‘Moms in the Wild’: This non-murder-mystery and its characters occupy a completely unreal place

There are some books you regret spending time on. The plot, the payoff, the narration, all of it leaves you cold. That’s how I felt after reading Moms in the Wild.

Written by Nidhi Raichand, the novel stars rookie journalist Sneha Talwar, whose very first individual assignment is thwarted when her subject, upcoming “mommy influencer” Natasha Babani, is found dead in a lake. What’s more, it’s a lake that Babani was on a mission to clean up. As a premise, it sounds quite interesting on paper, exciting even – neither of which it turned out to be.

But the bigger betrayal is that this opening sets up the reader for a murder mystery, or some form of it, and I kept waiting through the length of the entire book for something consequential to happen after Babani’s corpse is discovered, but it turns out this was the highlight of the whole story. Because there is no murder, and no mystery either.

I had made up my mind to not be too harsh on the author – Indian English-language authors often get the short end of the stick when it comes to audience reactions. It can be tough to connect with readers for whom this is a second language, yet who do their primary reading in it. But to be able to disappoint me even after my reasonably low expectations is a feat.

Raichand makes all the missteps that an author could – the conflicts are underwhelming, names do not register, the tone is inconsistent, the dialogues sound hilariously unreal. And to top it all, it makes a worse case for the people of Bangalore than social media beefs do, which is saying something.

What’s the matter with Sneha?

This is a question I asked myself a lot while reading the book. Sneha, a supposedly gifted young journalist working in “the most popular digital magazine of the country”, is dumb to the point of concern. There are plot points she does not seem to grasp, while a reader could probably (and correctly) guess and resolve the issue before Sneha has even begun processing it. And this does not even look intentional.

Sneha is not really a character, she is a block of ideas in one tab of an excel sheet with some rows devoted to what “traits” she might have. The only thing differentiating her from the other characters is that maybe they have fewer rows.

Sneha also seems to be pretty bad at her job. She does not understand how publishing news reports seems to work, is immensely affected by the subjects she interviews, and does not appear to believer in rational thinking. When Plot Point A takes place, logically followed by Plot Point B, then C, Sneha’s reaction is to go from A to B to C and then to a conclusion that is unrelated to any of them. And this thought process drives the entire book. The whole idea of the plot is explained somewhere in the middle in a conversation Sneha has with someone else in the book, without any preamble to or explanation of why this conversation was even taking place, except perhaps for the author to justify the title.

Who are these people?

The characters are just not real. Nor do they feel real at any point. The lead is supposed to be in her early twenties, but speaks like a 14-year-old in high school, from back when I was in high school. There is a conspicuous disconnection between the way the author writes her characters and the way people like them would actually behave or talk like.

It almost seems as if an older person is speaking in the garb of young people (oh!). The personalities are also not consistent. Halfway through the book, Sneha says she’s prone to saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, but this fact was never used before or after this point in the book. We don’t even know if Sneha just made up this bit of information about herself on the fly. Actually, it might have lent her an edge if she did. Even the names aren’t enough to differentiate the characters, which should have been an early concern for any author. After a point, it all merges into a sea of North Indian Chic names. You could probably feed broad plot points into ChatGPT and extract more variety.

In its defence, the book is peppered with some surprisingly profound lines, but this earnestness doesn’t add up to much, because there aren’t people sketched out enough to say these lines and sound convincing. It’s a good idea not to judge the book by the cover, because then Moms in the Wild might seem like a great, fun book, because the cover is where it peaks.

Moms In The Wild, Nidhi Raichand, HarperCollins India.