Busting crimes the way she knows best
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Anita Nair remembers showing her mother and brother her first poem – they demanded she write another one at once, because they refused to believe she had written it. “We didn’t do words,” Nair said of her family, explaining that at that point she became a closet writer, writing always in secret.” I read voraciously and the gods I worshipped those days were writers,” she confessed to a journalist from The Hindu. “And I was so much in awe of these writerly gods that I didn’t think I had the confidence to aspire to be one among them.”
As an adult, Nair has had to become accustomed to taking a place in the pantheon of Indian writers. The critically acclaimed and bestselling author of ‘The Better Man’(2000), ‘Ladies Coupe’(2001), ‘Mistress’(2005), ‘Lessons in Forgetting’(2011), ‘Cut Like Wound’ (2012), ‘Idris: Keeper of the Light’ (2014) and ‘Alphabet Soup For Lovers’, Nair was dubbed the No.1 female crime writer in the Indian pulp fiction scene by The Hindu in 2016.
She has also published a collection of poems titled ‘Malabar Mind’ (2002) and a collection of essays titled ‘Goodnight & God Bless’ and has written two plays and the screenplay for the movie adaptation of her novel, ‘Lessons in Forgetting’, which won the National Film Award for 2012.She was awarded the Central Sahitya Akademi award for her contribution to Children’s Literature in 2013, and her books have been translated into 30 languages.
Her new novel, ‘Chain of Custody’ (2016) has just been published and is her second crime novel. Chain of Custody is a sequel to Nair’s previous crime novel Cut Like Wound (2012).
What begins as a search for a missing twelve-year-old girl, takes a more sinister turn when Inspector Gowda finds himself embroiled in Bangalore’s child-trafficking underworld, a complex network of kidnapping, child abuse, sexual exploitation, murder and the taste of pure hell. Negotiating insensitive laws, indifferent officials, uncooperative witnesses, not to mention wife, son and lover on the home front, Gowda must race against time to a finish line he can’t yet see.
To do her research for this book she went to rescue units and shelters, talked to social workers, met abused children and generally “did everything I thought I ought to do to understand the problem at multiple levels.” She knew she had found the heart of her book when she met an actual trafficker at a shelter. “He was little more than a youth himself and it seemed to me he was merely taking forward what had happened to him,” she says.
Nair considers Inspector Gowda her male alter ego. While he is not based on a real policeman, Nair says she would happily run away with him. Her real-life experiences with policemen have been very limited: “I have met and interacted with several senior police officers and policemen from the ranks as well. Most of them impressed me immensely and in all honesty, a few of them made me want to laugh at their pomposity and a few others I wanted to kick for their churlishness,” she says, talking about how those encounters fed into her work.
“When I was building Inspector Gowda’s psyche, I knew for certain that all cops didn’t have to be the boorish creatures they are made out to be. Some of them are wonderful human beings and work tirelessly to make things right, and I was certain Gowda would be one of them.”
Nair says she understands why Indian crime writers are yet to enjoy global success. “Crime fiction is still in its primary stage. It will go global when the characters and issues written about start having greater dimensions than just the usual run-of-the-mill crime procedural and puzzle solving,” she has told journalists.