ON THE SAME PAGE AS CHRISTIE
FINALLY, A WHODUNNIT THAT TICKS MANY BOXES AGATHA CHRISTIE ONCE DID
In A Death in the Himalayas, a British resident of a town in Kumaon is found murdered in the forest, prompting one character to succinctly note to investigators: “Who all will you run after? The list of people who are happy to see her dead is long, very long.” In Udayan Mukherjee’s second novel, a mountainset murder mystery, everyone seems to have a motive, but none seems to have an alibi. There is the shifty American neighbour, the dubious British husband, the nasty local MLA and a cast of other rogues, buffoons and interested parties with good reason to do in Clare Watson. Watson, a writer and activist, had angered many; right-wing groups who opposed her book, local men whose wives she had empowered and real estate interests whose development plans she was hell-bent on scotching. Neville Wadia, a retired policeman from Mumbai, now retreated to a quiet retirement in the hills, is inevitably pulled into proceedings to lead the probe. Along with Satish Kalia, a cop sent across from Delhi, he must quickly solve the crime, given the mounting public interest and intense political pressure. The well-paced novel has all the familiar tics of a whodunnit, genre patterns that fans of Agatha Christie will instantly recognise; the frisson of whether the murderer will strike again, the tangential secrets that get uncovered, the red herrings and ultimately the final reveal itself. Mukherjee ably juggles his cast, in textbook fashion throwing suspicion on each one by turn, and moves things along at a decent clip. With crime fiction, murder is also a lens to examine the surrounding social fabric and Mukherjee attempts to parse the local culture, its fissures and faultlines, while touching on themes of natural destruction, intolerance and domestic abuse. But as an Indian reader, I found the patronising translations grating; for instance, Rs 64, is “less than a dollar”, the “gram panchayat” is the “village committee” and Holi, lest we forget, is “the festival of colours”. Though the language tends to lurch into cliché and there is a temptation to over-explain, Mukherjee manages to evoke a real sense of place, and the denouement when it comes, is sufficiently satisfying.