Review: The Fast and the Dead byAnuja Chauhan

Habba Gali, a middle-class neighbourhood in Anuja Chauhan’s new novel, The Fast and the Dead, is a sort of mini India. It is populated with people from different parts of the country, speaking different languages, following different religions and cultural practices, but living in relative neighbourly goodwill.

In this neighbourhood, live Jhoomar Rao, the veterinarian surgeon abandoned by her fiancé, and her mother Jaishri — once wealthy, now struggling. There’s Ayesha Sait and her son Haider, a newly minted Bollywood star. And there’s Peter Pais and his senile nonagenarian mother. There is a Kashmiri Pandit refugee carpet seller, a super successful Marwari jeweller and his Karva Chauth-observing family, and other local characters.

“The street is dotted plentifully with eye-wateringly colourful and hectically multi-tiered temples, one white-and-green dargah, one Roman Catholic church,” writes Chauhan for good measure.

The only thing they fight about is street dogs — while one group is keen to take care of them, others find them to be a pest. Such arguments among neighbours is only too common in urban India, but in Chauhan’s novel, a whodunit, it serves as a convenient red herring.

As anyone living in an Indian city now knows, such an interreligious and culturally diverse microcosm can exist only in fiction. Sociologists, urban studies scholars, and anthropologists have shown us over the years with rigorous research how India’s religious minorities or Dalits find it difficult to even rent houses in upper caste neighbourhoods, resulting in ghettoization.

Of course, no one picks up an Anuja Chauhan novel expecting uncompromising realism. On the contrary, Chauhan is known for creating the kind of rose-tinted romances that climb to the top of best seller lists. She has, in her novels, also combined the usual heterosexual romance with other collective obsessions of Indians, such as cricket (The Zoya Factor, 2008) and elections (Battle for Bittora, 2010) with great success.

In recent years, she has turned to murder mysteries. Her previous novel, Club You to Death (HarperCollins, 2021), set in a silver spoon-in-the-mouth club of New Delhi, explored the pitfalls of elitism. It also introduced us to ACP Bhavani Singh, a near-retirement cop investigating the crime.

Singh reappears in The Fast and the Dead, staying quite conveniently at a bed-and-breakfast at Habba Gali where a murder takes place on the night of Karva Chauth. Chauhan stuffs her novel with red herrings and an Agatha Christie-style accumulation of characters to keep the readers guessing who committed the crime. In the true spirit of murder mysteries, there is soon a second murder and multiple people with sufficient motive to kill or assist the killer.

One of the key pleasures of reading a Chauhan novel is the linguistic callisthenics she performs. As one of India’s most successful advertising personalities, she is credited with coming up with popular ad campaigns such as Yeh Dil Maange More or Darr Ke Aage Jeet Hai that have passed into conversational language all over India. She is always conscious of the fact that most Indians are naturally at least bilingual and this is reflected in the conversation of her characters. The novel under review, too, is full of local pidgin such as chill-madi or KLPD.

However, this also proves to be the narrative’s Achilles’ heel. It is most evident in the dialogue of ACP Singh and his wife Shalini, who are described by Chauhan as “a well-adjusted sixty-plus couple — Delhi-based, but with a preference for the quaint eastern UP ‘we/our’ pronouns.”

But, the quant Hindi/Urdu pronoun preference sometimes slips into Bhavani’s dialogue in English. For instance, when Bhavani tells another character: “We would nat call you a rose.” He uses “nat” instead of “not” like many north Indians do. But then, why does he use the Hindi/Urdu pronoun in this evidently English sentence?

Further, sentences such as “Like Jhoom even wants a groom!”, which are painfully frequent in the book, should have been blue-pencilled by the editors.

Also, the mystery at the core of the narrative and its resolution are both predicated, unfortunately, on too many coincidences. The murderer stumbles across a private journal written by one of his neighbours on his phone and plans out an elaborate plot. Why anyone would write a private journal on their phone remains a bit suspect.

PD James, one of the most celebrated writers of murder mysteries, once explained in an interview that while coincidences were common in real life inserting them artificially into the narrative of a crime story was not a good idea. Chauhan’s novel would have benefited from more attention to the plot.

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What the author manages to do successfully is combine the murder mystery with what is now being described as the “new India novel” — fictional narratives that reflect the socio-political conditions of the country since the election of Narendra Modi as prime minister in 2014. Some recent novels such as Devika Rege’s Quarterlife, Anjum Hasan’s History’s Angel, and Siddhartha Deb’s The Light at the End of the World can be cited as examples of this phenomenon.

In this novel, Chauhan combines serious issues such as interreligious marriage, rising Islamophobia, and the media and social media circus that erupts over every major or minor incident in the country with a whodunit. This has been done before in literary fiction such as Nilanjana S Roy’s Black River, Tanuj Solanki’s Manjhi’s Mayhem, or Rijula Das’s A Death in Sonagachi.

Chauhan’s novel is a successful crossover of this phenomenon into commercial fiction.

Uttaran Das Gupta is a New Delhi-based writer and journalist. He teaches journalism at O P Jindal Global University.