The
name is Bond - Jane Bond
couple of years ago
it was rumoured that there was a Bond movie coming out in which the Agent 007
was female. I certainly remember reading a number of articles about Halle Berry
being considered for the coveted role. The news however died down as fast as it had
caught fire.
Sirens Spell Danger, from the looks of it, promised
something similar. That, and the thought of Halle Berry as Agent 007 spurred me
to read these three stories - to check their credentials.
Femme
Fatale
- C Suresh
Femme Fatale is a rather filmy kind of story but
nevertheless has some unforgettable characters. Vikram, who comes to Bangalore
for a job interview, learns that he has successfully cleared the Indian
Police Service. Naturally he throws caution to the wind and decides to
celebrate with a drink. Being alone, he gets more than what he wishes for - he
gets picked up by a sexy, beautiful and oozing-with-attitude siren who leaves
behind her hotel room number. When he opens the door of the room, his dream of
an amorous evening turns into a nightmare of murder, terror plots and close
encounters with death.
While he is cursing the girl for throwing him between the
devil and the deep sea, who should turn out to be his knight on a white steed
but the very girl who had led him into the trap -Tanya. He has a hard time
figuring out what exactly is going on, and she has an equally tough time saving
his life by a whisker each time. The plot is completely Indian with
politicians, intelligence officers and foreign terror experts each trying to
outdo the other, using every pawn available to advance their game. The
difference: the wannabe IPS officer is the damsel in distress who is airlifted
out of danger time and again by Ninja Tanya.
The story is unique, the writing quite laudable. It keeps
moving at the right pace. It is also imaginative, for example, how Vikram
manages to extricate himself out of the ropes tying his hands and legs. Of
course there are the regular cliches like when Vikram is locked up in a room,
there just happens to be a wardrobe where he can hide in times of an emergency,
and how, when he even gives himself up for dead, Tanya arrives like Batman in
the nick of time.
In spite of everything the story is anything but boring.
There is action, emotion, romance and thrill. Whether intentional or not, the
story has twists and turns at regular intervals, and though you don’t keep
gasping for more, you kind of enjoy the going while it is good. And it is good
for most of the time.
Bella Donna
- Radha Sawana
Serial killers all have a pattern. So sayeth the Masters of
Investigation from London to Mumbai and Washington DC to Mombasa. Once the pattern is decoded, it is easy to
nab the murderer.
Someone is murdering men who matter and they all seem to be
walking into their graves without any coercion or force. There are no
fingerprints, no traces of violence and injury and traces of cyanide but with
no clue of how it entered their bodies. Who is leading them to their serene
deaths?
Radha Sawana takes the reader through a roller coaster ride
of the unexpected. With a plot that could leave even the veterans of whodunits
guessing, she superbly pours murder, suspense, forensic science, herpetology,
arachnology and human frailties into a test tube which releases a deadly tale.
I have never read a murder mystery written by an Indian which has no loopholes,
except this one. And what’s more, she has sprinkled a couple of sentences which
actually give the reader a hint but unless one reads the prose with
concentration, it can easily be missed.
The story also introduces some very strong and interesting
characters - Inspector Shardul Reham who hates rains but braves them in the
line of duty, Sub-Inspector Harsh Mehta whose meticulousness opens many a
closed door, Rajinder Sharma the director of the State Forensic Laboratory who
has devoted his entire life to criminal science and of course Detective
Superintindent Ajay Rathore - the hard taskmaster who drives his deputies crazy
till they get the results he wants. The involvement of the characters’ personal
traits as well as their private lives takes the story to a completely different
level. You can guess something about the killer even from this review, but if
you haven’t figured out at least that one clue, it should be enough inspiration
for you to sit down and read the story.
I have a doubt though - I have not heard of any position
called Detective Inspector or Detective Superintindent in Indian Police. We
have ranks like Commisioner of Police (Crime); Deputy Superintindent of Police
(Crime) etc. So I wonder if this is a hangover of reading too many western
crime novels. But it’s easily forgiven, because most of us have grown up with
Frederick Forsyth, Jeffrey Archer, Sidney Sheldon, Agatha Christie, P D James,
Mario Puzo and the father of all crime stories Arthur Conan Doyle. Do I need to
say more?
Bellary
- Karthik
L
Have
you ever wondered why all secret agents chase beautiful girls? Maybe it has
something to do with their job. They are never in one place, so they can never
marry and ‘settle’ down as they say. Like the number 13 which is lucky for some
and unlucky for some, most people believe secret agents are lucky because they can
travel business class, taste the best wines and live in the swankiest of hotels
but the agents themselves (after the honeymoon period) think they are unlucky
because they have to avoid bullets, squeeze through sewage tunnels and crawl
under barbed wire fences. Taken separately, one can perhaps go through the
rigor but the task is difficult because the locales change instantly. Now you
are sipping alcohol in a plush seat at 33,000 feet; now you are trying to
escape 25 people running behind you with swords to cut you down. Is it any
surprise if they fall for feminine guiles when not on duty?
Except
for the fact that a secret agent is never off-duty. Karthik L picks up an IB
agent Jay who is sitting in the sun on a Goan beach ogling at
bikini-clad women through his goggles. His boss in Delhi throws at him the
mantle of looking for a missing (read: dead) CBI agent and “something” that is
going to happen on the night of the 25th with the connivance of the ISI. With
this truckload of information, he travels by plane to Bangalore and from there
by train to Bellary.
He
meets a beautiful woman in the plane and another one in the train and falls for
both. He becomes suspicious when after meeting the women, he has to fight with
goons who are trying to act smart. However the second encounter lands him in jail,
with the woman leaving him stranded.
When
he had just about accepted that it was impossible to avert whatever “something”
was going to happen on the 25th, things start rolling and he finds himself in
the midst of a political-cum-religious juggernaut, with the powerful deity of
Bellary, Balla, baying for Jay’s blood. From here the story turns to the
supernatural and how Jay faces the wrath of Balla.
From
the beginning, the writer establishes that Jay is no James Bond. But he works
meticulously, keeps himself fit and ready for any eventuality. He does not wilt
under pressure and over the years he has built up a reputation for himself in
his department. A well crafted character.
The
climax is a bit of a let-down. So much hype is created around Balla but
everything happens in the background and the reader can only have second-hand
experience through sounds and light effects. The writer shies from bringing
Balla out into the open and endowing him with some kind of superpower which Jay
cannot match. That would have made the duel more interesting.
The
language is simple and fluid. There are enough hurdles thrown in the path of Jay
and it is interesting to read how he comes out a winner.
One thing common about these
stories, apart from the women involved, is that none of the male protagonists
performs any extraordinarily heroic feats. Even the fights described are realistic and the hero
is in as much pain as the victims after the fight.
Sirens Spell Danger, true to its
title, has in its stories women as the cause of the troubles faced by the protagonist.
However, it is only in Bella Donna that the female character is in the driver’s
seat. For the other two, the women characters are strong but the climactic
portions show the men taking centrestage.
I want to mention the cover page,
which is quite symbolic. A red-saree clad woman hiding a bloody knife behind
her, as she overlooks a busy flyover of a city with the red siren of the law
caught in a web of traffic. Kudos to the designer, whose name will always be
where very few will read it.
Well, I enjoyed the book. Though it
did not provide me with my anticipated Jane Bond, it did give me three extremely
entertaining stories.
Come to think of it, if I was a
producer, I’d cast Abhay Deol as Vikram and Deepika (can’t help, she’s my
favourite) in Femme Fatale, again Abhay Deol as Inspector Shardul in Bella
Donna with Pariniti Chopra in a special appearance and in Bellary I would opt
for Farhan Akhtar with Vidya Balan and Kalki Koechlin.
If I
ever were to meet Suresh, Radha or Karthik, I would like to ask them one question
– doesn’t the idea of Jane Bond excite you?
