Hill to Die on
Meeti Shroff-Shah’s ‘Temple Hill Mystery’ has a lot to offer but novelty, sadly, is missing from the menu
NOTHING SAYS COSY mystery like a bloodless death, an amateur woman detective and a tightly-knit community. The Death of Kirti Kadakia, billed as a “Temple Hill Mystery”, has all of these. The new novel by advertising professional and writer Meeti Shroff-Shah was longlisted for a Crime Writers’ Association prize and joins a growing subset of Mumbai-based detective fiction.
When Radhi Zaveri relocates from New York, nursing a bad case of heartbreak and an even worse case of writer’s block, she isn’t planning on investigating funny business. All she wants is to get on with her next book and her new life. But soon enough, Kirti Kadakia, her friend Sanjana’s father, is found dead, presumed to have killed himself. The family accepts this and the matter appears to be closed, but something nags at Sanjana, and with Radhi, she embarks on puzzling out all the inconsistencies and half-truths that swirl around the apparent suicide.
In the grand old tradition of all victims, Kirti Kadakia has a less-thanperfect history and plenty of enemies, including snivelling members of his own large family. A Gujarati community obsessed with wealth and status provides the perfect backdrop. Shroff-Shah’s Temple Hill is a barely disguised version of Malabar Hill; this is south Bombay red in tooth and claw. A retinue of staff glides in and out, Jain temples dot the landscape and gossipy aunties seem as lethal as your average Joe serial killer. Every meal and every snack is catalogued with forensic precision: from the mustardflecked dhoklas to the Vietnamese spring rolls. Shroff-Shah manages to successfully evoke a certain kind of privileged upper-class existence, its rituals, codes and claustrophobic mores.
This also means that an “upstairs/ downstairs” dynamic is vital to the proceedings. There are 29 euphemistic references to “helpers” alone, the cooks, maids and cleaners who lubricate the everyday lives of the wealthy. At times, the portraiture veers between condescension and caricature; from the Watsonlike Lila, whose task is to “tap into the great domestic helpers’ grapevine” to a housekeeper called Palak Ben, who “could afford to behave…obnoxiously… and get away with it” as she had proved her “loyalty and value over decades”.
Radhi and Sanjana meander through social situations gamely, trying to ferret out morsels of information. But the mystery at the heart of the novel is simply not mysterious enough, and the pace falters. We rotate through the standard Agatha Christie cycle: festering family secrets, a suspicious second death and a final Hercule Poirot-like disclosure to a room full of suspects where the murderer is duly scolded. Genre familiarity is part of the fun, but the reliance on cliches and the unremarkable cast do little to build on a promising start. It doesn’t help that careless western transplants shake the integrity of the fictional universe—for one, Mumbai police probes do not involve coroners. ■
Shroff-Shah’s Temple Hill is a barely disguised version of Malabar Hill; this is south Bombay red in tooth and claw