Merchants of Death
neelima dalmia adhar
Har-Anand Publications, Rs 395
A house of Tiffany lamps and Venetian chandeliers where women with translucent skin and unhappy marriages mate with men with Patek Philippe watches and unsated libido — Neelima Dalmia Adhar’s Merchants of Death looks like a fairly schmaltzy potboiler with a plethora of ordinary adjectives and persistent over-writing. But that is just the beginning.

The two-book-old Adhar seems to have a fixation for dysfunctional families and the amoral universe of the rich. She had dug into her own family closet and exhumed skeletons in Father Dearest: The Life and Times of R.K. Dalmia, a memoir that was well-received for the candour with which she wrote about her father — a philanthropist and philanderer, puritan and pariah, and the first

Indian owner of The Times of India.

In her debut novel, Adhar moves to the House of Loyas. There is no one protagonist in this debauched dynasty of Marwaris, whom the writer calls the counterparts of the Jewish community of the West, “who had traditionally been associated with profiteering and black marketeering in essential commodities like wheat, sugar, newsprint and cement during and after the Second World War”.

There is Bharat Loya — a boy with a mother fixation, whose rites of passage is a brief affair with his great-grandfather’s illegitimate daughter. An arms dealer and managing director of the industrial conglomerate GII, he cuts a cake on his dead son’s 23rd birthday. There is Bharat’s younger brother Vishal, a billionaire playboy with a bounty of floozies and starlets; his sister and deputy MD of GII Nupur, who goes on a spiritual trip and is killed in an air crash in the Northeast; the mother, the beautiful and beatific Amba whose pool parties are as famous as her satsangs, who renounces her chiffons for saffron and preaches nirvana but nevertheless rules her house like a Stalin; the father Ajay Vardhan Loya, chairman of GII, who faces an inquiry from the Enforcement Directorate for violating the Foreign Exchange Regulations Act and flies to Cleveland in the United States, ostensibly for medical treatment but also to escape interrogation and arrest, following which GII launches a media blitzkrieg against the Directorate.

... contd.