It begins satisfactorily enough: page 3 and a murder is announced. A big hulk of a man is sprawled on the floor of a 1BHK living room in Mumbai,his head bashed in,an anonymous body,deflating slowly,leaking out its juices in a strange house. And stuffed in the standard issue loft used to hide mouldy middle-class junk,is the woman of the house,Sitara Shah,alive but drugged. More bizarre mementos will tumble out of that loft as the plot of Kalpana Swaminathans The Monochrome Madonna,the third in the Lalli series,gathers speed. There will be 10 packages of sinister portent with nail clippings,bangles,a stick-on bindi,a shred of a dupatta,a bottle of cheap scent Majmua 976. Objects taken from various women? The treasured collection of a serial killer? The net is cast wide but no bodies are fished out. To detective Lalli,the last resort of the Homicide Department,and aunt to narrator,Sita,this is paradoxically,about a murder waiting to happen. Swaminathan sets up a fairly ambitious plot. The writing races and crackles for the most part. But she inexplicably slows things down in a chapter that goes purple over roses and makes you run to the dictionary to check the entries for (shudder) saurians and tropotaxic. Much is made of the Photoshopped version of Raphaels Sistine Madonna hanging in Sitaras living room. This is a murder mystery,Swaminathan suggests,concerned about ways of seeing. What is good detective work but spotting the optical trick in the mess of blood,muck and everydayness? Ironically,while the ways of Lalli are suitably inscrutable,the novel fails because it falters in the sleight of hand,the optical trick. Much before all is revealed,you will learn to distrust the astoundingly naïve narrator and do the math. What worse killjoy?
