Book Review: An Invitation to Death

Book: An Invitation to Death

Author: Anil Thakraney

Publisher: Srishti

Rs 121

Pages: 159

If there were a hierarchy of crimes based on the morbid interest they inspire, serial killing would be up there, somewhere on top. Spectacular blood and gore, psychopathy, (often) sexual perversion and inexplicable, unrelenting and random 'evil' - the combination is irresistible. Think of all the obsessive media interest in the Nithari murderers, the anonymous Stoneman killer who in the 1980s went about crushing the heads of pavement-dwellers in Calcutta, Charles Sobhraj, whose victims were found wearing bikinis, and so on.

Anil Thakraney's debut novel draws upon this fascination. The serial killer in An Invitation to Death -- and no, there's no mystery about his identity or modus operandi -- is a middle-class Parsi boy from Colaba called Darius Irani who kills young women he picks up randomly on the street.

A persistent myth about serial killers, at least in crime fiction, is that they leave signatures - a common thread that runs through all their crimes announcing, as it were, that they were all the handiwork of one man. In Darius's case, there are several signatures, all hideously gruesome - the victims' heads smashed with something heavy, their limbs sawed off, a sharp, long object inserted into the genitals, and a hint of sexual activity in the semen on their faces.

Naturally, the media jumps to report the murders and a police team led by retired ACP Azeem Khan is put together to investigate the case. Bodies pile up, as Darius goes on a rampage from Delhi to Goa then Bangalore, Pune and Mumbai. The police mount a nationwide manhunt and finally identify their man. But Darius is a smart operator - he has an IQ of 150 and is a master of disguise. Finally, with the police hot on his heels, Darius decides to take on Khan by laying siege to his remote, Coonoor coffee estate, where the only person in residence is his wife Zeenat, alone and defenceless. What happens? Does Khan nab Darius or does the latter kill Zeenat?

Action-filled and fast-paced, this novel is a page-turner until the last - quite hard to put down, in fact. Thankfully, it's also short - just 162 pages long - so most readers will be able to finish it in a single sitting. For Thakraney, a well-known columnist who's worked in advertising and magazines, it was deliberate strategy. "I told myself, let me write a book that a 20-year-old guy can wrap up in a single night. I could be wrong, but I feel people no longer have the time to read big books."

The book arose from Thakraney's fascination with crime and crime fiction. "Agatha Christie: some of her books I have read 15 times," he says and adds, "There's very little crime-writing happening in India even though there's so much of it happening all around."

"We also haven't had a proper serial killer book, no upmarket serial-killer, so to speak. Most of the serial killers have come from the lower strata of society - people like Raman Raghav and Auto Shankar. So I thought - what if a local home-grown boy, in a city like Mumbai, white collared, educated, intelligent - turned a serial killer."

Interestingly, especially for a novel that is so overtly pulp, is the way it refrains from painting a simple moral universe, a conflict between good and evil. Killing is evil here, of course, and Darius must be stopped, but Thakraney's cops are no saints. They cheat on their wives and feel no qualms about killing a criminal they feel will get away in court. And, unlike Darius, they get away with it.