Death Comes To Matheran: Revisiting A ‘Perfect Accident’ That Wasn’t |Book Review

This is another of Shabmanam for Minwalla’s creepy crawly murders for young adults that will do equally well for adults as well. Death Comes to Matheran seems to have all the ingredients for a potboiler – it starts with a July 13 Friday birthday in the gloomy drippy hill station where 11 friends have gathered together to celebrate a landmark birthday which suddenly ends in the death of two people – one a guest and one a driver. The two victims go for a night time walk down a steep hill path and apparently fall to their deaths. Someone has seen something they should not have by lightning strikes, the author imples and will be dead before midnight.

The cast is glamorous, a Miss India who is married to Rakesh Jhaveri, the main victim, a rich Parsee couple, an ex-model who designs jewellery, an intellectual Bengali author and her husband and more. The police have closed the murder as an accident but 11 years later Pramila’s children are busy wondering whether their father’s death and that of his driver was actually an accident – especially since their mother started suffering from intermittent amnesia. When the story starts, however, Pramila seems to be recovering her memory in fits and starts and her garrulous daughter Tara is busy informing some of the Mumbai friends of their parents. The result is that quite a lot of people start showing interest in what exactly Pramila Jhaveri can remember which is turn arouses Tara’s suspicions.

The family is on the verge of a trip to Mumbai where the Jhaveris need to consult with a lawyer since their father’s uncle is busy trying to deprive them of all their property. Minwalla tells her story by intercutting conversations from that fateful Matheran weekend with the lives of Tara and Sameer, especially Tara who, for some reason, seems to have been cut off by her bestie Simone. What makes the events more suspicious is the fact that everyone involved seems to live in three adjoining multi-storyed buildings in Altamount Road and they have all grown up cheek by jowl with each other in the compounds since they were six.

The closeness is almost claustrophobic along with the intercuts of conversations at different levels. There are adults giving themselves alibis because no one is too sure how two grown men can have fallen off a cliff at night and why they would have gone walking in the dark in the first place and there’s Tara’s problem with her friend Simone who is determined to cast her and her mother in a bad light.

Minwalla shows her eye for detail and her knowledge of Mumbai and Matheran in her descriptions of Muncherjee Mansion, the gloomy spooky place where the adults are booked and that of life in Mumbai’s elite compounds which have their own issues between servants and masters – the more so since the death at Matheran involves a driver as well as his master.

She specialises in dark corridors and buildings with blinking neon lights like Sinha Chambers where Tara and Sameer book an AirBnb for the family with unexpected consequences. Touches of Stephen King ensure that the reader is always looking over his or her shoulder at crucial points of the story. But then there are all the things that nineteen year olds love – thrift shop clothes, iinstagram influencers and love and jealousy. There are also the issues that arise when a small town girl becomes Miss India by accident and nets a rich Gujarati businessman from under the noses of his friends – the more so because she is dark skinned.

Minwalla keeps the pace going - though perhaps she holds the cards close to her chest for a little too long before finally reaching the climaxin a creepy location in the middle of the Mumbai monsoons which are guaranteed to hijack the city in shades of gloom that can match Matheran for atmosphere and she does her best to hide the identity of the people responsible till the very end. Perhaps everything doesn’t come together neatly but most readers will not crib too much over things left out in the smoke and mirrors