By Kalpana Swaminathan

Rs 299

It’s a rare whodunit that gives you more than what you had bargained for and Kalpana Swaminathan’s latest detective novel is that anomaly. The fourth in the highly entertaining Inspector Lalli series, I Never Knew It Was You operates on the standard crime-fiction machinery with a confident literariness, which makes the reading a pleasure.
That Swaminathan didn’t begin her writing career as a detective novelist works to her advantage. There is more, it would appear, to Inspector Lalli’s life than death. I Never Knew It Was You features a serial murderer but we aren’t taken kicking and screaming into the grisly with gratuitous elbow-deep autopsy details when corpses turn up bearing “his” signature mark: a pink nylon cord around the neck.
The accelerating body count weighs on the recently retired Lalli, but so do other considerations: the making of the perfect orange marmalade, the appreciation of a passage by Isidore Ducasse, and the importance of teaching a sloppy colleague professional earnestness via a succession of prickly practical jokes.
The story begins at the Delhi airport where Lalli’s niece Sita, the 30-something narrator, runs into a former classmate. Anisa, now going by the name of Anais, hands over a cardboard box to a woman anxiously waiting for her son. “But Ankush? Where is Ankush?” asks the waiting lady. To which Anais replies, tapping the cardboard box with “one elegant finger, ‘He’s right here… Inside’”. What follows from there is a whodunit that is 25 years old, and Lalli plunges back into 1986 with relish, hoping to catch one who got away: the tragic unsolved murders of Maybelle and Lucy, Pereira sisters from Bandra’s Chapel Lane.
The narrative splits into three parts: the present, events of 1986 and back to the resolution in the present.
The mysteries only mount, as do the coincidences that tie everything back to Lalli: the pink nylon cord suggests the involvement of the Rassiwalla serial killer, who appears to have a personal enmity with Lalli. Then there is the puzzle surrounding the Sada Suhagan, a personalised diamond that hangs around Lalli’s neck and attracts a horde of covetous women.
The Lalli-centricity to the case is a bit of a stretch on the credulity of the reader and by the time the story delivers its climax the narrative has visible stretch marks. All this while, Watson-like, Sita is a few steps behind Lalli, accepting revelations by the teaspoonful. Sita’s baffled awe with respect to her aunt’s behaviour adds further glamour to Lalli’s somewhat unconventional working style. Lalli may be batting for the right team, yet, she lies, impersonates, withholds and punishes at will. Why quibble? What’s a detective without some verve and professional arrogance?
Lalli has an informal squad in place. There is Dr Q, an immaculate, humane police surgeon “stuck on the first line of his book for the last 20 years”. Inspector Shukla is robust, slightly thick and asks plodding yet fertile questions, not without comic value: “Who sent email to mother? If victim sent, he is not victim. If victim did not send because he is victim, then who sent?” Neither is Shukla’s capacity for pointblank questions limited to the case. He rubs Sita the wrong way with his assumptions about her as a single woman. “Why you’re not married Sita?” he asks when Sita hands him a plate of food. By contrast, the young, slightly enigmatic Inspector Savio is understated with simmering machismo and is possibly a misfit in the Mumbai police, because, as Sita remarks, he loves his job too much to last much longer in it.
The love of things is a leitmotif; it saturates the novel and keeps the tragic firmly in check. Mumbai, where the action takes place, is “home”, bundled up for Sita “like a gunnysack” in its “brown miasma”.
Swaminathan humanises her characters by shoring against their pain the delight in the “madly pleasing” cup of affogato, by offering “the hoard of nuts and dried fruit” as remedy
against the evil that must be investigated. As though the convivial must be celebrated all the more when faced with the inexcusable depths of human vice.
Memorable for its characters, dark comic undertones and liberal extension of the traditionally
male detective horizons, I Never Knew It Was You is a breath of fresh air in a genre that is generally known by the stagnant whiff of the crypt.

Karishma Attari is a Mumbai-based book critic and writer.
She is working on her coming-of-age novel, I See You.