For some years between 2009 and 2013, I worked as a reporter on what was called, often dismissively, the “gender beat”. I had little experience of the crime beat, and had only two skills to offer: I liked walking around Delhi, India’s capital, as well as unfamiliar small towns and villages in the neighbouring states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh on my own, and people seemed to be comfortable talking to me.
My editors and I had no idea at the time that we were about to witness a striking and bitterly wrenching phenomenon. As Indian women began to reach for independence in their homes and migrate in large numbers for jobs across the country in the early 2000s, this promising, potential revolution was stemmed by many factors, including wave after wave of patriarchal violence.
This is nothing new; as many crime writers in India but also the US and other parts of the world know, apparently unrelated acts of violence, from rapes to murders, mob lynchings to excessive use of force by vigilantes or the police have been used to maintain the status quo.
For a few stories, I tracked murders by the score, often of young girls and women who had dared to travel from their villages to take a competitive exam, or try for a job interview, or work in a mall, small acts of independence that enraged men who resented their presence in India’s workplaces, streets, and public spaces. Sometimes a case caught the attention of the national media, and for a while, TV crews would swarm across cities and small towns like Jind, Panipat, Lucknow, or villages like Garnauthi and Badrikapurwa, churning out sensational headlines, and vanishing to chase other gruesome crimes.
I tried, and failed, to maintain a reporter’s objectivity in the face of the distress of the families left behind to grieve their dead But gradually, my sympathies turned to the hundreds of cases of what a police officer called “mamooli murder”: ordinary killings, so commonplace as to be unremarkable to the media, and therefore invisible.
Once, a father from a caste that continues to face historical discrimination bared his shredded heart to me, talking for two hours about his daughter, who had been raped, murdered and her body discarded in a junkyard, among the rusting spare parts of tractors and buses, by a gang of upper-caste men. Her murderers had connections to powerful political clans; they faced no charges; the evidence was obliterated; his wife committed suicide a year later. His grief came at his listeners like a barrage, a storm of lamentation.
When he finished his story, we were all quiet. Then his friend said, “In these parts, the murder of girls is normal. It is an everyday thing. The justice you are asking about, it is not for us; it is a luxury good for others to possess.” Five years later, the father had found a kind of release. He haunted local police stations and district courts, quietly helping and advising bewildered, grief-dazed families through the maze of the system.
None of the characters in Black River are based on real individuals — I didn’t want to steal someone’s life and massage it into fiction — but the depth of his loss haunted me, and helped me understand Chand, a father who weathers tragedy twice over, better when I started writing my novel.
Writers and journalists are part of the landscape, the social and political worlds about; we don’t get to hover above it all, reporting from a great height. I come from a historically privileged caste, speak English and am a Hindu, from the majority religion in India. All of these factors combined to allow me access and more safety than most have — but I also had to understand that the assumptions I made about how power and justice should work, were hugely blinkered. It was only after several years that I slowly began to understand the police better.
Many of the policemen — and a few policewomen — I met were open about their own beliefs and biases, justifying caste and religious prejudices and defending the endemic use of torture in police work. I also learned that addiction and depression were severe problems among many policemen, that a sizeable number took their frustrations and anger home, beating their wives, children, parents. And I met a few in the police force in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, who stepped away from the hate, and tried, sometimes at great personal cost, to do right. The police in most districts told me much about villages and towns: if they were bigoted, the town was likely to be bigoted too, if they were casually brutal, they were an accurate reflection of the thirst for violence around them. When I wrote about a village policeman, Ombir Singh, I had to get my ideas about both venality and nobility out of the way, and let him be himself: corrupt, capable of using extreme force, but also possessed of an inconvenient conscience.
I covered many subjects on the gender beat, but what lingered were the stories of the “mamooli murders”, the ordinary crimes, the everyday sorrow of permanent loss. And when I quit the job, I began to walk the borders of the Yamuna river, a neglected, polluted but still achingly beautiful Himalayan river within my city. Sometimes the river had become toxic sludge, sometimes it was silvery and rushing, miraculously alive. The women I met along the banks of the Yamuna thought I was daft and irresponsible to waste my time walking, but also offered friendship, priceless tips on safety. “Whatever you write,” one woman said to me, “write it in friendship. Or what is the point of all your books anyway?”
Like Chand’s friend Rabia, they taught me that resistance wasn’t always visible, that it could happen far away from protests: refusing to leave when you’re told you’re not wanted in a city is resistance, making friendships across the high boundary walls that separate men and women, Hindus and Muslims, higher and lower castes in India is a revolution.
Many other Indian writers in English are now beginning to write crime and noir fiction, from Tanuj Solanki to Madhulika Liddle to Raza Mir and Deepti Kapoor. We are only the newest entrants into a long Indian tradition. Crime blazed a gloriously pulpy trail across Hindi writing, led by flamboyant authors like Surendra Mohan Pathak and Ved Prakash Sharma, and from Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games to the irresistibly gory Mirzapur, written by Karun Anshuman, or the gripping Dahaad with a woman police officer in the lead, written by Reema Kagti and Zoya Akhtar, Indian crime shows have swept Netflix and Amazon Prime. Tamil crime novels often featured swaggering, macho detectives, and the Bengali sleuth from Byomkesh Babu in his elegant dhutis, created by Sharadindu Bandopadhyay to Feluda, Satyajit Ray’s much-loved detective, was a staple of my childhood reading.
The thought of joining this company was intimidating — but cheering, like finding new and old friends. “Write in friendship,” I’d been told. So I did.
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