Krishnan Srinivasan, Kris to those who know him, has had an extraordinarily distinguished career as a diplomat, as well as an author of scholarly works relating to various aspects of international relations. He has had diplomatic experience in parts of the Middle East and several spells as Head of Mission in Africa. His tenure, at a turbulent time in the history of Bangladesh, resulted in a major book dealing with the fall of General Ershad, the military ruler of Bangladesh. Apart from describing the role of civil society in that revolution, the author includes a memoir of his years as head of the mission in Dacca, now Dhaka. In later years, after serving as Foreign Secretary, the author wrote a book about this period called Diplomatic Channels.
After his tenure of several years as Deputy Secretary General of the Commonwealth in London, the author wrote a scholarly work on the Rise and Decline of the Commonwealth. During his long academic career, Kris spent time at Wolfson College and at the Centre for International Studies at Cambridge.
The author shares with this reviewer a college at Oxford, Christ Church, where we both spent time, about six years apart from each other.
Just before COVID struck the world in 2020, the author was engaged in the production of a scholarly work on Values in Foreign Policy. This reviewer had the privilege of being associated with this project and made a small contribution to it. The author has continued all these years to publish articles on subjects relating to international matters in the leading newspapers of India.
After such a storied diplomatic and academic career, it is a refreshing surprise to learn that the author has written detective stories in several volumes! In fact, the book under review is the 8th in this series!
Kolkata Crimes is a set of 7 detective tales of a little under 300 pages; the stories are racy, full of suspense, intrigue and mystery, which unfold mainly in the city of Calcutta of yore, now ‘Kolkata’ as in the title.
The author takes us, in the book, to many areas of this teeming metropolis, which in the early 20th century was called the City of Palaces (a reference to the magnificent buildings in central Calcutta). He describes places such as Gariahat, a middle-class area with a strong Bengali population. The ancient Tollygunge club features in the book in more than one story. The golf course in this historic club is said to be the second oldest course in the world after St Andrews, the prototype, in Scotland!
There are two main characters in Kolkata Crimes, who appear in each story. In fact, both characters are in all the earlier detective novels written by the author. One is a former Somali diplomat who has suffered immense personal tragedy: Ambassador Michael Marco has had a few postings abroad, and one in India as a trade consul. He stays in Calcutta at an establishment colourfully called the “Wise Owl”. Ambassador Marco, in the course of these stories, makes utterances which are often reminiscent of his abode!
His conversations with Koel Deb, the other main character in the book, are replete with rare insights into human behaviour, nuggets of wisdom, and sometimes scintillating wit!
Koel Deb herself is a brilliant young woman who has a prosthetic arm, the result of an earlier serious accident. Deb stood first in the civil service exams, but chose not to join the higher civil services, including the Foreign Service. Instead, she opted for the Indian Police Service. After her debilitating accident, she set up shop as a private detective, using her experience and contacts made during service in the police force as well as in other echelons of Calcutta society.
Deb’s chosen mode of transport, rather unusually, is a large Harley Davidson motorcycle on which she buzzes about the labyrinth of Calcutta’s streets and bylanes.
The author draws sketches, with much facility, of some of the fascinating characters in these pages. There is Shahnaz Sarodana in Bombay, for example, most likely a Parsi, a racehorse owner who is concerned about her prize filly ‘Catalytic’ and its safety. The Mahalaxmi Race Course in Central Bombay is the place where her valuable horse is stabled. There are fears that some people might take action to harm this horse. This is how Koel Deb, the detective, is brought into the story.
The first meeting with Sarodana is described by Deb in these words: “Mrs Sarodana rose with a smile as I entered the terrace. It did not light up her face suddenly, but seemed to suffuse it by deliberate degrees. Her hair was presumably dyed because it was jet black and sleek and shining and sculpted around the ears. She was slim and held herself upright, but it was her beringed hands that most clearly betrayed her age that was in the late 50s, because they had none of a young woman’s soft roundness.”
Talking of the fashionable Sardona and her position in society:
“In her circle, her social decrees were law, but she was said to have too many admirers not to have an equal number of enemies.”
Then there is the Swiss former diplomat, Hans Hartman, who learned Sanskrit in Benares and became a specialist in the languages of the Kuki and Mizo tribes of North East India.
To add an air of mystery and barely disguised menace, Hartman is described as: “Not everyone regarded Hartman as a harmless elderly scholar. To some who claimed to be in the know, he was a man of violent mood swings, an odd character who alienated people by being abrupt and who had generated gossip for decades... someone considered unstable and unfit for social life.”
The Swiss Scholar has an adopted daughter acquired from the orphanages of Kalimpong and Kurseong in northern Bengal. The girl is apparently of European descent, judging from a description of her physical features. Hartman and his daughter are the central figures in this particular story, which also involves a cast of other characters!
There is also a Japanese person by the name of Nakamura Sato. He is into buying art by famous Indian artists and invests in a Rabindranath Tagore painting. Sato is described by Parul, the lady looking after the art gallery, in the following way: “These Japanese people are so smart and hi-tech and sell their products all over the world, and they have made so much money that they have more dollars than they know what to do with. Their latest fashion is to invest in art from abroad.”
Parul is, in fact, referring to a type of Japanese who made huge amounts of money during the ‘bubble period’ in the 1980s. That was a time when land values in Japan hit astronomical heights; the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo, for example, was valued as equal to almost all of Manhattan!
Nakamura is obviously a Japanese of the ‘bubble era’ ilk! He and the gallery are involved in alleged forgery and a network of con artists, which leads to unexpected situations!
There is the incredibly smooth, glib, slightly shady society dentist Augustin. Augustin has little time for the hoi polloi, mixing as he does with Calcutta high society. His posh friends, heads of the top clubs in the city, the odd diplomat and other big business tycoons have swinging parties at his special flat, maintained ‘ostensibly’ for such purposes. What actually happens at such fun parties is the subject of this story and needs to be read and enjoyed!
The characters in the book include some from the underworld of Calcutta. The bar owner of the Olympia Café, Shirish Saha, is a case in point: “with a flat face and thinning hair... With a loud voice, big paunch and a broad false smile... like other bars in this area, it could have been a front for drugs, women and small arms. The local police were always welcome to use the place gratis, and were compensated sufficiently to look the other way!”
In this part of the book, there is a display of an uncanny familiarity with the nefarious activities in the seamy slums of Calcutta. There are also scenes in picturesque places such as Kala Bhavan at Shantiniketan, the university set up by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore in the early 20th century.
At Kala Bhavan, the fine arts centre, there is an encounter between a dour, humourless lawyer, Anirban Raha and the detective Koel Deb; she describes her meeting thus: “Raha greeted me with all the enthusiasm of an usher at a funeral... waiting with the saturnine Raha could not help anyone’s mood, but there was nothing for it except to sit as far apart as possible... and listen to Raha expounding the laws of consumer fraud.” This meeting relates to the same story, which is set in the art gallery of Calcutta mentioned above.
As might be expected of an author who has spent a lifetime dealing with politicians of varying hues, there are perceptive comments on domestic political situations in India. In one story, the following description is illustrative of this undoubted skill of the author: “The Kolkata Police Commissioner was obliged to hold a press conference on the instructions of the Chief Minister, who felt, perhaps unwisely, that it was better to head off any criticism or false rumours by revealing what could be revealed... Commissioner Prasanta Chandra, flanked by a laconic Dutta and Shankar (who remained silent under the nation’s Home Minister’s strict injunction), did the best he could in front of a querulous crowd of journalists.” Many such journalists “had been confidentially briefed by the New Delhi Union government to make things uncomfortable for the West Bengal state government.”
Those familiar with current domestic politics in India would see the accuracy with which the tenuous juxtaposition between the central government in Delhi and the state government in Bengal has been described by the author.
Running through the book are dalliances of various varieties, extramarital affairs galore, some tender with a degree of depth, others imbued with starkly dark malice. Almost all such liaisons are inextricably intertwined with high intrigue, blood–curdling danger and in some cases death.
Many of the stories in the book have a number of literary and musical references, which lighten the narrative with attractive interludes. Ambassador Marco responds to Koel’s statement about an occasion when she listened to Verdi’s Aida in Italian in Delhi, with the following: “Ah, Minnie (the name he uses for Ms Deb), how satisfying. If only my dream might come true! And to you my heavenly Aida, to return crowned with laurels.”
Similarly, while talking to a young student, Hirak, Marco says:
“Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.” Hirak’s quizzical look is answered by Ambassador Marco with much aplomb: “Shakespeare, Hirak, ‘Measure for Measure’.”
Again, while driving in Hirak’s car, Marco says to him, in response to a remark by the young student: “Perhaps you are right, Hirak. But as Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai said when asked about his assessment of the French Revolution: ‘It is too soon to say’.”
Hirak, needless to say, is duly impressed by the erudite ambassador.
There are many more such quotes from literature and from Latin with which the author shows much familiarity. In the story about the art gallery in Calcutta, the author displays his admiration for the work of some of the greatest Indian artists, including Raja Ravi Varma, MF Husain, KK Hebbar, Francis Souza, Laxma Goud and KCS Paniker.
As one might expect in detective stories, there are several points of palpable tension in the narrative. This is so in the story about a group of actors touring in Cooch Behar. Here is an example: “Satish played a card game of Solitaire by himself. Prabhat filed his nails and sulked. Asha stared at her mobile phone as if it explained the mysteries of the universe. And they seemed to be warily watching each other as well, creating an intense atmosphere... they seemed to be sticking to each other, because each of them was afraid to leave the others alone for some reason.”
No detective stories would be complete without a fair share of deaths, suspected murders and an occasional suicide. Kolkata Crimes does not lack any of these ingredients! On the contrary, there is a detailed litany of gory and at times grisly accounts of murders, which show a familiarity with medical detail: “Dutta gently opened the blouse to examine the cuts on her chest. As he did so, he and the paramedic leapt up in shock. The sternum of the corpse had been cut open and many of the ribs broken, exposing the interior cavity of her body...”
Equally macabre, when the same body was removed to a hospital, there is the following olfactory description: “The smell of antiseptic and cleanliness gave way to the smell of the dead and damaged... whether Indian or Swiss, poor or rich, the odour of the dead human being was identical.”
The last story, The Unravelling, which is the longest in the book, ends on a delightful, even if slightly enigmatic note!
To savour the many joys of reading this book, one has to go through each story carefully, in order to unravel the mysterious conclusion, which inevitably comes at the end of each chapter. In the case of this reviewer, some of the more complicated stories had to be read more than once!
It can be said without any hesitation that it was well worth the effort!
Title: Kolkata Crimes
Written by: Krishnan Srinivasan
Price: Rs 499
Published by: Har-Anand Publications Pvt Ltd
