Character Assassination

A murder mystery resonating with news of new India

Six Suspects, Vikas Swarup, Doubleday, Rs 495
A murder mystery resonating with news of new India

Vikas swarup’s second novel Six Suspects is anything but pure fiction. It is compellingly written, with each twist and turn in the murder plot resonating news, events and the chaos of modern-day life in India.
Swarup, an (evidently) talented and rather quiet officer in the Indian Foreign Service, is said to have conceived of this book while posted in South Africa. It is an intense mix of occurrences in India, with the author not hesitating to use names, places and associations that are near-fact. There is a TV news diva who goes by the name of Barkha Das, there is Mukhtar Ansari, there is a “corrupt home minister” who operates in Uttar Pradesh and whose son Vicky Rai bears a close resemblance to the accused in the infamous Jessica Lall case. There is even a touch of Salman Khan in Vicky Rai who has shot two black bucks and whose speeding car runs over people. There are images from the film industry, its seamy side and secretaries who run the lives of cinestars and eventually decamp with all of their employers’ wealth.

The novel is the story of what happens between two parties. It begins with young bartender Ruby Gill being shot dead by a guest wanting another drink after the bar is closed, and ends with the murderer Vicky Rai being shot dead as he holds a party to celebrate his acquittal seven years later. The murder mystery remains a thriller down to the last page. But it sometimes gets too much, for all the misery and horror of new India is in it — the new gadgets, the lust for more and the speed with which connections are made, used and thrown away. All of this rests on the stable bedrock of a corrupt state, with politicians and bureaucrats sharing the spoils and even willing to kill their kin to get ahead or save themselves. Add to this a chilling take on TV and investigative journalism.

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The image of a tribal, an Onge, from the Andamans and what he/they represent stand as a metaphor for the “other” India often breezed past whenever new India is discussed. The image is held out by one of the characters (an intriguing investigative journalist who goes by the name of Arun Advani) as “a precis of our culture… a withering indictment of all that is wrong with us”.
All in all, Six Suspects is topical, pacy and full of characters and incidents one can identify with. Some readers could almost spend time worrying about who is alluded to and which real-life incident is mirrored in which chapter. There is a star heroine, for instance, who hails from Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh and with a faint resemblance to Shabana Azmi.

While the theme ostensibly central to Six Suspects is who kills Vicky Rai, in the way the events occur in the lives of the six suspects, murders happen all the time and seem to be part of getting things done or keeping the wheels of business moving. It may not be as good as Swarup’s first novel, Q & A, but Six Suspects is powered by the same desire to take the reader through the grimy and often criminal underside of India rocked by all kinds of change, with, as a character in the book does, “Firozabad chandeliers being changed to Swarvoski chandeliers”, and that too, in a tearing hurry.