BOOK
REVIEW
TITLE:
KILLING TIME IN DELHI
AUTHOR:
RAVI SHANKAR ETTETH
PUBLISHER:WESTLAND
PUBLICATIONS, 2019
PRICE:
Rs. 599/- HARDBACK
Bugsy
Malone Meets PG Wodehouse at Amrita Shergill Marg
This short novella is a racy and enjoyable read. The
language has spark and wit emanating from every page. Steroid infused phrases such as “When I
staggered in, the show had already started and the sight of coltish, long-legged
, anorexic teenagers c0nvinced me there was a white Biafra nobody had told me
about,” describing a fashion show, abound.
Another short jab describes a corrupt, and it turns out
later in the book, a murderous senior policeman: “He swiveled on his hip,
slowly scanning the people like a cut-price Superman”.
Killing
Time
is a frothy tale without any ambition to profundity that starts off like an
English counties Wodehouse bumble despite an accidental drug overdose that
provides the first ever-shifting body, and the whiff of blackmail. It then settles down
into a facsimilie of hard- boiled 1940s style Private Detective whodunnit for
the digital age.
This particularly in the profusion of laconic Bogartish imagery, and quite an
education in the good life brand names. To wit : “Sheena’s body was large, rich and generous, firm and
soft in the right places” and, “Look Ratty’s got a new Hublot. And it’s real
rose gold, worth lakhs and lakhs”.
“It’s a Tourbillion Power Reserve, dude, Ratty said, and
spread out the fingers of his hand to indicate it provided five days of power
reserve”.
The murder and
blackmail too is kept light and conversational, more a musical Bugsy Malone, complete with sexy siren
and child actors with adult tropes, rather than that full-blown Mafioso with
dreams and a heart, Bugsy Seigel.
The plot line is deliberately improbable, almost a
lampooning of several echoing genres in the page-turner section, but the
exuberance of the writing is a delight.
The author has a sneering, off-hand affection for the
gaudy rich and likes describing them in a party setting. “I gestured
to the nearest golf cart. Delhi’s money bags hire golf carts manned by men in
white uniforms to bring guests to the house and drop them off at the gate
during parties. This practice, introduced by a classy Pakistani woman in a half
hat and birdcage veil and married to a meat exporter with shady political
connections, was immediately adopted by garment exporters, real estate developers
and such like, who form the upper crust of what passes for high society in this
town”.
Here is an excerpt on the self-same cocaine snorting beau
monde: “The pusher was a fixture at the trendiest parties, always wearing a
cheerful grin and pink jeans..He was in his twenties , with the skin of a baby and the smile of an
old man bored of hoarding secrets. And bored he was too, of the inside view he
had of Delhi’s rich-ridiculous and indiscriminately libidinous. Most of the
pretty boys thought he was gay and tried to score some of the white powder by
promising services of a low sort. Some pretty girls who got the shakes in the
morning pleaded with him to pimp them to old men in exchange for cocaine. He
never did being a hard man with a soft heart”.
Ravi Shankar
Etteth, a senior journalist and political cartoonist for his day job, is also a
prolific writer of novels, churning out the last couple, quite different from
each other in content and style, published just months apart.
Is this one in his authentic voice, influences included?
I certainly hope so, because if his aim is to entertain the reader, this book
succeeds. Etteth’s earlier books tended
to dwell on the very profundity and philosophical underpinnings this one has
scrupulously avoided. And to good effect.
There is a godman of sorts in the book, one Shamsher, who
greets the protagonist every single time by saying “By Shiva the smoky dude”.
And Shamsher seems to bring out the James Hadley Chase in Etteth: “ The fight
suddenly whooshed out of me. Whatever quan the swami had with Nik, in Mandy’s
and Shamsher’s bowling alley I seemed to be the main pin”.
The names of characters in the book, happy to be
cardboard cutouts, are a Wodehousian hoot – Coke Rao, Buffet Bhatt, Bonnie Jogi
– a former air hostess, and Cadillac Pimp –“because he drove the car and also
because he was a pussy farmer”.
There is quite lot of parody : “ Rudra Pratap was from Bastar or some such
place that is all forest and full of guys with bows and poison arrows, who will shoot any
stranger wandering in their domain. There are also leeches, snakes and leeches.
I knew this because an outdoorsy girl, an acquaintance of mine, had once told me”.
A murder is plain comedy: “Nik whipped out a short knife
from his overcoat pocket and buried it deep in Bhatt’s neck. Rao screamed and
threw the packets in the air and rushed out. Meanwhile, Bhatt collapsed slowly
with a gravitas the Titanic would have been proud of”. And those packets are,
of course, cocaine. Nik is a murdering cop, and Bhatt was an etiquette teacher
and freeloading glutton earning Buffet for a first name.
Almost the entire book is a first person narrative in the
voice of the protagonist Chaitanya Seth, who goes by Charlie because: “ It is
supposed to be trendy in Delhi to have
foreign-sounding names”.
The hyper-tone in the book, funny as it is, can start grating on your
nerves like the canned laughter after every gag in an American sitcom. Etteth
knows it can be too much of a good thing. So he wisely winds up the tale in just 197
pages of this good looking hardback.
(931
words)
For:
The Sunday Pioneer AGENDA BOOKS
February
12, 2019
Gautam
Mukherjee
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