existing alongside squalor and poverty. “The same city, but two countries, poles apart.”
It is clear that much research has gone into the writing. All of it comes out in the descriptions of the city’s slums, in the insights into the lives of Mumbai’s police personnel and the workings of the film industry. The Blue Bar navigates the murky world of Mumbai’s dance bars, explores their nexus with the police, Bollywood,
real-estate tycoons and the underworld and presents how bar dancers are viewed by religious institutions, women’s rights groups and society. The book begins with the line “Endings are overrated”, but what’s a whodunit without an unexpected twist leading to a satisfying denouement? “Sometimes the best-looking, most innocent faces hid criminals,” writes Biswas. And thereby hangs a tale.