Book review: Black River by Nilanjana Roy
Crime and punishment
Is this book a police procedural? Classic urban/rural noir fiction? A reflective look at all the elliptical loops around a crime? Actually, Nilanjana Roy`s Black River is all that.
With this work, Roy brings to a crime fiction debut all the skill she employed in her delightful cat books The Wildings and The Hundred Names of Darkness. A perceptive reader will quickly find a connecting link: the cats of those books, the villagers of Teetarpur and those who live in makeshift huts along the Yamuna in this book, are all of them mostly outsiders, and this is their tale. The black river of the title is the beleaguered Yamuna, and the story tells of what takes place near it and some distance from it, too.
A little girl has been murdered in a village which is a two-hour drive from the capital, and while the tale proceeds in pretty much the manner you want crime thrillers to proceed, it`s Roy`s evocative sketches of the characters, including the red herrings, that really tugs at the reader`s heart. While policemen Ombir Singh and Bhim Sain attend to the case with the occasional pang because they knew the victim Munia as well as her father Chand, they are your archetypal cops who want to dispose of the case as quickly and conveniently as possible. A mentally challenged man was seen at the site of the crime, and given that he is Muslim, the village`s sectarian emotions are immediately set on the boil.
Chand won`t be fobbed off easily and wants justice for the loss of his beloved daughter. Ombir Singh might be a hardened policeman, one who doesn’t necessarily believe in the concept of justice, but loose ends that poke him in the eye trouble him and he wants to investigate further.
Socio-political commentary
Roy first sets the crispest mise-en-scene I`ve read in a while, then using the Muslim angle to widen the loop of her story, she gives us Chand`s backstory, as well as that of his closest friends Badshah Miyan and Rabia. After which, she takes us to a locality in the capital city, and shows us how people there are slowly but firmly turning against Muslims and harassing them no end, despite the latter community `making themselves smaller and smaller.` As Rabia muses, to not look obviously Muslim is a convenience, sometimes a necessity, that also feels like a betrayal. There is a passage detailing what Muslim women in the locality have to go through while walking to their homes, fact dovetailed into fiction, upon reading which the reader`s heart hammers.
This isn’t a murder mystery actually, because the reader quickly arrives at the right guess as to the killer`s identity. What it is basically, is a look into the hearts and minds of people who live lavishly and well, people who eke out a hard living, people who kill without a second thought and people who are killed. People who spread evil like mould wherever they land. It is also a look at how the impoverished live day to day in temporary dwellings that can be and often are demolished by other people on demolition and beautification drives. It is a look at the hopes and tentative dreams of those who live on the fringe. It is the continuing story of land grabbing, forest land in this case. It also is a look at just what we have done to the Yamuna: `For the most part, Delhi turns its back on her, staining her swollen body with its ashes and garbage and sewage, choking her with the city`s waste, its discards, its corpses and diseases.`
The author has stated in print that this book has no heroes; that is as may be but the reader`s sympathy for the gruff Chand who so loved his little girl, unwittingly or otherwise, makes a hero of him.
Black River by Nilanjana Roy. Context/Westland Books. Rs 799. 350 pages
This appeared in the Sunday Express magazine of 15 January 2023.
Related Links:
Book review: The Wildings by Nilanjana Roy
Book review: The Hundred Names of Darkness by Nilanjana Roy
Feature: The Nilanjana Roy Interview
Sheila Kumar • January 15, 2023