Apu’s World

Reading Tarquin Hall’s mystery novel, ‘The Case of the Missing Servant’, one cannot at times escape the feeling that it tries very hard to explain India in the manner of a television anchor breathlessly exclaiming on the gigantic contradiction that is India. What else is one to make of a paragraph that explains the great Indian arranged marriage?

And yet the arranged marriage remained sacrosanct. Even among the wealthiest Delhi families, few parents gave their blessing to a ‘love marriage’, even when the couples belonged to the same religion and caste. It was still considered utterly disrespectful for a child to find his or her own mate. After all, only a parent had the wisdom and foresight necessary for such a vital and delicate task.

Throughout the novel, the feeling persists that this is a murder mystery set in India, about Indians, yet written by an outsider, for outsiders. Despite this feeling, ‘The Case of the Missing Servant’ is an enjoyable read and its characters, if teetering on the edge of becoming stereotypes, never quite succumb to it. We meet here, Vish Puri, India’s ‘Most Private Investigator’, a Punjabi sleuth in Delhi, a man of integrity and ingenuity, who can access the corrupt and complex nightmare that Delhi is, and yet stay somewhat detached from it. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, Vish Puri relies not on a single Watson, but on an entire streetsmart team whom he has affectionately christened with names like Tubelight, Flush and Facecream.

Unlike the highly individualistic and brooding detective of most Western fiction, Tarquin Hall creates here a fundamentally Indian detective who is a ‘family man’, and this means a Mummy-ji who gets involved in the investigations and does some cool sleuthing of her own. There is also the statesman Chanakya, whom Puri reveres and considers the original Guru of detection, from whom the upstart Holmes copied his techniques.

The Indian class system and treatment of servants, rural poverty and the exodus to urban India, the stark contrast between slums and gleaming urban palaces, the tortoise-like pace of the Indian judicial system - all these become part of the case of the missing servant, Mary, that Puri is called in to investigate and must solve if he is prevent an innocent man from being convicted of murder. All this while he continues to handle his ‘routine’ cases, the screening of grooms before arranged marriages are conducted. The novel flits between Delhi and Jaipur with an occasional detour into the rural hinterland, as Puri pits himself against an ambitious police officer who’s made up his mind minus evidence, and sees no problem with that.

Will he succeed? Is the client, Ajay Kasliwal really innocent? What is the Kasliwal family hiding? With no fancy psychological explanation and little use of forensics, Puri relies on good old-fashioned detection and a solid amount of leg-work to arrive at what is a very satisfying conclusion.

Publishers: Random House Group

Price: Rs. 429

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