Book review: A Maharashtrian murder mystery based on real events

The air of the village in 'Hurda' is thick with age-old discrimination based on taxonomies of caste, religion, and gender. (Photo by Nikhil More via Wikimedia Commons)

What is the difference between story and plot in a work of fiction? One way to look at it is that a story covers the who, the what, and the where, while a plot deals with the how, the when, and the why. The story of Hurda, Atharva Pandit’s debut novel, is one that has appeared in newspaper reports over the years. However, it is the way that the plot is handled that makes the novel powerful and haunting.

Bloomsbury India; 326 pages; Rs 699.

Hurda is about an investigation into the disappearance of three young girls on Valentine’s Day in 2013 from Murwani, a village in the interior of Maharashtra. Reporter Chitranshu Chitale travels to cover the incident from Mumbai, almost 850 kilometres away, and returns after a few days to file a by-the-numbers account of the affair.

Though the girls’ bodies are discovered in a well on the outskirts of the village, the mystery remains unsolved. Unable to forget about the case, Chitranshu returns six years later to speak to the people involved and gather material for a book on the subject. Could it be a book, Chitranshu wonders metafictionally, that would “try and understand the story of the village and its people and then juxtapose it with the story of the crime?”

The novel see-saws between the two timelines and is composed of interviews, reports, and shifting viewpoints of a diverse set of characters in the area. From these kaleidoscopic shards, a picture emerges that is decidedly unpretty.

The subject has echoes of Sonia Faleiro’s The Good Girls and to an extent Nilanjana Roy’s Black River, while the structure is reminiscent of some of Stephen King’s early work. Pandit’s Hurda is, however, an impactful work in its own right because of the manner in which it uncovers layers of hypocrisy and deceit from the heart of India.

This is an investigation in which no-one is spared. The local policeman is crude and semi-alcoholic; other officers engage in what Americans refer to as enhanced interrogation techniques; leaders leverage the situation for electoral gains; a goon parading as a social worker seeks to settle old scores; and members of the region’s wealthiest family are involved in shenanigans and cover-ups. Chitranshu himself is hardly a paragon of virtue, indulging in a reprehensible sexual act on his first visit and later being accused of harassment by a colleague.

The air of the village is thick with age-old discrimination based on taxonomies of caste, religion, and gender. People are unthinkingly suspected or arrested because they are from the minority or not native to the region. Almost all of the residents look for self-advancement in terms of material gain, relationships or power — at the very least, they want things to go on as they always have, without prying eyes.

Many sections of the novel have an appealing and repetitive choral quality. People weigh in on topics such as rumours of witchcraft, the clothes worn by the girls, the problems of intermingling, and express other patriarchal, misogynistic attitudes. These voices fill the silence created by the disappearance of the three sisters, who are sketched in colours not of their choosing: Anisha, the eldest, who “always wanted everything to be clean, tip-top”; Priyanka, said to be the brightest, who “already knew that there was no future in Murwani”; and Sanchita, with “a bubbling inner life” and “no opinion of her own”.

The dialogue of Hurda — which refers to the jowar crop that is a winter delicacy of the region — is notable for its local flavour, with no concessions made to those unfamiliar with Marathi. “Daring baaz that girl, dumping her stuff into Aangle chi granary,” says one character for example. Others pepper their conversations with “local lukhya”, “jadoo tona”, “haan barobar” and the like, not to mention profanities related to parts of the human anatomy. In this way, Pandit creates an effect of verisimilitude – leaving aside the knotty issue of inserting such terms into English dialogue, a language that many of the characters are not likely to be familiar with in the first place.

There is much unpleasantness in Hurda, then, and readers who turn to fiction for upliftment and relatable characters should probably stay away. For the rest, the novel is a disturbing look at Indian realities that are often a universe away from genteel urban drawing rooms.