High- octane thriller
A journalist with an army background races to unravel the terror plot and seize the bomb even as the body count piles up
Indian thrillers have come of age with a swift arrangement of smoke and mirrors, and action sequences borrowed liberally from Bond films. In fact now too much explanation is really not required — all it needs is for the body count to pile up, set against a background of terrorism with a beautiful doomed heroine thrown in for good measure. Kulpreet Yadav’s Catching the Departed has all these factors. His hero Andy Karan is ex- Indian Army and a would be journalist with a gallant heart and patriotic soul.
Yadav knows that a thriller really doesn’t need too much description as long as the reader has a cliffhanger to keep him turning the pages. Something that writers like James Hadley Chase have perfected. Nor does Yadav flesh his characters out in depth. They are there to kill and excite and everything else that is delivered is on a strictly need to know basis. Even the women just exist to be killed — sometimes after several inexplicable attempts which makes you wonder whether the killers really knew what they were doing — without contributing anything but love and helplessness to the plot, most specifically the beautiful Monica, who is much older than Andy Karan, and is described only in terms of her red candy lips and her unfortunate past love life.
The canvas of Yadav’s novel combs two major cities and the backwaters of a village in the Punjab with major flips of the timeline, which is sometimes a little confusing. Perhaps the book could have done with a little more conversation, because in an attempt to cover ground quickly and avoid boring the reader, Yadav tends to summarise what is being said.
What the book does need is good editing, which would have taken care of the grammatical glitches and sorted out plot and time tangles. Perhaps Andy Karan too needs a little more fleshing out and some desi masala apart from height and good looks, not to mention some more exciting gadgets. He blithely blunders through with no concern for issues like fingerprints. Thanks to his army training he can leap the roofs of buildings with a single bound.
Catching the Departed picks up pace towards the end when there is a bomb on the move between Mumbai and Delhi jouncing in a Mahendra Scorpio, but then with the revelation of the villain’s true identity and motives, loses credibility. With bombs and terrorism piling up, an ancient super villain whose only ambition is money seems a little sad.
On the whole this is one of those travelling companions meant to be flipped through for a thrilling moment or two.
Anjana Basu is the author of Rhythms of Darkness