No one takes my brinjals! – Review of a thriller

One doesn’t often get to read a thriller written by an Indian author where intrigue, suspense, murder, kidnapping, and even a chase runs for a long distance with guffaws, smirks, laughter, and even satire to keep company. Now, if the title of this review intrigues you, let me just add that I’m not talking about Vir Sanghvi or Ranveer Brar being over-protective of some of their recipes and out to nab criminals in their book but about a seemingly cuckoo family of Tripathis from Kanpur who are now probably in love with the art of investigation. To put things in some perspective, this thriller has ‘two suspects claiming to be innocent. A dead husband. A failed actress who needed psychiatric help and a criminal from Kanpur who was somehow connected to this mess’.

Let me admit that I had a lot of fun reading ‘Kanpur Khoofia Pvt. Ltd’ by Richa S Mukherjee and really appreciate that despite the first hundred odd pages dedicated to making me laugh out loud at intervals, the plot flexes its thriller muscles in ways not many thrillers can. The protagonist Prachand Tripathi who didn’t quite make it to the IITs, has a knack for looking between and around everything enough times to convince the reader that he indeed thinks like a detective. His wife Vidya believes he thinks ‘quite clearly as a wanted criminal’ and we are told by him that he has sharpened his detective instincts from ‘books and bollywood’. Prachand hasn’t quite established himself as a detective because, after all, finding a stray cat or some aazadi-seeking cattle cannot make him another Hercule Poirot. The book is brimming with entertaining incidents poking non-hazardous fun at the section of middle-class caught between old habits and brand new inclinations. And so we come across a Whatsapp group called Gwaltoli Gilheris hobnobbing with the English pop singing aspirations of Bhushan Tripathi who is forever trying ‘his best to stitch together a few notes but the tune gets away from him in terror’. I can go on and on about the wonderful caricature of the Tripathi family where Dinbandhu Tripathi who wears langot is told by his wife Rachna that this piece of innerwear is an embarrassment as ‘all day long it flutters in our faces from the clothesline, like a royal flag. Everyone in Gwaltoli knows that you are possibly the last person in Kanpur to still wear a langot, so why hide it?’ I instantly fell in love with most of the characters, including Vidya who, despite her knack for being an able assistant to Prachand, also happens to be his Delhi-bred wife completely overawed by new formats of technology and she describes Alexa as ‘the little black box. It reminded her of some tantrik’s paraphernalia she had once seen’.

If the Kanpuriya family holds your attention, so does the rest of the plot where Prachand, the private investigator and owner of Kanpur Khoofiya Pvt. Ltd. is given the task of tailing Shailaja Kapoor, an actress of ‘Angrezi Mem’ fame… and from this stage the story tumbles into her murky past. The actress does have a boxful of woes that includes ‘a mad mother, a bastard of a husband and the worst luck on the planet’, and this does gives the story all the right ingredients for a thriller. Coming back to the almost Wodehouse-like narrative skills of the author, the reader gets introduced to Senior Inspector Navin Shrivastava from Ratan Lal Nagar police station whose ‘integrity and righteousness had shrunk like his meagre earnings’ and who ‘kept scratching his stomach instead of his head, almost as if his grey matter was stored in there’. This character loves ‘spicy food to fire up my brain. This case is becoming even more twisted than a jalebi with every passing day’. So yes, the case of Shailaja’s abduction and her husband’s murder are the cues for a few shady characters to step inside the plot. The point that I am making is that Richa has a vastly different perspective to thriller writing and this book isn’t the usual sort where gun battles, gruesome killings, espionage, international plots, terrorism, and blasts happen time and again until the reader desperately looks for a break. The pages of this book do carry with them victims of a dark and dangerous game but the reader has enough light-hearted story-telling that provides the right breaks.

Before someone misunderstands and assumes that the book is all about slap-stick overlays for some weak thriller elements, let me point out that the narrative is as tight as it aught to be in worthy thrillers and the witty interludes keep the boredom of unnecessary explosions and encounters deeply woven in with the narrative. This is one thriller that doesn’t merely make you sit up and read but also smile uncontrollably at times. After all the pages introduce you to crime-infested rats like Bhima Shankar who leads ‘a life of petty crimes suited his needs’ and Patty Bhai, another criminal who readily jumps in to quip: ‘I should work with the planning Commission of India. Who else is cursed with ever-changing plans more than me!’ This book has a wide horizon of personalities and the way they have gone on to affect the social milieu around us in ways that make even a thriller seem so like a social commentary of the times… and thus it has everyone ’from MLAs to journalists, to women’s organizations, to civil rights NGOs, no one could keep their noses out of this case. Fame, money, power and media were like mounds of jaggery. A tiny whiff and everyone would come crawling like ants, hungry for the limelight.’

No, I’m not going to tell you who the masterful crime coordinator was in the climax except the fact that it could be anyone from a ‘nautanki budiya’ to any of the criminals I have been referring to in this review. By the way, to my mind the book is a strange gonadal mix of the way writers like Surendra Mohan Pathak and Ved Prakash Kamboj would think with the added bonus of an ever-witty Wodehouse finding a way to poke fun at what a lot of others may not even notice. I do hope the author sends me her other books as well, whenever they are published.

.

Details of the book:
Title: Kanpur Khoofia Pvt. Ltd
Author: Richa S Mukherjee
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
ISBN: 978-93-5357-151-1

.

.

.

.

.

.

Arvind Passey
04 August 2020