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A murder mystery starring a bored housewife, Kiran Manral’s The Reluctant Detective, works well as a light read with self-deprecating humour.
Review by Unmana Datta
Don’t go into Kiran Manral’s The Reluctant Detective expecting a detective story on the lines of Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple. The two murders in the first couple of chapters are almost incidental to the story, narrated by and starring a bored suburban housewife, Kay Mehra, who, driven partly by boredom, partly by curiosity, and partly out of her wish to see justice done, looks into the murders she encounters.
If you go in expecting the story of a somewhat bored, somewhat flurried housewife with what appears to be low self-esteem, a marriage which has long since lost any vestige of romance or meaningful communication and an exhausting and often repulsive five-year-old… that’s exactly what you get.
The narrator-protagonist’s self-deprecatory snarky humour and tendency to ramble are both the best and worst parts of the books. Some of these passages are genuinely funny, but some seem way too long and unnecessary and not funny enough. It’s hard to know where the narrator ends and the writer begins, and you begin to realize it’s Kay the narrator, and not Kiran the writer, who’s day-dreaming before she gets called back to the present moment.
The book could have been much better with more careful editing. There are typos (“joggers track”) and other errors (“lawfully betrothed” used as a synonym for “spouse”), full stops used instead of question marks, and long run-on sentences that make it difficult to hold on to the meaning.
Overall, though, it’s a nice light read, and while I was torn between disappointment at the extremely predictable denouement to the murder “mystery” and relieved at the lack of absurd melodrama, I know the book is probably better for not indulging my fantasies of a real suburban-housewife detective, instead sticking to the reluctant detective of the title.
Publishers: Westland
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Unmana is interested in gender, literature and relationships, and writes about everything she's interested in. She lives in, and loves, Bombay. read more...
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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