Mystery of the missing puzzle

That Indian authors are culturally ill-equipped to write a credible thriller is debatable. That Ravi Shankar Etteth is the latest in the line-up to fall flat on his face attempting the genre is beyond any debate.

The Village of Widows is the second novel by Etteth, deputy editor of India Today, and is, ostensibly, what is popularly called a "murder mystery."

But if you are picking this one up, it is best to be under no illusions. The blurb on the jacket is misguiding. "The murderer began to laugh. He was confident that the police would come up with nothing."

It is Etteth who manages to come up with nothing. The murder is solved before you have even gone through one-third of the novel. This is no Christie or Archer. No desi-fied Rendell. There is no mystery. But more than that there isn't even a semblance of a coherent plot.

Here are fragments from the story. It begins with the murder of a Madagascan diplomat in the embassy in Delhi. The ambassador calls in his old friend Jay Samorin, a practitioner of Kalari, a martial art from Kerala, and a retired cartoonist""Samorin chucks his job, we are told, by chucking a dead pigeon (!) at his editor""to investigate the crime.

On hindsight, Etteth would have done better treating not his fictional editor but real editors at Penguin so fowl-ly. The publishing house can well claim top honours for bad editing. Investigating the murder, officially, is Deputy Commissioner of Police Anna Khan, variably addressed as "Commissioner" Khan in the first half of the book before everyone, the lady included, takes to inexplicably addressing her as DIG Khan.

If you can bear to read closely, the book is ridden with such errors. But let's not nit-pick. Khan, recently transferred from Kashmir having earned a reputation as a fierce "encounter cop" there, crosses swords with Samorin and finally solves the case with his help. Her reaction to the unbearably smug Samorin all this while alternates between irritation and irritating attraction.

The bimbette cop and the caveman are not unusual. You would have encountered characters of their kind elsewhere, not least in Mills & Boons romances, or Mard- and Coolie-type Bachchan movies.

But, then, perhaps Etteth has been simply practising scriptwriting for a Bollywood-ised The Taming of The Shrew. Indeed, the whole plot copies a formulaic potboiler, complete with big cat pets a laAjit.

In the absence of any credible story to tell, Etteth uses one-part murder, one-part romance, a liberal sprinkling of boudoir romps and bathtub soaks, nymphomaniacs and misogynists, and then takes you through all possible locales that may make up the cliched "exotic" India.

The action moves from Kashmir to Kerala""a guaranteed international seller ever since Arundhati Roy's pickle pickings""to Vrindavan with its widows and poverty, and manages in-between to catch the action at New Delhi's Page Three hangouts, Rick's, and The Imperial Hotel.

The book's title suggests the village of widows would somehow figure big in the scheme of things. In this patchy collage of borrowed stories, it doesn't. It merely serves as a somewhat vague setting, an impossible land where ostracised women stay together and take up prostitution to earn their living.

For Samorin, this is a place that is mysterious and somehow connected with his childhood wherein his father had shot his mother for having an extra-marital affair before being, ostensibly, hanged.

The second mystery in the book deals with Samorin's search for his past. Once again the build-up doesn't match the resolution. Places like the village of widows and Cardamom Hill, the jungles, lakes and islands of this landscape are merely props not intrinsic to the whatever little there is of the plot-line. You can't shake off the suspicion that the exotic names and laboured settings are there merely to titillate a primarily western audience.

A third strand concerns Dhiren Das, painter, Samorin's alter ego, darkly evil, clearly the villain of the piece. Das is a native of the village of widows, his mother one of the unfortunate women and, like him, evil unrelieved for no apparent cause. Etteth is clearly claiming the examination of the nature of evil for a theme here.

You are advised to overlook all such intellectual pretensions just as you would the suspect science he doles out in the latter half of the book. Das, killer of dogs and women, is somehow involved in murky goings-on in a charitable hospital for widows in Vrindavan. He is friends with an evil doctor who injects unsuspecting patients with doses of cancer.

Samorin""all resemblance to Bond is purely intentional""busts the bad guys and finally Das, even as the latter is completing his masterpiece, installation art, which makes use of the embalmed body of a woman he has murdered...

Etteth clearly would be at home at any spin-a-yarn contest in college. The best of "mystery" stories work because all the pieces fit seamlessly. There are too many pieces here for that, too many twists but alas, no tale.

THE VILLAGE OF WIDOWS

Ravi Shankar Etteth
Penguin
Price: Rs 295
Pages: 355