‘Follow the bulbul and you will find the caterpillar.’
What do you get when a celebrated and veteran theatre practitioner decides to write his debut detective novel? You get a murder mystery written in the best traditions of the golden age with overt and covert genuflections to two of its greats—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie; set in the metropolises of Delhi, Bombay and Madras, and with the distinct socio-cultural complexities of each, that are the stage as well as the props of this complex clue puzzle. Feisal Alkazi’s The Artful Murders is not only a mystery set in the murky underworld of art theft, forgeries and stolen antiquities, but also a very artfully crafted puzzle that needs the combined forces of the police, and Ragini Malhotra and her cohort of dedicated friends to disentangle. This engrossing tale of murder and machinations keeps the reader guessing till the last page, and every protean clue is sometimes Ariadne’s thread that leads you out of the maze, and sometimes a red herring that frustratingly ends in a cul-de-sac.
At the heart of all the unanswered questions with which the curtain rises on this drama is the trope of dissimulation: the murders of Mrs. Krishnamurthi and Pratap, the mystery of the disappearance and reappearance of a painting by one of India’s most famous painters, the idli batter with its familiar but strange smell, the missing taveez, the entangled marital and love life of the maiko Shobhana and her gaiko Saudamini, the story of Ruksana Begum of Matia Mahal, and the two attempts on the life of the lead detective, Ragini Malhotra. ‘Wanting to be someone else, taking on another person’s identity, trying to pass yourself off as something you are not, what a theme it is in literature, Ragini thought. And in real life too.’
In the archetype of classic detective fiction, the calm and predictable lives of an upmarket neighbourhood in South Delhi are disrupted by the murder of one of its apparently most harmless denizens, and the same disruption happens in a less salubrious area not too far away, with the sensational news of the discovery of the dead body of one of its occasional residents. The stage is set for the detective to get to work and discover whether the two murders are connected in any way. The connecting threads, when they emerge, are the warp and weft of the story that unfolds, accompanied by the food cooked up by Ragini’s family retainer Gulab and described by Alkazi in mouth-watering detail.
Given Alkazi’s theatre background, the reader expects scads of literary and theatrical symbolism and is not disappointed. Like the masterly director that he is, the writer blocks and executes each scene with great dexterity. This is no mean feat as the scenes change rapidly from the interiors of homes and havelis to broad boulevards and mean streets; from art galleries to theatres; from the past to the present and then into the mind and consciousness of the dramatis personae. What at first appears a muddle soon emerges as a carefully crafted jigsaw puzzle that is deceptive in its simplicity but mind-bendingly complex in reality. The thing to remember about jigsaws is that every piece certainly has its place in the final picture, but we have to be careful that no piece is left unaccounted for, as that means that we have got it all wrong and need to start over.
Detective fiction has outgrown the competitive rivalry between the police and the private detective. Vikas, Fernandes and Mrs. Ragini Malhotra work in symbiotic harmony, each member of the team complementing the other, as their domains overlap but social and gender cachet, expertise and access vary. To add grist to this mill, we also have the very versatile PP, not just a Pert Punjabi who Ragini originally took her to be, but Private Investigator Premlata Puri. As the antagonists seem to become stronger and further out of reach, our detectives begin to apply time-tested modes of reasoning and work on the means, motive and opportunity, the how, the why and the who, to unmask and apprehend the metaphorical hand/s wielding the murder weapon.
One of the time-honoured contracts between a detective fiction writer and his (in this case) reader is fair play. This ensures that the reader has every chance of solving the puzzle if not before then at least at the same time as the detective. A codicil to this contract is that the final solution must be a credible and logically satisfying one. One of the techniques that Alkazi uses to honour his side of this bargain is to frequently recreate whatever has happened in a kind of mental action replay by his chief detectives so that the reader is also reminded of all the variables that are colliding in this labyrinthine plot. As Fernandes suggests, ‘Re-enter the scene imaginatively in a way, and it is amazing how much detail you will recall.’ What makes Alkazi’s mystery novel so fascinating is that each time this happens, a vivid picture does emerge but with a twist. It is almost as if what has been shaken is not just one’s memory but also a kaleidoscope, and each subsequent picture transforms dramatically into something completely different from the previous one, so the quest has to begin anew.
As the story hurtles towards its denouement, we as readers can look back to all that has happened over the last three-hundred-odd pages; with the benefit of hindsight and the combination of observation, knowledge and deduction, as Holmes instructed, the pieces of the jigsaw finally fall into place.
As a passionate devourer of mystery novels, if there is anything that personally perplexed me, it was the interruptions of the parenthesized translations between Hindi and English of some dialogues. The purpose of this editorial decision remained unclear till the end, as the translations did not contribute anything to the plot or the characters or the action, and in fact acted as unwelcome intrusions into the otherwise smooth flow and pace of the narrative. The other niggling disquiet relates to the fact that in spite of being ‘the prime mover’, Shobhana Shandilya is never encountered in the flesh or given a voice unlike most of the other women characters in this story. Since the Epilogue promises a second Ragini Malhotra mystery to look forward to, I can only speculate that Alkazi is keeping Shobhana up his sleeve as an adversary whom our detective will lock horns with again in the future.
In the final analysis, this is a book that all aficionados of detective fiction will certainly relish, as it is a page-turner set in a hitherto relatively unexplored part of the crime underworld—art and antiquities—about which we garner a wealth of fascinating insights. Next time you come across a painting that purports to be by a great master, do check its provenance carefully before you become an unwitting mark of a clever forger and remember that Feisal Alkazi has given you a master class on composition and movement, distinctive colour and palette, which are the alphabets that make up the authentic signature of an artist.
Anjana Neira Dev is Professor, Department of English, Gargi College, University of Delhi, Delhi.