Crime files | Review of Rudraneil Sengupta’s The Beast Within

Of late, publishers worldwide have been guilty of a singular crime: if there’s a body in the book, be it the victim of a gruesome murder, or a series of quiet, mysterious deaths (I’m looking at you, Butter), the marketing material will zoom into the detail and pitch it as a ‘crime’ novel.

It sells a few books, certainly, but more often than not, it leaves the genre aficionados wondering what just happened. There’s space, of course, for re-evaluating the category and injecting fresh ideas and perspectives but the trend has ended up shortchanging the crime-fiction fan.

Not The Beast Within by Rudraneil Sengupta (disclaimer: the author is a former colleague of this reviewer). This is the crime fiction long sought by English-reading Indians who grew up on Poirot and Superintendent Battle, moved on to Montalbano and Banks and Zen and the Dublin Murder Squad, and wondered why, for all the gory crimes that make headlines in our newspapers, there was no local equivalent of policemen driven as much by their dark past as their passion for justice.

Such good crime fiction as has emerged in the past few years has largely steered clear of officialdom (Samyukta Bhowmick’s A Fatal Distraction comes to mind). Salil Desai’s five-book-old Inspector Saralkar series, on the other extreme, edges too close to pulp to be taken seriously as crime fiction.

One of the major reasons why the effective police procedural is a rare breed in the country’s bookscape lies in the systemic opacity of the law and order machinery. Mostly viewed as an organ of torment, the police are also regarded as hopelessly corrupt, ill-equipped and understaffed. To then go beyond these indisputable truths and delve into the many layers that comprise policing in this country is a moment that deserves applause. Sengupta’s weary and damaged Inspector Prashant Kumar is a credible protagonist who works the many planes of NCR’s realities without either diminishing inequities or ignoring power structures.

Author Rudraneil Sengupta

Intriguing characters

Interestingly, The Beast Within works less as an archetypal whodunnit than as a how-the-whodidit-was-nailed. When Jyoti Dhurwa, a 15-year-old tribal house help, falls to her death in posh Panchsheel, a section of the police force is ready to close the case as an accident after quick inquiries. But Kumar, lately posted to Hauz Khas after the successful apprehension of a cop-killer in the Bawana badlands, is having none of it. The way Sengupta captures Kumar’s delicate relational networks within the force — convincing his superiors to give him the case, building his team, earning the newbies’ trust — is worthy of savouring. It also allows Sengupta to create a host of intriguing support characters, led by the wrestler-turned-cop Meera, and chief aide Zeeshan.

As important as Sengupta’s understanding of the workings of the police system (he spent two years embedded with the Delhi police for a series of investigative reports for his newspaper) is his familiarity with the multiple terrains of the national capital region, from swish drawing rooms to wretched slums. The sense of place, so important in any crime fiction, permeates the novel like the fogs that descend on Delhi every winter: bleak, clammy, almost claustrophobic. It weighs down the investigating team in peak summer, becoming ever more dense and forbidding till Kumar — adopting unorthodox ways that would be alien to a Brunetti or a Banks, but would be entirely relatable for an Indian — fights it off to reveal a series of crimes hinged to Jyoti’s death.

Tightly plotted, with spare yet realistic portrayals of Delhi’s peoples and places, peppered with earthy humour, unforgettable characters, and a perceptible love for the city’s indomitable hustle, The Beast Within is the kind of novel that sets up a hit series. Maybe it’ll dissuade the marketers from using the ‘crime’ label too freely as well.

The reviewer is a Bengaluru-based writer and editor.

The Beast Within

Rudraneil Sengupta

Westland

₹599