Beat Files

A twenty-something crime reporter remaps Mumbai

A twenty-something crime reporter remaps Mumbai
Abir Ganguly works on the crime beat for a Mumbai tabloid. He files man-bites-dog stories day after day and spends the rest of the time dreaming up wisecracks. He likes the weather in Mumbai inside the air-conditioned malls,that is. He talks to a lizard that inhabits a corner of the wall in his Andheri one-BHK. He gets attacked and pinned down by female mannequins in his imagination. Oh,and he has a vivid imagination.

No,Abir Ganguly isnt as clever as he thinks,he is not even as cynical as he thinks,but you can cut him some slack: he is only 23. So when a police inspector calls him on his cellphone one evening and asks him to come along for a little jaunt down to Mahalaxmi,he goes. When the little jaunt turns into a gunfight that kills a man who,by the way,happened to be a Muslim Abir returns to the office and files a report: Cops Kill Gangster in Gunfight.

A week later,when Abir is asked to profile the dead man,the gangster of the report,he discovers that there is much more to the story. There is,in fact,a whole life. How he sets about to recreate that life might have been the subject of this novel,but it is not. My Friend Sancho is,instead,about the friendship that develops between Abir and Muneeza,the daughter of the dead man.

Mumbai-based blogger Amit Varmas debut novel makes no claims to be deep literary fiction. It is a racy and light-hearted read,aimed at the market that has until now been dominated by the Chetan Bhagat style. Serious issues such as tabloid journalism,communal divisions,encounter killings,corruption are brought out briskly for viewing and then quickly put back into storage.

But apart from being better producedI especially like the lizard on the coverVarmas novel,which was longlisted for the Man Booker Asian Literary Prize,is much more intelligently written. The prose is entertaining. Good keema-kaleji is better than sex. I can have it by myself,and its never awkward. It can also be self-aware. I realised later that my wisecracking was a nervous tic. Much like the Regular-Guys-Like-Us audience at which the book is aimed,its narrator eats tuna sandwiches at Subway counters,watches Priyadarshan movies,drinks peach-flavoured iced tea,and is skilful with words like chica,slurpacious and postmodern. And anyone living in Mumbai can relate to the lesson that Abir draws about Iqbals death: Things like that happen in Bombay every day. Big injustices,little omissions,on the streets and in our lives. Mostly you have to let them pass,and concentrate on the stuff you can control,on the things that matter.

I read the novel in one sitting,into the night,and there were several moments that made me smile. Abir is intelligent enough and,at the same time,ignorant enough for us to care about what happens to him. The only weakness of the novel is that we dont get to know enough about Muneeza. We see her through Abirs eyes,and for a reporter even a reporter in love he doesnt really notice that much.