Hot Stage: Anita Nair talks to Crime Time

In Anita Nair’s Hot Stage, Borei Gowda is a splendidly grumpy, hard-drinking cop, an Indian Rebus with a complicated love life. When Professor Mudgood is found dead in his decaying Bangalore house, it is considered a natural death; after all, he was 82 years old, but Gowda isn’t so sure. All the evidence points to a political murder since the professor was a fervent critic of right-wing forces in India. But as Gowda launches a parallel investigation, he stumbles upon a secret and murky world where there are no rules or mercy. When Gowda’s hand is forced, he takes a calculated risk and infiltrates the sinister domain to bring the truth out into the open. Will he succeed? And at what price?

Paul Burke: So, Anita, congratulations on publication of Hot Stage. Please tell us about your new novel, the third Inspector Gowda investigation.

Anita Nair: Hot Stage begins with what seems like a political murder. Meanwhile everything about the crime also suggests that this could be real estate linked crime as the deceased lives on a prime piece of land. But the nature of the investigation and what it entails of Borei Gowda and his team change when they stumble into a murky dangerous world of violence and money.

There is also a parallel story line of Bhuvana, the serial killer, from the first novel A Cut-Like Wound playing cat and mouse with Gowda who has now been promoted to Assistant Commissioner of Police.

PB: Like your other Gowda titles Hot Stage has a specific meaning within an investigation but it also could refer to the way the murder mystery gathers pace as it unfolds. Can you explain its specific technical and wider meaning please.

AN: When I first thought of A Cut-Like Wound for a title, I knew that any Gowda books I would write henceforth would have medico-legal terms, legal or forensic terms as titles. However, I didn’t want to settle for the well-known terms or use those terms in the obvious way.

Hot Stage refers to a key step in a method used in evaluating glass particles found on a victim or at a crime scene and is a valuable tool in gathering trace forensic evidence. Basically, what it does is use the refractive index of the glass to determine its source. I loved the possibilities of what the term suggested. And in this third Gowda novel, ‘Hot Stage’ has multiple meanings: the evidence that leads to the scene of crime; of the hot stage in the course of an investigation as in ‘the breakthrough’; and the figurative hot stage in the book where the crime happens.

PB: Crime fiction is growing as a genre in India, I believe, and some very good novels have gained international recognition too, including your work. You write across genres but you are one of the pioneers of this genre locally do you see it becoming significant for Indian readers?

AN: Crime fiction is actually a thriving literary genre in Indian regional languages. Sadly, most of them are truly pulp fiction. I have often wondered if the ‘Indian reader reading in English’ is reluctant to embrace crime fiction written by Indians in English for this reason.

The reader who is familiar with the best of international crime in print and screen probably worries Indian crime fiction in English will not meet the standards and hence will be a disappointment. To give the reader the benefit of doubt, he/she/they very well know that gathering information or researching government institutions in India is a tough proposition. Thus there is always a degree of scepticism about the authenticity of facts presented.

Happily enough for me, the response I have had in India for my crime series has been wonderful. Gowda has a huge fan following and there is always the query: When is the next Gowda book coming out?

Literary fiction novelists are seldom asked that!

PB: There are specific themes in Hot Stage and also an exploration of wider concerns. Looking first at political issues including extremism, rampant urbanisation, unfettered rural development and corruption for example. Do you see crime fiction as a vehicle for social commentary? A chance for you to raise issues that concern you. Scrutiny is useful in all societies, why not through fiction.

AN: I didn’t realize crime fiction could be a splendid platform for social commentary until I began the first novel in the Gowda series. Until then, I had stayed in the realm familiar to writers of literary fiction: the mindscape of the characters. However, with the first Gowda book, I noticed the external milieu had immense bearing on crimes committed and the state of mind of the criminal and victim. And this allowed me to raise issues that trouble me be it child trafficking to unfettered rural development to extremism.

Interestingly, I think that my literary fiction has benefitted from this intense awareness of the world around us. I find this seeping into my literary fiction as well.

PB: To look at the Hot Stage the narrative explores how lives are affected by the power structures of society, capitalism, religious divisions and bigotry, the ‘privilege’ of class and male entitlement. These are not easy issues to tackle but clearly addressing them goes to the heart of modern India.

AN: As an Indian living in India, it is impossible for me to write fiction that is divorced from the reality of India. There are multiple issues in the country and each one of them are hydra-headed monsters. Almost all of them affect every person in India. Except that most of us don’t actually notice or even realize it. We are so caught up with the business of living that we don’t see beyond what is around us.

Until I began writing crime fiction, the themes I had dealt with had been intensely individual in nature. Of characters grappling with a sense of identity or the nature of artistic integrity, etc. The engagement with the external world was only of some consequence.

But with crime fiction, I knew I could work in political and sociological themes into the personal narrative of a character or as a context of an incident. This, I hope would enable the reader to have a shift in perspective and thus evaluate state of the nation and state of the society for themselves.

PB: There are references to Chain of Custody and child trafficking here. It’s a deeply troubling issue. Did you draw on what you have witnessed and the experience of the people on the streets trying to tackle this problem?

AN: Chain of Custody was an intensely harrowing book to research and thereafter to write. It began as a simple query in my head on reading a newspaper report on missing children statistics: Where do the untraced children go? What happens to them.

There was very little I could find about this and to understand it better I began researching child trafficking and what I discovered made me certain that I had to write about it.

Research for this book involved working at various levels: going to rescue shelters, spending time in rescue homes, talking to NGOs, social workers and trafficked children and visiting police stations in an effort to understand at what point the police steps in and what the results are. Every part of it was grim and it left me devastated, and even more determined to write about it.

PB: Tell us a little bit about Inspector Gowda as the novel starts, his background and ideas on solving a case and how he’s changed as he gets older and faces challenging cases. His relationship to authority is developing.

AN: Borei Gowda as the fearless intelligent middle class Bangalore cop was how he happened in my head. When we meet Gowda first in A Cut-Like Wound, he finally has a case that makes him pull himself together and take a leap in both his personal and professional life. By the time we meet him again in Chain of Custody, the second novel, he has evolved into a man with a renewed purpose; a hardheaded investigator who cannot let things be. This is the Gowda we meet in the first pages of Hot Stage. He has also been

promoted and is now Assistant Commissioner of Police. But Gowda has also realized that nothing has changed except his designation. This makes him even more hungry to take on cases even if it means having to work with the Central Crime Bureau. His passion for what he does is even more keener making him take risks that could end his career and ruin his relationships as well.

PB: The murder victim Professor Mudgood is an old man. The crime could be political or it could be personal. We get to know him a little before his demise. Were you interested in exploring the issue of ageing and growing old. Also in relation to generational understanding and differences, a challenge for all societies.

AN : I have very elderly parents. My mother-in-law turned 100 in January. I have elderly relatives and friends. As a person, it distresses me no end to see them fade into shadows of their former selves, feeling irrelevant and useless.

I have witnessed the impatience the middle aged have for the elderly as the power equation changes.  As a writer, it makes me want to capture what the elderly know about aging and what growing old has done to them. So with Hot Stage, it was more than just a plot point and became a study on the helpless fury of the elderly.

PB: This is a dark story but even confronted with murder humour and the absurdity of life always shadow us. There are lots of sharp observations on the people in your novel.

AN: There is a part of me that refuses to be bogged down by darkness no matter how overwhelming it is. That reveals itself as humour in the midst of dire situations. Some of the characters I create appal me at the degree of the evil they are capable of. And I am just as appalled at myself for having created them. My comic characters are how I redeem myself.

PB: Can we look forward to more Inspector Gowda investigations in the future?

AN: I know for sure that there will be a fourth book and hopefully soon.

Hot Stage is published in paperback by Bitter Lemon Press on 20th June.

A Cut-Like Wound by Anita Nair – The Inspector Gowda Series Book 1 (amazon.co.uk)
Chain of Custody by Anita Nair – The Inspector Gowda Series Book 2 (amazon.co.uk)
Hot Stage by Anita Nair – The Inspector Gowda Series Book 3 (amazon.co.uk)