Feature: The Anita Nair Interview
` In many ways Borei Gowda echoes my thoughts and feelings`
The one word to describe all three of Anita Nair`s Borei Gowda novels would be the Merriam-Webster word for this year: authentic. In Hot Stage, the cop goes about first uncovering homicides then solving whodunnit in the contemplative yet brisk and very authentic manner readers are now familiar with.
Anita Nair talks about Gowda and his new case with Sheila Kumar.
Cut Like Wound. Chain of Custody. Hot Stage. These are terms policemen would be familiar with, not so much the lay public. Would you like to explain the meaning of the title of your third Borei Gowda novel and just why you settled on this term?
Hot Stage refers to a key step in a method used in evaluating glass particles found on a victim or at a crime scene, and is a valuable tool in gathering trace forensic evidence. Basically, what it does is use the refractive index of the glass to determine its source. I loved the possibilities of what it suggested. And in this third Gowda novel, Hot Stage has multiple meanings: the evidence that leads to the scene of crime, of the hot stage in the course of an investigation as in ‘the breakthrough, ’ and the figurative hot stage in the book where the crime happens.
Is fearless, intelligent, middle class Borei Gowda growing with each story or did he fall into your head with his prominent characteristics fully formed, at the time of the first novel?
Borei Gowda as the fearless, intelligent, middle class Bangalore man is how he happened in my head. But how fearless and intelligent he could be is something I discovered for myself during the writing of Cut Like Wound, the first novel in the series. We see Borei Gowda pull himself together and shrug off ennui in both his personal and professional life. In Chain of Custody, the second novel, he has evolved into a man with a renewed purpose, a hardheaded investigator who cannot let things be. This is the Gowda we meet in the first pages of Hot Stage.
All three books are intensely Bangalore-centric, giving people a glimpse of just what ails the city: its dying lakes, its over-construction, its politician-industrialist nexus, the indifference of The Gated Ones, the mountains of stinking garbage, and more. Nothing is what it seems in this city, Gowda muses at one point. Does he mirror the author`s gaze?
In many ways Gowda echoes my thoughts and feelings, and it is especially true about what is destroying Bangalore. The Gowda series is set in a fictitious area based on the neighbourhood I have lived in for more than two decades now. I have seen it change and not always for the better. But Gowda isn’t just my mouth-piece. His viewpoint is drawn also from his upbringing and his nature, which isn’t the straight and narrow.
Gowda drops a stat, saying 60% of crimes in new Bangalore are real estate linked. Do you see the situation getting worse before it gets better?
It made me look at the nature of crime in the city and I realized that statistics indicate just one part of the malaise. As land values escalate, the nature of crime acquires a more horrifying edge. In all honesty, I really don’t know what this city is going to turn into as I see even its texture changing.
OB, the man who keeps a blade in his mouth at all times, is an interesting character, as is Ditchie Babu. How did you come up with them?
While researching the earlier books, I would notice very ordinary looking men being brought into the police stations. They, I would be told, have a blade of some sort on them. OB or Oblesh is drawn from them. Just an average man on the street you would walk past till such time he spits a blade at you.
Ditchie Babu is a creature of my imagination. I had always wanted to create a comic villainous character. A sort of tribute to Jack Nicholson’s Joker and closer home, to S.A. Ashokan from Tamizh cinema.
There is a running theme in this book , albeit subtle, of ageing people, their feelings of helplessness and fury, the way they are looked at by the younger lot with a mixture of exasperation and protectiveness. Is this a concern you are voicing as an author or something more personal?
I have very elderly parents. My mother-in-law will be 100 in January. I have elderly relatives and friends. As a person, it distresses me no end to see them fade into shadows of their former selves. As a writer, it makes me want to know how they feel about what growing old has done to them. So with Hot Stage, it was more than just a plot point and became a study on the helpless fury of ageing.
What kind of research did this book call for?
Lurking around dodgy bars. Consulting with MMA fighters. Exploring my neighbourhood with a fine toothcomb to build on the plot and the setting. And initiating conversations with just about anyone willing to talk to me on the various points of interest in Hot Stage, be it dentures, passports, boiled eggs or illegal fights.
The topics that find mention in the book may be hot topics: religion, ageing, bigotry, concretization of a city, terrible roads, large crimes lurking in plain sight. But they are treated in a dispassionate manner. Is that distance a device you have deliberately adopted for your police procedurals?
Yes, this distance is drawn from how Gowda views what he does. For Gowda, crime is always violent; it destroys the order of things be it murder or a fiscal crime. The criminal is a creature ruled by a dangerous passion. Hence Gowda believes that the investigator must be dispassionate and can’t allow his prejudices to taint his process.
This Q and A ran in the Literary Review of The Hindu on 8 December 2023.
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Sheila Kumar • December 8, 2023