Mistress of murder spills her secrets

TIME OUT

With her new murder mystery hitting bookstands, Kalpana Swaminathan is all set to claim the crown of crime fiction for herself. The Gardener's Song is the second in her "last resort" Lalli series, creating for the first time in Indian contemporary fiction an iconic female detective. Swaminathan, who has been writing "since I was eight" and has written for children as well as jointly with Ishrat Syed under the pseudonym Kalpish Ratna (Dr Wrasse of Crystal Rock, Nyagrodha "" The Ficus Chronicles), first claimed the limelight for her novels Ambrosia for Afters and Bougainvillea House. She followed that up with the first of her Lalli mysteries, The Page 3 Murders, set in a historic house, not unlike Agatha Christie's Ten Little Niggers (later released as Then There Were None).

Though she denies any parallels with Christie's fiction, the influence is as evident as Lalli's incisive insights into people. Swaminathan may laugh off the similarities but the new book "" far less engaging than her earlier works "" is vintage Dame Agatha, and you can't help wonder if investigations into murder do happen in the manner she spins them off. For all its obvious flaws and weaknesses, the familiar setting is almost soothing. Murder, quite clearly, interests her, and with Swaminathan ready to dish it up on the menu, readers can hope for rainy days to curl up with her whodunits as fast as she can churn them out.

Why this interest in the bloodier side of life?

Life is bloody in itself. If it weren't, there would be no story to tell. And, I write other stuff as well, but never, I hope, bloodlessly. Murder is merely a literary device.

How does a murder mystery develop? What insights into human life does it require of an author? Are you constantly looking at "murder" when you meet people?

Murder catapults characters out of their tight, polite lives into expressing their true selves. It makes them sweat. Soon, hopefully, one of them is going to say or do something real!

Writing a murder story is just another exercise in communication. You have to ask yourself: "What is he or she trying to say? What's happening behind the words?" Isn't that what one constantly does while talking to people?

People in fiction are so much more rational and believable! When I transfer a real-life situation into fiction, I have to constantly downscale the madness. The most bizarre scene in The Gardener's Song is the watered-down version of a real incident. It is not just what people do, it is the impossible things they say... Sometimes the madness doesn't register when you're in the thick of it. It takes fiction to give it perspective.

Bougainvillea House was a particularly chilling "" and disturbing "" book. Is it purely fictional, or was it based on people you have known?

Any sort of unease that my books provoke always delights me. Bougainvillea House was a disturbing book to write. It is purely fictional "" except for its origin, which you can see on the book's dust jacket. Ishrat Syed, with whom I write as Kalpish Ratna, and who's really the right side of my brain, photographed the cliff at Baga in this brooding light. As always with his pictures, this one was dripping with story. He gave me the picture saying, "There's murder in this, somewhere." And, of course, there was.

How do you write "" are you disciplined, chaotic, orderly; are you calm, angry, excitable?

The people around me are too kind to tell...

A bit of Lalli in you...?

Alas, no. But I've grown up with a lady quite like her "" my mother.

Do you worry that while you may have mastered the craft of writing, the storyline and style are beginning to suffer?

Ouch! Was that a review?

A Lalli series on television...?

If they can get her right, I'd love it.

Are you a prolific reader?

I'm a compulsive reader "" anything: road signs and hoardings, the backs of packets, grocery wrappings, medicine, ancient and futuristic. But not financial papers like this one!

Any interests "" cooking included?

I'll tell you one thing I haven't tried yet "" boredom.

What's your idea of time off? Do you get the time for it?

I've been in the time-manufacturing business since I was a kid. I always take the long way home.

Any criticism that upset you greatly (don't please say you don't read reviews), or pleased you immensely.

There are reviews that have upset and pleased me. Never to any great degree, though! Adult opinion should not be taken too seriously. The only criticism I take to heart is from readers below 16. I remember one kid wrote to me to say the picture on the cover of Dattatray's Dinosaur was the wrong dino, and so it was. Despite my objection the publishers put an Allosaurus on the cover and the story has a Camptosaurus. That was the toughest. The nicest was from a nine-year-old who described Ordinary Mr Pai as "a fairytale about real life".

Are you already writing the next book? Plotting the next murders? Will you return to novels or stick to Lalli?

I've never turned away from the novel. Bougainvillea House, accidentally, had an element of crime in it, which placed it in a genre it doesn't really belong to. The Lalli series is detective fiction, written as such. At the moment Ishrat and I are at work on a book on medieval Bombay.

There's great attention to medical history in Bougainvillea House, food and feasting in Page 3, none of that in The Gardener's Song.

The Gardener's Song is Bombay Suburban. We don't do Cordon Bleu. And except for the weekly Punjabi-Chinese, we eat at home, thank you. We get all our medical details on primetime TV, but we do have an interesting sideline in poison...

One thing that absolutely no one knows about you, but which you're willing to share with us...

I'm terrified of questions like this one!