‘Black River’ by Nilanjana S Roy is a rural noir about grief, friendship and justice

Bindu Menon

Teetarpur is that average anonymous village “not known to have inspired a line in a film song or even a mithai”. And so when a murder occurs, a horrific one at that, the village finds itself in an uneasy spotlight as TV crews descend from nearby Delhi. Nilanjana S Roy’s ‘Black River’ is as much a police procedural as it is a springboard for some serious reflection on the state of the nation. This rural noir, set in the craggy edge of the Delhi-Haryana border, unravels not just the mystery behind the crime but also peels away at layers and layers of insecurities, prejudices and fears that have come to define India, both in its cities and villages.

Death by hanging from a tree is a powerful, unsettling visual associated with rural crime, where caste divisions, exploitations, oppression of women and quick, rough justice follow a neat set pattern. But, for the local police, the hanging of eight-year-old Munia is an aberration in that sense. As the narrative progresses, the crime underscores the rot within a sleepy village like Teetarpur, where the events leading to Munia’s murder and the aftermath show the fraying of moral codes and the fragmentation of its social fabric.

Munia’s father Chand is that lonely stoic hero, broken deep within by his personal loss yet unrelenting in his pursuit of justice. Bhim Sain and Ombir Singh are the cops investigating the murder, their noses to the ground but weary to the bone, burdened by their own personal baggage and a battered-down station house to call home. There’s their superior, the “Delhi boy” SSP Pilania, somewhat displeased at being wrenched away from VIP cases in Delhi and thrust with one out in the boondocks. The prying media romping about Chand’s small farm scouring for soundbites and the souvenirs of a dead child, the dancing girls and drug pushers enticing factory workers, and the rich and mighty ganging up to parcel out real estate from forest land, hoping to transform a shabby village into the next Gurgaon — these and many others make up the rest of the cast of Teetarpur.

The novel leaps back and forth, in time and space, like the tides of the Yamuna. Roy’s narrative is at its lyrical best when it walks you along this “black river”, which forms a watery border around Delhi, a “river that exerts a half-felt pull on the capital’s subconscious, infecting its citizens with watery dreams and silted dreams from time to time”. Roy takes you to the heart of Delhi and its invisible humanity, the labouring migrants who wade into the city everyday foraging for work and a roof over their heads — like Chand, his soul brother Khalid and Khalid’s wife, the strong and resourceful Rabia. The trio make the riverbank their home, like hundreds of other illegal squatters. As they live by, fishing for magur and whiskered catfish and keeping company with the orange-beaked Indian skimmers and painted storks amid the keekar forest, Chand blithely observes that “it is funny how the illegal squatters have the best view of the river”.

Chand will soon forge a lifelong bond with Rabia and his mentor, the master butcher Badshah Miyan. It’s a friendship that is impervious to the rise of religious fundamentalism. Rabia and Badshah Miyan soon witness the ground slipping from beneath their feet. Delhi is brutal, “a city where even the crows have a calculating glint in their eyes and will snatch a piece of bread from out of their fellows’ beaks”, but they are not prepared for its rabid descent. When sword-wielding boys from the shakha spread terror in the slums and barbed wire fences separate the Hindu and Muslim sides, Rabia pensively holds on to the belief that she is no outcast in her own country. But Badshah Miyan knows better. “We are used to a hundred little fires breaking out here and there, smouldering… But this is different,” he warns her.

It’s a different fire that smoulders within Chand too. When he puts it out in a final act of justice and redemption, he is at peace with himself, his courage and grace intact, and able to let go of all that he has carried for long. Franz Kafka once said, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” Roy’s ‘Black River’ makes the cut.