Awesomely evil with an American twang
Sunil Sawant is an encounter specialist and crooked cop. The only thing that he loves in the world is his nine- millimetre Beretta. His colleague, Arjun Kadam, favours a clunky .45 revolver, but Kadam’s also got a Walther stuck in the small of his back that Sawant doesn’t know about. We never learn what brand of ammunition they use, but whatever it is, they’re clearly placing bulk orders. Because in the new graphic novel Mumbai Confidential , written by Saurav Mohapatra and illustrated by Vivek Shinde, the guns are blazing most of the time.
You know what you’re in for with this book; it delivers pretty much exactly what it promises. Imagine a Ram Gopal Varma or Anurag Kashyap crime thriller plot synopsis handed over to Jeph Loeb ( Batman: The Long Halloween) or Frank Miller ( Sin City), and you’ve got the idea. It’s a straightforward Mumbai crime story, complete with shifting gang allegiances, a despicable washed- up filmstar, layer upon layer of corruption and lots of extrajudicial killings. Shinde’s art fits the story perfectly: he’s very good at drawing angry tough guys baring their teeth. His characters are exquisite in their ugly rage. Especially Sawant; if they make a movie out of this book, his role is going to be tough to cast, because few real people look this awesomely evil.
The book also includes four short “interludes” drawn by other artists, featuring the same characters. Two of these come in the middle, and help move the main story along, while two come at the end and can be read independently. All four of them are great; I especially liked Devaki Neogi’s “Demand and Supply”, about a ruthless hired killer who comes in a small package, and Saumin Patel’s “House of Cards”, which provides a glimpse of the back story for one of the characters in the main tale.
There are a couple of things that make the book not perfect. For one, all the female characters are props. There’s a wife who’s there to die of cancer and give the protagonist depth, a little girl who’s there to get mowed down by a bad guy to convince us he’s really bad, and a gangster moll who doesn’t get a single line or even a decent- size frame to herself. That was a bit of a letdown — there aren’t nearly enough badass women characters in Indian comics, and I was kind of hoping I’d get to meet one in these pages. ( There are certainly plenty of
Shinde is very good at drawing angry tough guys. His characters are exquisite in their ugly rage. Especially Sawant; if they make a movie out of this book, his role is going to be tough to cast, because few real people look this awesomely evil.
real- life examples to draw from. Just read S. Hussain Zaidi’s Mafia Queens of Mumbai.)
Another issue is the language, which has a tendency to veer off into American cowboy territory. “Kinda always figured you for a whining pussy”, says Sawant at one point; “Come on, all you scumbags”, taunts Kadam. Kadam’s friend Fattu, trying to get him to upgrade his technology, tells him, “I mean, your VCR was probably on Noah’s Ark.” We get the occasional spurt of theek hais and arrey bhais trying to reground us, but it doesn’t quite work. Sure, there are some Mumbaikars who speak English like this, but not these dudes, come on!
In Mohapatra’s defence, he’s in a bind here. To be authentic and true to his characters, he’d have to write the book in Hindi, peppered with Mumbai street slang and Marathi. It would surprise me if he were fluent in that idiom; Indians who are this clued in to the stylistic traditions of American superhero and noir comics are usually too Anglicised to have the required street cred. But even if he could do it, Hindilanguage publishing is a shady world. While a few companies like Raj Comics seem to have figured out a business model that works, it’s not generally considered very lucrative. ( Maybe our new pro- Hindi government will start giving generous grants to support the publishing of Hindi graphic novels! There’s an idea!) Instead, Mohapatra and Shinde are aiming their book at a foreign market, as is made clear from the Tom Waits quote at the beginning, and the Ron Marz introduction (“the city is caught between the modern and the ancient”: urgh, the next time I have to read a line like that about an Indian metro, I may go vigilante with a 9- mm Beretta myself). It might sell abroad — the story does function as a pretty good noobie introduction to the Mumbai crime world. I imagine it could do very well in Spanish or French or Italian translation, with the thorny issue of Indian vs International English removed.
And then there’s the ending. When the surprise twist comes, and the criminal mastermind who was pulling everyone’s strings all along is revealed, it’s not really much of a surprise as it should be because he’s pretty much the only character left alive. On second thought, though, this is awesome and totally appropriate. If you pick up Mumbai Confidential for its blood- red cover and promise of gangland noir fantasy, you’ll be quite satisfied with the all- out slaughter that brings the book to a close. Rakesh Khanna is a founding editor of Blaft Publications, an independent publishing house based in Chennai