Mastering a New Trade
Having excelled in several genres, Ashok Banker now checks the right boxes with a gripping thriller
Ashok Banker is one of those rare Indian writers whose body of work has always been hard to categorise. They have written coming-of-age novels set in 1980s Bombay (Vertigo, Byculla Boy),
Ramayana and Mahabharata re-imaginings, sequences of novels about Krishna and Kali as well as a couple of gripping whodunits. They have been a journalist and a screenwriter for television.
A Kiss After Dying, Banker’s latest work, is a ‘howdunit’ in the best tradition of James Hadley Chase and Ira Levin (whose novel A Kiss
Before Dying has inspired Banker’s title and the skeleton of the story).
The novel follows its protagonist Hannah (an Indian posing as a student in Zurich) and her elaborate revenge plot against the superficially charming, unscrupulous Ricky Manfredi, whose super-rich father was responsible for the deaths of Hannah’s father and brother many years ago. A Kiss After
Dying is expertly plotted and its irresistible anti-hero never lets the action flag.
Talking about their fourdecade-long career, Banker
says: “I knew I wanted to be a novelist when I was nine years old. I began writing my first novel at the age of 12 and completed it at 15. I worked as a journalist in order to learn the craft of storytelling. Even in those news and feature stories, I soon found my strength lay in longform writing. In short, I am a book writer first and last. It’s my first, last, and only true love.”
A Kiss After Dying, like the novel that inspired its name and basic structure, is about a ‘righteous avenger’ who feels that the ends justify the means, a luxury that was often not extended to young, female protagonists—up until Gillian Flynn’s bestselling and widely acclaimed thriller Gone Girl, of course. “What Flynn did in Gone Girl was nothing less than the reinvention of the thriller, taking it out of the misogynist, chauvinist, testosterone-driven domain of male action heroics and setting it in deceptively placid suburbia, distilled through feminine angst, paranoia and #metoo distrust of male drives,” says Banker.
A Kiss Before Dying represents the best qualities of contemporary genre fiction: A KISS AFTER DYING IS ABOUT A ‘RIGHTEOUS AVENGER’ WHO FEELS THAT THE ENDS JUSTIFY THE MEANS, A LUXURY RARELY EXTENDED TO YOUNG, FEMALE PROTAGONISTS whip-smart, coolly ironic and propelled by complex motivations, this is a thriller that will have you up way past your bedtime. It is also incredibly cinematic, with a lot of the chapters clearly informed by the basics of episodic screenwriting. Banker, of course, was the writer of the 1995 Englishlanguage Doordarshan TV series A Mouthful of Sky, produced by Mahesh Bhatt and Amit Khanna’s production house Plus Channel.
Featuring future stars like Rahul Bose, Milind Soman, Ayesha Dharker and R. Madhavan, many of the show’s episodes had been directed by Bhatt himself. Banker says, “For Mouthful, I ended up writing the entire show myself, working almost around the clock for almost a year and a half, except for two weeks. Over 250 halfhour episodes, or 125 hours of television, written at the rate of a script a day, from story to screenplay to final shooting scripts, all written on the fly by me in real time.”
Banker recalls how there would only be a backup of five or seven episodes, so almost anything they wrote on Monday would be on air on DD Metro by Friday or the following week, at best. No better training than TV, when it comes to writing quickly and effectively, and it has held Banker in good stead—they have now written scores of books across several genres, and at 58, they are still going strong. ■