Delhi by night is dangerous, threatening, seething with discontent. There is something almost otherworldly about its tree-shrouded neighbourhoods and deserted multi-lane roads cast in the chiaruscuro shades of the sodium vapour lamps glinting through unruly amaltas trees. This is the real city that provides the context for Avatar Singh's literary city where crime, history, power, violence, beauty and death reign supreme. Published by Fourth Estate, this genre-straddling work is aptly named Necropolis and reveals a side of the city where the dead are never quite gone. The book which is at once an ode to a city as well as a vindication of its shortcomings is a city novel like no other. And who better to write this than Avatar Singh, the Dilliwallah who knows its numerous nooks and crannies and their varied secrets and offerings. As editor of Time Out's very first Delhi edition, he encouraged people to go out and explore the city and find its many stories in its many mohallas.
One of the reasons Avatar Singh succeeds in his crazy literary experiment of a book is the deftness with which he juxtaposes types, characters and styles. He pits poetry against hard-boiled crime fiction, a literary ethos with genre exercises and history with news from the sensationalist urban rags. Necropolis is both an episodic novel as well as a collection of short stories linked through their common protagonists, antagonists and fictional landscape.
It is perhaps fitting that its cover features the forbidding yet enticing image of a dark purple rose — an image that is morbidly fascinating as a symbol of a strange and almost decaying beauty. It is also apt that a murder is announced in the first three lines of the book followed up by a detailed description of the dead body especially its most unusual feature — "Around his throat was a necklace of fingers". This finger collector or Angulimaal is one of the recurring characters in the novel — a mysterious young man whose face is always shrouded by a kaffiyeh — and whose actions remain cryptic as he plays nemesis as well as informer to DCP Dayal with equal ease.
DCP Sajan Dayal is our unmistakable hero, a Dilliwallah to the boot with a hint of an old-world tehzeeb, a love for Ghalib and in his own words "a chowkidar with a taste for history". He is an anomaly of sorts — an original denizen in a city of migrants, a well-bred and upright police officer — both characteristics of a rare and vanishing breed. He is well aided by Kapoor, an older and legendary police officer with a longstanding if violent reputation of dealing with criminals, and Smita Dhingra, a fresh IPS recruit who struggles with her experiences as a woman law enforcer in a city which "isn't famous for treating its daughters well." This trio form the crime fighting protectors of the city, its last defence against an endless anarchy.
Their milieu is made up of other shadowy creatures of the night — the lycans, the vampires, the drug dealers, the kidnappers, the rapists and the murderers as well as the other equally dangerous creatures who roam the corridors of power by day and act as puppetmasters controlling the fates of its 25 million odd inhabitants. Into this mix is thrown the novel's most pivotal character, an anthropomorphic representation of Delhi through her various pasts and presents, her muse and her burden — the irresistible Razia. She is all charm and romance and poetry. She personifies night and time and in all her endless ages, she is both a victim of the city as well as its vigilante defender. It is her passionate relationship with DCP Dayal, her omnipresence across the pages and crimes that make her fascinating. In one of her first encounters with the DCP, there is an inspired exchange of words between the duo:
“These girls call me Razia. I don’t know why.”
“It fits. Delhi’s own Sultana. Regal, powerful.”
“Dead, too, these past eight hundred years.”
“A blink of the eye in this city’s history, surely.”
Singh fuses fantasy with gritty realism. His exploration of the city noir is deliberate as he traverses the length and the breadth of this heaving metropolis capturing the stench of the Yamuna, the decrepit evil lurking in the carefully tucked away urban slums, the fragrant beds of hollyhocks and rows of silk cottons in Lutyens Delhi, the mirrored ostentation of South Delhi's nouveau mansions, the anonymity of its migrant workforce, the staggering power of its elite and the shadow of the crime that lurks at every corner of the various Delhis encased in each other like Matryoshka dolls.
He scratches at the raw surface of a shared history to reveal the crimes wrought by time and finds no healing balm even as his crusaders race to stop the marauders who threaten to destroy all. He takes the reader through the different textures of the city through its changing seasons and neighbourhoods. His novel is the chronicle of an unforgettable and unusual love affair with Delhi, a city where the possibility of romance exists near the darkest pools of hell.
A loopy and lesser edited version was published in the New Indian Express Bangalore on 24 March, 2015
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