Sunday, March 24, 2002		Books

Dextrous Sri Lankan whodunit
Bhavana Pankaj

Murder in the Pettah
by Jeanne Cambrai, Penguin Books, New Delhi. Pages 483. Rs 295

IT’S one of those books. You are drawn to it because of its rather ‘murderous’ cover, something like a Zee horror show title. Few pages on you wonder if you have nothing better to do than feel voyeuristic grief for a young woman’s murder. You continue reading it anyway though not because of its sparkling style or gripping narrative. The style, you think, is lazy–as lazy as a deliciously do-nothing spring afternoon and the narrative about as gripping as a game of tip-cat (gulli-danda).

Well…Pettah is an old, seedy area of Colombo. Its old temples, churches and mosques entice the exotica-hungry tourists in the day. It draws drug-dealers, gem peddlers, drunks, prostitutes and murderers at night. One such night, an unlikely young English girl is found murdered here.

A Sri Lankan-Dutch Burgher computer nerd from America—Clive vander Marten or CV and his gorgeous supermodel cousin Maggie are visiting their old, eccentric aunt—Maud—around the same time. The girl, Dorothy Bell, now so alive, is now suddenly so dead with a long knife driven right through her heart. The memorial service is entertaining, the conversation petty. There is arrack and soda, phoney tears, Dorothy’s hippie boyfriend Michael, her hip dad Reginald Bell tolerating the mourners, shaking their hands and his own head… the beginning is all too familiar, with a cadence of a typical American whodunit. Except this one is being played out in Colombo.

But somewhere, sometime soon the story slaps you out of your slumber. And before you know it, you are in it—watching Dorothy’s designer dad call upon the holidaying CV to play Holmes. In a matter of a few hours and several dollars, CV is ostensibly on the murder trail. The "work junkie" that he is, CV has already been snooping around for details on Reggie Bell–a rich gem trader with a "sex life of a rabbit".

Loads of American humour, sometimes bawdy, but you are on a thrilling road ahead as CV begins to ask some brilliant questions. Maggie as "fellow inhaler" and Maud as a bridge partner of a friend of Michael’s mother play Dr Watson to the hilt.

Dorothy, the reconstructed heroine of Cambrai, is a tantalising woman with many personas. A rich society woman, a grubby ragamuffin, a millionaire’s tart who fixes her Arab boyfriend’s gambling fortunes, a girl raped by the familiar and the strange, a businesswoman who can kill or even be killed for a few precious stones... it is hard to tell who the real Dorothy is.

Even harder is to tell who killed her. Her grieving bisexual boyfriend Michael who stands to inherit her large fortune; her Arab lover Mahmoud who also raped her once; Bundy, the owner of Casino Vegas who disappears mysteriously; her paedophile father and partner in the gem trade... CV has a confounding list of suspects. But like he says "no one has a motive. Everyone has an alibi. I’ll just shake a few trees." While he is on his tree-shaking mission, you see him fall hopelessly in love with Emma—Dorothy’s buddy and also a suspect. But soon it is murder time again. This time, in true Lankan style, another person is bumped off with a bomb!

Cambrai peels every layer of her mystery with élan, without a fuss. But each revelation is a shocker. One time Emma spots Mahmoud at a haze party and panics. She later tells CV the Arab had raped Dorothy. Another time, CV visits Michael’s mother who first makes love to him and then tells him Michael is actually Dorothy’s half-brother. Wow! The author etches her characters with dexterity. The unflappable, lovable Maud; the beautiful, brainy and feminist Maggie; the pot-bellied, bald-headed, passionate but very cerebral CV, the pervert Reggie, the kleptomaniac Bundy, Teddy, Soongs, Della, Ali, Perera, Frances... the sheer number of players baffle you. But all of them are irrevocably joined by Dorothy’s murder and CV leads one of them to the noose.

Cambrai’s mystery doesn’t exactly take you by the jugular, but she is brilliant with her glimpses of a nation ravaged by civil strife, crime, corruption and murder. She is witty, wicked and offers delectable slices of the American and English life. And that lifts what could have been a morbid, ordinary crime thriller.