If you like your detective stories dark and deep, there is a vast library out there to choose from, starting off with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. But if you like your detectives to look cool and chic, and to seethe with jealousy when someone else turns up looking even more chic, you will welcome the return of Kiran Manral to the detective genre. In The School-Gate Kidnapping, we have a familiar combo to savour. It’s the well-beloved Sherlock Holmes partnering the equally beloved (for different reasons) Shakira, and all you need to do is just sit back and wait for the popcorn to pop.
You meet many old friends. There’s prime protagonist Kay Mehra whom you first met when she was The Reluctant Detective a decade-and-a-half ago. Now, less reluctant, she is noticeably older but not visibly wiser. She still believes it is as bad form to leave a crime undetected as to leave a cream bun unconsumed. There’s her husband, the suave stoic who takes everything on the chin, and has a macho chin to show for his pains. There’s also her kid, now more charmingly odious than ever before and the hard-bitten professional detective Runa. The rest of the cast are familiar too. You have met them before under different names.
In Manral’s hand, all the world is a high-rise apartment complex, with heroes, sheroes, and a couple of zeroes - all within an elevator ride from each other. They interact sweetly with each other just as long as necessary before they can get back to stabbing each other gleefully in the back. Detective Kay Mehra would have been one of them too, but she happens to become eyewitness to a kidnapping of a school kid. Soon, the crime is upgraded to murders, because this is not a children’s story. But there’s nothing remotely sinister about the wrong doings because mayhem is a boisterous party game. Kay & Co have their priorities pat - solve crime, point finger at guilty, restore order and do all of the above while keeping mascara, skin tone and hair colour exactly as per your stylist’s recommendations. Everyone around, including the kidnapped kid’s mother, knows that you can only be as distraught as your makeup will permit.
Manral’s description is mercilessly vivid. About one of the building’s plentiful divas, she says: “There should be a limit to the aesthetic procedures that could be legally conducted on a person within a year”. When war breaks out between neighbours, Kay is quick off the mark: “Your colourist is wonderful. No one can tell you are 90 per cent grey.” She also describes a friend wearing a sari that “clung in a non-partisan manner to her curves and flab alike’.
The novel’s storyline may be as slim as a desirable waist, and the characterisation is such that everyone plays true to their billing. What holds the book together and keeps turning the pages is the sense of fun. Yet sometimes, you can’t help feeling the story is being stretched too long and too thin. Manral is the supreme master of the funny metaphor, there is no one in the land within touching distance. Yet you wish that she had held her instinct in check or that a more rigorous editor was at hand.
But even as you say this, you realise you are being churlish. School-Gate Kidnapping sashays as much as it sleuths. It is not meant to be forensically analysed or the depth of its characters plumbed. It is a pick-me-up, a ray of sunshine on a dull afternoon, and we could do with more of that.
Title: The School Gate-Kidnapping
Author: Kiran Manral
Publisher: Rupa Publications
Price: ₹395
Pages: 267
