Book Review: Black River

Black River is certainly about a murder that needs to be solved.  Nilanjana S Roy opens the book with what seems to be the harmless whims of a playful little girl who runs away to explore the open fields when no one is looking. The fact that there is danger involved doesn’t occur to Munia since she is a stone’s throw from home. No one is a stranger to her, including a man she sees ‘playing’ with a woman.

The result after several grim chapters is heartbreak for Munia’s father Chand and the villagers. Munia is found hanging from a tree – an image that is fairly common in certain rural heartlands. The heartbroken villagers are thrown a Muslim murderer, Mansoor Khan a wandering man with rattling wits who suffers from some kind of heartbreak and who was conveniently on the spot cradling Munia’s feet.

Roy brings in the police, sub-inspector Ombir Singh and his sidekick Bhim Sain, both of whom know the girl and share the grief of the village. However police procedure in a village situated between Delhi and Haryana, the desolate Teetarpur, is fraught with difficulty. There are obstacles and Ombir is at the beck and call of his superior SS Pilania who wants a gruesome murder quickly solved. The richest man in Teetarpur Jollyji also takes an unusual interest in the incident which took place when he was apparently in Delhi. What begins to unfold seems to be the usual crime noir – the death of a child with elements to the case conveniently missing.

However to call the book a murder mystery would be to ignore the fact that there is another stream of narrative that runs parallel to the first one a tale of migrant lives and outsiders seeking to belong. Roy holds up the flow of the narrative with a story of life by the Yamuna, the black river of the title. She goes back in time to Chand’s younger days when he was striving to make a living in the big city of Delhi. There he makes friends with  with a Bengali migrant couple, Khaled and Rabia and with Badshah Mian who runs a meat shop and who teaches him how to cut meat. Their lives are ruled by the flow of the river and by the people in power who lay down the movements of migrants and also those of the minority communities.

Roy tell the story of what might have been if Chand had lived by the river with his friends, going back to the roots of Munia’s birth which is linked to the disappearance of Khalid – who is only one of the disappeared in the book, the others including the body of a murdered woman, a threatened dog and Mansoor Khan. Her timeline swivels between time past and time present engrossing the reader until she breaks away again to return to Teetarpur with its threat of lynching where the murder remains unsolved. Rural Teetarpur is what one might expect with mujras. nautch girls, a single factory that sells incense sticks and an ominous undercurrent of blackmail. 

Ombir Singh, who is as disturbed as other policemen in noir thrillers by his personal issues and cynicism,  cannot rely on forensics to help him solve the case. Whatever technology he can rely on is dysfunctional and with his associate Bhim Sain, he struggles to unknot the puzzle frustrated by police procedure and on occasion their own failures.

While Roy does an admirable job of the smoke and mirrors, it is quite easy to cut down the suspects and arrive at the solution to the mystery.  Black River also follows the gradual growth of communal evil, from a trickle to a flood though corruption also seems to follow the same path. People want more and those who stand in their way can be disposed of. However, where Chand is concerned, he is not the usual heartbroken rural father. He has his own inner strength and the virtues of observation which he seems to have picked up in the meat chopping shop. He is true to his friends and longs for his lost migrant past.

Roy’s language is racy, detailed and poetic by turns – though on occasion a trifle too poetic as testified by Badshah Mian’s holding forth on the meat carving trade in the middle of the slaughterhouse – though that too is possibly a metaphor for the fate of certain communities affected by hate politics. She does a good job of holding back on the gore, suggesting and implying to telling effect while tethering the plot and raising anticipation.

One cannot quibble with her bracketing of the stories though perhaps one could ask for a little more from the characters and the situations she describes. The book is more about minorities and conflicts than murder – even though it is touted as a murder mystery. What the book does do is ask why these things happen.

Price- INR 499/-