If full-time diplomat and part-time writer Vikas Swarup (of Q&A, er, fame) had waited a bit, the skeins of the reprehensible Aarushi murder case would likely have found their way into his new, uh, thriller, Six Suspects. The author’s attraction to high-visibility crimes is apparent, but instead of spreading its grisly net across his cast of characters, Swarup loads them all on to his villain, Vicky Rai.
Rai, in Swarup’s hands a murder victim too, is many real-life people rolled into one: he poaches blackbucks (Salman Khan), murders (like Manu Sharma) bar attendant Ruby Gill (Jessica Lall) at pointblank range at the popular Mango (Tamarind Court) restaurant, and mows down six people on a foggy night when speeding in an inebriated state in his brand new BMW (Sanjeev Nanda). Then, there is the strange love story of mobile thief Munna who falls in love with (no surprise) Uttar Pradesh home minister Jagannath Rai’s daughter (slim shady references here to the “honour” killing of Nitish Katara), even as he is referred to as Bhaiyyaji (as opposed to Behenji — that’s Mayawati — geddit?), and he even spins a story around the silly attempt to raise Mahatma Gandhi’s spirit…the trivia of city gossip turned into fiction that is stranger than real life.
This page three vituperation is less than savoury, the author no more than a vulture feeding on the carcasses of city crimes, so he disappoints both the voyeuristic reader looking for an insider’s point of view into high-society crimes, as well as the more sincere reader who finds such references distasteful. Still, Swarup does serve up a concoction which, like bhel, is an intriguing mix of those who make up our city life. At times too, he is assured as a writer, though these are infrequently occasional. In attempting to churn out a quickie instead of a book, he unfortunately shortchanges himself with caricatures instead of characters. The language is just as erratic, supremely confident in places, tacky in others — an inconsistency that could have been easily avoided with a little more diligence and editing. That said, Swarup’s interlude into Onge tribal territory in the Andaman & Nicobar islands is almost like an epiphany (though hasty writing is apparent here too), written not as an outsider but as someone looking outwards from within. There is a separate book here that Swarup might want to visit, so long as he does not trivialise it the way he does his other protagonists.
When Vicky Rai (yes, the same home minister’s son) is found dead at his own party, six suspects are rounded up for carrying firearms on them — an arsenal, as it turns out, of a British Webley & Scott, an Austrian Glock, a German Walther PPK, an Italian Beretta, a Chinese Black Star pistol and a locally improvised katta. Naturally, the police have no clue about the weapon that killed Rai.
The six suspects? A retired Scotch-guzzling bureaucrat with a mistress who develops a schizophrenic alter-identity as Gandhi; an actress who in an unexplained act reaches out to her lookalike from the boondocks; the Onge youth who must bring back from the mainland a stolen tribal relic; the mobile thief who finds himself out of his league when he accidentally recovers someone else’s stolen loot of cash; home minister Jagannath Rai (yes, the victim’s father — but then, he’s a politician, right?); and the naïve American who comes to India for a wedding with a penpal, not realising he’s been had…
Swarup next sets the drama for his personae, providing them with motives, each one of them; building then on the evidence, and finally the breaking news (Barkha Dutt as Barkha Das) denouements. The possibilities of who the murderer is, the twist in the tale, are actually interesting, indicating that Swarup has the ability to build a plot and wring it for all the suspense it is worth. It is this that rivets you to the second half of the book, while the first half is merely a teaser of real-life identities who have been patched up to make Swarup’s unidimensional characters.
Would I recommend the book? Let’s just say, it’s ideal for a train journey, particularly since you won’t be guilty chucking it out of the window short of your destination.
SIX SUSPECTS
Vikas Swarup
Doubleday
£10.99; 472 pages