“Every question I want to ask about the world, I could do in a crime novel.” That was Scottish writer Ian Rankin in 2010, explaining in an interview to this reviewer, why the genre felt so powerful and political to him. In his books featuring the dour Edinburgh cop Inspector John Rebus, the crime novel breaks out of the mechanics of genteel “locked-room mysteries” and steps into seedy lanes and working-class neighbourhoods, alive and alert to the fault lines of class and gender and the neuroses of the powerful. In traditional plots, the reward is cerebral. A sleuth solves the puzzle set up by a murderer’s deception and, in doing so, restores the moral order. Murder offers writers like Rankin, Denise Mina and Henning Mankell an opportunity to journey into the darkness of their societies, to take a sharp, unsettling look at the violence, inequality and evil amid them – and the structures and economies that make those possible. There is little redemption, and much moral disquiet at the end of it.Nilanjana S. RoyBlack RiverContext (November 2022)A crime novel set in and around Delhi, Nilanjana S. Roy’s Black River promises a similar tour of darkness. It casts a wide net, from Teetarpur, an unremarkable village at the edge of the Delhi-Haryana border, “famous for nothing”, to the “black river”, the Yamuna, that is being swallowed by a grasping, growing metropolis. Though the novel jockeys back and forth in time, its present is “new India”, where hate and dehumanisation daily stalk Muslim minorities. Black River is ambitious, written with skill and steeped in sympathy. But it falters because it is torn between what it could have been – an impressive novel about the death and life of a river, and the temporary people who make a home around it – and what it tries too hard to become: a competent police procedural.The book opens with a sense of stifled menace. A young girl, Munia, hides in an orchard and watches a secret rendezvous in a patch of land near her house. A man meets a woman and strangles her. In the space of a few short, grim chapters, Munia is dead too – found hanging from a jamun tree. At the murder scene, Munia’s father Chand finds a weeping man, Mansoor Khan, a ‘madman’ and drifter, “one of the imperfect pots baked from the Almighty’s clay, with a crack running through it”. It is now up to sub-inspector Ombir Singh, the resident cop at Teetarpur village to bring closure to Chand – and to prevent the lynching of the prime suspect. Like the classic noir detective, Ombir Singh is weighed down by cynicism and exhaustion – “his fatigue like a heavy, familiar backpack”. His personal life is troubled; his professional prospects dim. He is grimly aware of his powerlessness in the police bureaucracy. When a senior cop parachutes into the village, Ombir sizes him up as someone “who wants to do good, who sprinkles goodness from above into the lives of people, as though it were holy ash”.As the cop in a police procedural set in an Indian village, he is also up against usual dysfunctions. There is only one filing cabinet for the most important crime files; the rest go into jute sacks. No crack team of forensic scientists at his call to swoop up evidence – footprints are erased, even a body disappears in the course of his investigation. He cannot rely on autopsy reports. Most autopsies in these parts are conducted by underqualified doctors’ assistants, as upper-caste doctors rarely want to touch bodies themselves.When a mob gathers around the police station, egged on by the most powerful man in Teetarpur, asking for Mansoor to be handed over, Ombir quietly gives in. “His years in the police have not convinced him that there is much justice in the universe, or that it is his job to commit acts of justice. But he does not like deceit. He does not like loose ends.” The reader sees the world of Teetarpur through Ombir’s cynical eyes, but he is not the emotional centre of the novel. That role belongs to Chand, the heartbroken father. In its second and finest section, there is a bend in Black River – as the novel flows backwards to recount Chand’s journey to Delhi at the cusp of liberalisation. Here, he becomes one with the “invisible tide” of migrant workers that courses through the city.“Every morning, the tide sends in a flood of people who work to build Delhi’s roads and homes, to guard the factories and offices of the wealthy…and every evening, the tide ebbs, casting them back outside the city, strewn like human debris.”He makes friends with a Bengali couple, Khaled and Rabia, as mismatched as Fokir and Moyna from Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. He, the man with a ‘riverine nature’ who cannot live in concrete houses; she, the pragmatic mother who must find a way to survive in a flint-hearted city. On the banks of the Yamuna – a river that is some decades away from turning into a black cesspool – the three friends make a home for themselves, despite police raids and demolition drives. Roy tells the story of this friendship with deep sympathy and tenderness. This is a Delhi of labourers and butchers, cooks and painters, but the novel doesn’t turn them into “research” objects. The river, as home not only to humans without a fixed address, but also to fish and birds, magur and katla, orange-beaked Indian skimmers and painted storks, offers a humane, alternate vision of what the city could have been. This is the pith of Roy’s book, the radiant Delhi novel that is hidden in the shell of the police procedural. The reader will want to stay with this narrative, but, wait, there is a crime left unsolved. Unfortunately, Black River’s plot lets it down. The big reveal, when it comes, is unconvincing. Nor does Black River shine any light into the matrix of power in Teetarpur village; for a novel set in a north Indian village, it remains oddly silent on caste. Neither is it emotionally invested in Munia or the other woman killed in the course of the narrative; or insightful about the sexual dynamics in a village. Its passion has been spent in Delhi.The writing of Black River is vivid and lyrical; sometimes unnecessarily so: a worker’s scaffold is “anointed” by a thick rope; a cow’s eyes carry “an inarticulate lament”. Characters break into unlikely, effusive eloquence (for example, Chand’s employer’s speech in the abattoir). Roy shows remarkable control in the scenes of violence, told in the present tense; a sense of terror ripples under the surface, without spilling into gore. But as a crime novel, Black River flinches from asking the tough-minded questions — poor noble characters are pitted against the vulgar rich in a world shorn of moral ambiguity. Even when they commit violence, their moral core remains intact. One hopes, however, that Roy is not done with Delhi – that in future works, she will return to the banks of the Yamuna to tell the story of Chand’s people, those who live outside high walls and barbed wires, in the “cracks outside gates”.Amrita Dutta is a journalist in Bengaluru.
