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The Village of Widows He knew that the police would go over the rooms with every device available to them. They would use forensic experts, sniffer dogs, fingerprinters, and the non-diplomatic staff would be interrogated endlessly and not allowed to sleep —- the rest would claim immunity. A murder in an embassy would be Priority A for the Delhi police, but he had taken all the necessary precautions. He had spent an hour going over the entire room, carefully recalling the places and objects he might have touched, wiping them clean....
Etteth is a Deputy Editor with India Today. He is also a political cartoonist and graphic artist, a detail that sheds some light on the characters who people his novel. In the true caricature mode, they have at least one pronounced trait on which the authorial gaze focuses, a single characteristic, whether negative or positive that defines the individual personality, be it a hunger for power or for revenge or money, or some personal fetish. But what the main characters seem to have in common is their obsession with murder. A diplomat in the Madagascan embassy of New Delhi is stabbed to death in mysterious circumstances and Jay Samorin is called upon to help find the murderer. The police officer in charge is Anna Khan, a woman who has earlier lost her husband in Kashmiri militancy. As the story progresses, there are flashbacks in time, unravelling the dark secret clouding Samorin’s childhood, a secret related to yet another crime passionel, the killing of his mother by his father, his strong bonding with his aunt, and the mysterious goings-on in a certain village inhabited by widows. In a traditional detective story two stories are narrated simultaneously: the story of a murder which has already taken place, and the story of the discovery of the murderer’s identity. In Village of Widows, however, more than two stories are unfolded. Along with the story of Zafy’s murder and the hunt for his murderer, other events are taking place, other stories being unravelled, other characters wafting in and out of the narrative: the artist, Dhiren Das, undoubtedly evil, a doppelganger of sorts, who seems to have a hold over Samorin. There is also Samorin’s aunt, a sort of fairy godmother hovering benignly over his childhood memories; Mrs Hassan, who becomes a victim to a medical crime even as her daughter, a nymphomaniac, meets a bizarre end`85. The galaxy of characters is intriguing, indeed, as are the stories linked with them. All of these eventually merge; the various threads are ultimately gathered and placed in context to the initial episode — the killing of the diplomat. But, en route, the reader is often required to pause and look around, sometimes at a leisurely game of chess or at an art exhibition, and sometimes at a socialite evening, a high-society cocktail party with all its page-three celebrities, their shallowness, their whims and eccentricities. This is the jet set crowd, the upper echelons of the society where wine flows freely and where promiscuity is the norm. Etteth seems to know this world only too well. Through all these digressions and indirections, the author strives to arrive at a direction leading to the conclusion of the novel. Is he trying to do too much at a time? Perhaps he would have done well to demarcate clearly the boundaries of his narrative vision. The way it stands, his storyline is a shifting one and the vision is diffused. Even the title could have been better chosen, for the eponymous Village of Widows occupies a comparatively small role in the story and could have actually been dispensed with. So, for that matter, could many other digressions. However, all said and done, the book does make a good read. It is a riveting tale that keeps the reader glued right up to the last page. It speaks of life and times we are familiar with. And it comes like a breath of fresh air in the manner it is narrated — in easy, elegant and informed prose. Ravi Shankar Etteth writes sensitively, exploring the realms of passion and beauty, juxtaposing diverse aspects of human existence: evoking on the one hand, the physical world of love and lust, and on the other, a world of spirituality, of kalari and meditation. This, after The Tiger by the River, is his second novel. No doubt there are many more to come. Etteth has far to go. |
THUS begins a tale of violence, sex, and political
intrigue. Ravi Shankar Etteth’s The Village of Widows has all
the ingredients of a popular crime thriller: a murder, its
investigation, clues, red herrings, a search for the criminal, some more
murders, more intrigue, digressions, circumlocutions, and a
cliff-hanging sequence of events before the mystery is finally
unravelled. The book seethes with a kind of animal energy, the energy of
a leopard or cat poised for a kill — feline images which occur
frequently through the narrative. This is a book about passions of the
blood, a subject that fascinates the writer, and which he has evidently
researched in great detail.