It just took one day. Maxwell Pereira sent his manuscript to the publishers, and The Tandoor Murder went from manuscript to book overnight. And, quick is the best way to describe it. Reminiscences of Indian police officers are few, are usually sermonising and never fun. Pereira’s is then an anomaly—a vivid, detailed, racy memoir of the ‘tandoor murder’ that shook the conscience of the nation in 1995.
He has a voice, literally and figuratively. He is part of Delhi’s Capital City Minstrels, a choir that travels abroad to sing, but it is his voice on the pages of the book that leaps out and grabs you, from the word go. And, by the time he describes how he is rudely woken up at 1am by the shrill ring of the telephone—”a flattish, cherry-red instrument which sat malevolently’’ by his bedside—the reader is hooked. “It is not a thriller,’’ he says. “It is real life.”
Pereira, who led the case, had been commissioned to write about it in the 1990s, but the book was put on ice. “I returned the advance,” he says. “I didn’t want to jeopardise the case. He [the killer] was too wily.”
The book offers a ringside view of the grisly Naina Sahini case. It had everything: a powerful politician (Sushil Sharma), his attractive wife (Naina), passion, jealousy and a burnt body in a hotel. Sharma had asked for butter to make the body burn faster. The corpse was a horrifying sight, he writes. The face wore “a blank horrific grin”, the teeth were exposed, and some bones were retrieved from the ashes of the tandoor.
But, it is not voyeuristic. It is gentle—candid and empathetic. “Detached,” is how he describes Naina Sahini’s parents. “They refused to accept the remains.... We did everything that we could do. Yet, the parents would not say [it was her],” he says. The family would say, “Bring Sushil Sharma here. Let him say that it is she,” of which Pereira said he found no logic.
He fleshes out the characters in the case—for the lovers of hardboiled crime—like constable Abdul Nazeer Kunju who “expected to spend the evening with his wife and three-day-old daughter, but.... would have to handle the overnight beat” and commissioner of police Nikhil Kumar who had a “knack of piercing one’s ego with a few crisp questions”. Pereira sketches his world with his trademark humour.
Tightly paced, he narrates how the investigation progressed, from how Sushil Kumar and Naina Sahini’s flat was found, to hunting down and nabbing Sushil in Bengaluru. There is also the trial, which was not simple. “They wanted me off the case,” he says.
Though the details of the case are well known, Perieira produces a book that is still readable and fresh.
The Tandoor Murder
By Maxwell Pereira
Published by Context
Price: Rs 599;
pages 290