A Wicked World

Book

Title: Assassin

Author: K R Meera

Translator: J Devika

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2023

Pages: 654

There is hardly any goodness in the world of this brilliantly crafted novel. Its world is driven by avarice of all sorts: for wealth, power, status… Halfway through the gripping drama, the protagonist is told rather curtly by a police officer. “You haven’t met good men. That is it.” Satyapriya, the 44-year-old protagonist who has just survived a murder attempt, replies promptly that the Inspector was right. “I have never seen a really good man. Can you show me one?”

Leaving aside a couple of characters, every man in this novel is driven by some sort of avarice. The women are the victims of these men and the systems created by them. It may be worth mentioning here that K R Meera is a feminist. Right in the beginning of the novel, we hear Satyapriya telling the investigating police officer that “Luck in love is directly proportional to submissiveness, not beauty.” A few pages later, we meet Samir, a Maoist from Kashmir, for whom “love and submission were one and the same.”

The novel begins with the demonetisation of 2016. The assassin shoots at Satyapriya on 16 Nov 2016. There are many similarities between the two actions: demonetisation and the murder attempt. Demonetisation appears again and again in the novel like a leitmotif. On the last but one page of the massive book, we are told, “The first step towards disarming the enemy is to make him poor.” We are reminded intermittently that demonetisation did not help a bit to control black money which was its purported objective. Demonetisation was a clever strategy to steal the very soil from beneath a lot of people’s feet. A lot of the manmade systems are meant to do precisely that: steal something substantial from others.

Why would anyone want to kill Satyapriya, however? She doesn’t have anything substantial that can be taken from her. Her father, Sivaprasad, was fabulously rich once upon a time but his personal insecurities and egotistic nature brought him to his ruin as well as that of his family. Having left the medical college without taking his MBBS degree, Sivaprasad eventually made it big in the Chennai film industry. Women were his weaknesses. Young girls, especially. He abused quite a few pubescent girls and thus created enemies galore. Eventually he is not only stripped of most of his wealth, but also stabbed and made absolutely immobile. However, why would those enemies attack his daughters? Sivapriya, the elder daughter, dies in an accident which later turns out to be not an accident. Now Satyapriya is the target. Why?

Meera weaves an astonishing murder mystery which is quite an epic. There are plenty of suspects all of whom steal our attention vying with one another. There is Sriram, for example, who was once a teacher and is now a successful politician. He deflowered Satyapriya on the floor of a lab in the college and was caught red-handed by his wife. What Satyapriya did later brought the man’s marriage to a disgraceful end. Is Sriram out to take revenge?

There is Samir the Maoist with whom Satyapriya had passionate sex in treetop huts in the forests. Prabhudev Maheswari of Vedanta mining company had certain unsavoury interests and hence issues with Satyapriya. Even the godman of Mahipala Ashram is a suspect. And the ashram has a unique way of eliminating unwanted people. It gives the job to A who appoints B who will get C and so on. In the end, no one knows who actually wanted the murder to take place. A few more suspects emerge as we move on in the extremely shadowy world of this novel.

There are family people too who have more than enough motives to eliminate Satyapriya. Sivaprasad’s associates in the industry could be the killers. In short, almost every man here is a potential killer. “Caste, religion, money power, muscle power…” These are the factors that rule today’s world.

Who is the real killer out of all the countless villains in this novel? We are kept on tenterhooks by Meera’s consummate narrative. As I reached the final pages, I began to wish for a quicker end. Too many characters and too many happenings and even more interconnections. It became a bit too heady for me.

Intoxicating. That would be the one word to describe this novel.

PS. This post is part of the Bookish League blog hop hosted by Bohemian Bibliophile