Karma Cola
Most of us who gravitate towards the section marked “thriller” in a bookstore have grown up with all kinds of crime novels littered with corpses, cops, conspiracies and crummy detectives that figured out whodunit. The Hindi audiences have had pulp crime novels to read when travelling in trains for years. A Chennai-based publisher has translated Tamil pulp for those who have been waiting to read a good blood and gore tale in English.
So, Mansuri, Macabre seems like a cool title for someone starved of a whodunit. The writer has been published before, so you don’t think you will suffer a first-time writer’s enthusiasm for carefully constructed sentences peppered with adjectives and explanations that are the result of English lessons taken by stern nuns. However, when one nodded off again and again when reading this book, one had to examine why.
It’s a good device telling a story in first person. But then there are so many first person tales that it begins to annoy you. There is the narrator, the diaries and letters of Babuji, Pappi, Moni Baba, Babuji as P.P. Sharma, ID’s story, hearsay account of Mr Bannerjee and his own story. And then there are stories of other characters told in these first person accounts. You stumble through the tale because all these first person accounts sound as though they are really one person and not many.
These first person accounts take away the reader’s sense of discovery and participation, which even the simplest of gumshoe tales have in plenty. Reading report after tedious report of how It was at my urgings that Swamiji began to dress in fine silks, wear flashing diamond rings and a heavy gold necklace... makes you want to ask as the teenagers of today, “Dude! WTF! Don’t these characters have a mind of their own?”
All this becomes even more unbelievable when the story of the godmen moves from one cliche to another: godmen seduce women bhakts, they loot in the name of creating ashrams, they kill and torture people just like that. The story is so immersed in cliches that you struggle to figure out what happened to the sisters who have been murdered.
Everything happens all too easy to all the characters, the amassing of wealth and women, the escaping from law and getting caught, people getting strangled because they know too much and you grit your teeth because the explanation you get page after page is: The diary goes on to relate all that was happening in Moni baba’s life. Just replace “Moni baba” with any other character and the result would be the same.
You don’t want to know who murdered the sisters (and they seem like the best thing in the book, as their life is mildly more interesting that the godmen) and why, because you have fallen asleep several times in trying to count godmen related cliches in the book and the nasty things (from rape to abuse to death) that happen to every woman character in the book. The only thing macabre about this book is that it is 230 pages of “tell, don’t show”.
Manisha Lakhe is the author of The Betelnut Killers
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