Not quite safe
by Chloe Campbell
on Delhi Noir
The TLS, December 11, 2009
Delhi Noir is a collection of fourteen short stories set in Delhi, each one based in a particular area or neighborhood. By relocating a style that is more commonly connected with mid-twentieth-century America, to present-day urban India, the material is powerfully invigorated. The ground covered by these stories extends from the cover-up of a government massacre (in Omair Ahmad's private-detective story "Yesterday Man") to a middle-class heroin addict to a gigolo ring run by a housewife (Mohan Sikka's "The Railway Aunty"), to a street kid from the city's Inter State Bus Terminal who turns on his Fagin-like-mentor ("Small Fry" by Meera Nair).
Through there is that sense of corruption, the cheapness of life, and the impossibility of safety that haunts noir writing. Almost everywhere there are corrupt and brutal policemen, crooked and savage politicians; the idea that nearly everybody is likely to doublecross anyone is a recurrent theme, powerfully expressed in Hirsh Sawhney's "Gautam under a Tree", which creates a frightening sense of the unknowability of others. Some stories act as wish-fulfillment revenge fantasies on a theme of police corruptionfor example Ruchir Joshi's "Parking" or Nalinaksha Bhattacharya's "Hissing Cobras" (which has a moment of female retribution). Bleaker tales suggest the pure impossibility of justice ("Just Another Death" by Hartosh Singh Bal, "The Scam" by Tabish Khair, "The Walls of Delhi" by Uday Prakash). Pulsing through all this is a disquieting sense of sexual voraciousness, both male and female.
Irwin Allan Sealy's "Last in, First Out" is one of the more classically noirish tales here, and it is one of the collection's more perfectly executed stories. An account of an autorickshaw driver's attempts to put a stop to a pair of rapists who prowl the forested parkland of the Delhi Ridge at night, it captures the creepy ambiguity of even well-intentioned acts of vigilantism. Sealy's Delhi wide boy is nicely done, down the to deadpan "I was getting nowhere fast", expressed after a small but perfectly rambling bit of dialogue on whether a suspect's suit is blackish gray", "grayish black" or "blackish black". While the writing is at moments almost lyrically contemplative, Sealy's command of noir style is demonstrated in this wryly correct use of cliché.
Delhi Noir is part of a series of anthologies covering cities, from Dublin to Lagos. The range of the series shows the power of the genre to express the seductiveness and unease of urban life, but this volume both draws on and confronts the genre's promise to revel in the social underside. The appeal of noir is that it makes danger enjoyably safe: reading from the comfort of one's armchair, and protected by the literary safety net of familiar tropes. In reading these stories, however, one feels that the net has been cut, as the writing veers into something more disturbing. There is a rawness in the writers' engagement with brutality. This is most obvious in Siddharth Chowdhury's "Hostel", which is set in a student dormitory full of desperate young men in thrall to their landlord, a murderous gangster who flaunts his sexual conquests in front of them. In the act of reading the story, one is forced to confront a sense of sickly voyeurism behind this fascination with the social and sexual savagery unleashed by urban dysfunction.
The macabre tenor of writing in Delhi Noir at times subtly deviates from a de-stylized noir into a kind of contemporary Indian Gothic: there is a touch of Edgar Allan Poe in the deathly lust for so many beautiful women. A strong strand of male sexual hunger and despair merges with class envy to draw a sort of structuralist portrait of violence in the stories that despairingly describe the violent psychosexual effects of economic emasculation (particularly in Palash Krishnia Mehrotra's "Fit of Range"). The final story, "Cull" by Manjula Padmanabhan, is a dystopian rendering of a future Delhi as a regional megalopolis silently at war with its gigantic, segregated slum belt; more science fiction than noir, it makes a logical conclusion to the anthology. The cumulative effect is a collection which, in all its macabre desolation, conjures a world capital and makes an argument about the effects of extreme inequality and injustice in a gargantuan city.
