She is a bit of a decoy, Ambai’s Sudha Gupta. First introduced to the reader in A Meeting on the Andheri Overbridge (2016), Sudha, at first glance, is your average middle-class working woman, efficiently performing multiple roles as she runs her household and her detective agency in the city of Mumbai. Playing within the normatives of detective fiction, she has a mentor, the expert detective Vidyasagar Rawte, and, in a departure from the trope, she often works with the law enforcement officer, Inspector Govind Shelke. Her husband, Naren, is a scientist, and her daughter, Aruna, is pursuing her MA degree. This leitmotif of wholesomeness, stability and domestic felicity runs through all four stories in this selection and is nothing but Ambai setting the reader up. The title participates in this sleight of hand. Sudha Gupta’s Adventures in Detection, it announces, situating reader expectation plumb in the middle of a Christie-like easily plottable world, promising resolution and a return to order. The text does anything but. Detection remains secondary to the scope of the text. Murders need solving and wrongs need to be set right, but the real canvas of Sudha Gupta’s work is the murky depth of human behaviour. The Death of a Sarus Crane is not formulaic crime fiction. It is, instead, a study of the patterns and possibilities of crime in urban India.
Playing with conventions
The short story has been Ambai’s chosen fictional form for close to five decades. While her oeuvre would decidedly be termed “literary fiction”, the Sudha Gupta stories form a much-needed bridge, narrowing the perceived gap between literary and genre fiction. About time, too. For entirely too long, despite the ornery shouting in the ears by cultural studies, literary fiction has seen itself as the cultured older sibling to the wild abandon of genre fiction. Reduced to the repetitiveness of formula, genre fiction, whether romance, crime, fantasy, science fiction, Young Adult, or horror, has routinely been dismissed by the high priests of literature as frivolous or non-serious, and “only” entertaining.
Cynthia Hamilton, studying hard-boiled detective fiction in America, describes formula as “merely a set of interrelated conventional elements found in a large number of individual works. Such conventions spring from an agreement between writers and readers which allows the artist to simplify his material and to control, through concentration, the reader’s connotative associations”.
Ambai’s investigative stories play with these conventions. They have the stock characters – the mentor, the sidekick, the recurring cast. They have the closed-room crimes and the family intrigues and skeletons in the closet; but, they also often debunk the norms of crime fiction. As Tarun K Saint has pointed out in his introduction to Indian Detective Fiction, Ambai’s refusal to provide closure, in contravention of the set rules of the genre, is one of the ways in which she re-invents the form, freeing the investigative story from the stultification of boxes to be checked, allowing it to engage with the “critical questioning of hierarchical structures whether of race, class, caste, or gender.”
Ambai seems to prefer personal connection over the insistent objectivity usually accorded to the detective. All four stories situate Sudha in some sort of relationship with the victim/perpetrator. “A Room Measuring 250 Square Feet” investigates the unusual death of 18-year-old Anil Pawar, an orphan who had helped Sudha with an earlier case. In “Sepal”, Mallika, the daughter of Sudha’s cook, Chellammal, is in need of intervention and rescue. “Bun Maska and Irani Chai” has Sudha attempting to save an older couple she has known for many years from being dispossessed of their home. In the titular story, “The Death of a Sarus Crane”, the accused are friends of her husband. With the collapse of the impersonalising distance between the detective and the crime, Ambai pushes further the dimensions of crime fiction, forcing the reader to acknowledge that crime and the loss of order are no longer fictional, but have spilt over into their personal spaces.
A similarly disjunctive strategy is the scaffolding of the narrative with domesticity. The book opens with a two-page description of the personal history of Sudha’s assistant, Stella, setting the tone for constant segues between the personal and the professional. The male detective, across cultural-linguistic traditions, has been an outlier, a little bit eccentric, mostly detached. Sudha, unusually, is centred in the home space. She drinks her cinnamon tea, plans meals, and is ably assisted by the other women around her. The stories indicate a nuanced understanding of the domestic space – its limitations as well as its refuge. To any reader familiar with Ambai’s writing, the community of women looking out for other women is already a familiar idea, one that is beginning to assert itself more and more in fiction written by women.
The city is central to these stories. Sudha plots Mumbai through its landmarks – the iconic Prithvi theatre, Irani cafes, graffiti on Chapel Road, as also its generosity, its homes with their old bones, its aggressive urbanity, the squalor of its over-populated pockets, and the sordid secrets and crimes that taint its intimate spaces. Sudha’s everyday cases mostly involve couples investigating each other. The trust deficit this implies is a telling commentary on relationships in a troubled world.
Stories of feminist intent
Each of the four cases she investigates turns the lens further inward till the city itself turns into a transgressive space. “A Room” and “Sepal” both deal with gender identity, from significantly different perspectives. In “A Room”, a parent is forced to abandon their family because of social prejudice against the transgender community, while in “Sepal” a young woman finds herself unable to cope with the guilt of rejecting an offer of love. With a delicate touch, Ambai details the complexities of queer desire, and condemns the fear and hostility with which society treats those it deems unacceptable.
The rawest of the narratives is the eponymous story, “The Death of a Sarus Crane”, which deals with a horrific case of child sexual abuse and reminds us of the vulnerability of children marginalised by both gender and class. “Bun, Maska and Irani Chai” examines another kind of vulnerability, that of ageing parents forced to give up control of their lives. The city, pretending at domestic normalcy, drops the mask, exposing its seedy underbelly, just as soon as you begin to look closer.
There is a simplicity in the narrativising of this second inning of Sudha Gupta’s “adventures in detection” which is typically Ambai. There are no bells and whistles, no attempts at clever plotting, no shocking twists for that frisson of excitement that often defines crime fiction. These stories are informed by a clear feminist intent. They take stock of injustice and oppression, and when they cannot offer a solution, they perform the difficult task of truth-telling. Sudha takes the reader through flawed families – neglected children, missing parents, separation caused by poverty, through experiences of loss and grief, and the joy of found families.
The narrative engages with the dynamics of class, commenting explicitly on the immunity that the privileged enjoy from justice. “A death of a poor child in Mumbai will affect or upset nobody,” Vidyasagar Rawte tells Sudha. “Here, no punishment has been given even to the drunken drivers who have run over and killed pavement dwellers. They will just buy off such poor families. Only a case where the rich are involved in a juicy scandal is fodder for newspapers.” The reader is only too familiar with the truth of this gap between law and justice. Sudha, navigating this complex space, is not just a detective. She is also an observer of the socio-political world around her and pulls the reader into a similar role. In multiple ways, then, The Death of a Sarus Crane re-imagines detective fiction. If you go to it looking for a whodunit, you will be sorely disappointed. If, instead, you would like a few adventures in the study of human frailty, this might be a good place to start.
The Death of a Sarus Crane: Sudha Gupta’s Adventures in Detection, Ambai, translated from the Tamil by Gita Subramanian, Speaking Tiger Books.
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