Love and death in Teetarpur

In a small village on the ever-growing outskirts of Delhi, an 8-year-old girl is playing by herself in her father’s fields when she sees two adults doing something unusual. A few pages later, one of the adults is dead, and so is the little girl.

The start of Nilanjana Roy’s novel suggests a mystery, but readers will probably suspect the motive and identity of the murder fairly early in the novel. The book is, in fact, much more social commentary than murder mystery. It is beautifully written, following the characters with empathy and understanding.

The 8-year-old is Munia, daughter of Chand, whose mother died in childbirth. She is the darling of her father, uncle and aunt who have brought her up with loving care; everyone around knows her and is fond of the little girl playing in the fields. The village is horrified by her death and demands justice. The dead adult, in contrast, is a dancer and sometime sex worker, and seems to be little missed by anyone.

Set in 2017, the novel follows the fallout from these deaths. Angry villagers demand justice, and focus on the first man on the scene, who happens to be Muslim.

Mansoor kneels on the ground, his white kurta torn, his black salwar streaked with dust and mud. […] Usually, Mansoor has a gentleness about him. [..] In Teetarpur, he had received the respect due to all madmen, until this day.

The local policemen are Ombir Singh and Bhim Sain, overworked and underpaid.

It is expected that the big men in a district will send something to sweeten their lives. Every month, Bhadana hands them two unmarked envelopes plump with cash, as is standard in most police stations.

The cash comes with expectations, of course, that the policemen will fulfill their duties in accordance with the requirements of the major landowner. Still, Ombir Singh and Bhim Sain do their best to implement justice, as per their own morals.

The novel is written entirely in the present tense, normally not an approach that appeals to me, but is well-written enough that I rarely noticed it.

Each major character has a backstory, and the novel moves from the present to their past in turn. This could be distracting and take away from the forward momentum of the novel, but here each such digression adds to the broader picture while filling out the personalities. Chand is at the center of the novel, and befittingly, a significant portion of the novel is devoted to his past. He had migrated to the slums of Delhi, working in the shop of a Muslim butcher, living on the banks of the Yamuna river (the ‘black river’ of the title) and watching it slowly die, until eventually he came home to the tiny farm to raise his daughter. His best friends from that Delhi period are Rabia and Badshah Miyan, who now come to help but have to hide their Muslim identity in the tense communal situation.

Ombir Singh’s wife lives far away and he sees her only occasionally; he has been terse in his phone calls to her since a fertility test has made him doubt the parentage of their child. Even this little sidestory nicely reflects the realities of modern India: the availability of such tests, but also their unreliability.

The novel does not shy from describing the growing communal tension — people who have lived together for decades are now identified primarily by their religion — and the ease with which these tensions can be manipulated by the powerful. At the same time, the focus on the individual characters and their backstories also engenders a slim hope that individual behaviour can alter the course of events.

Roy does a lovely job of evocatively describing the landscapes.

The village lies at the edge of the Delhi-Haryana border, an hour’s drive down silent, forested roads covered in powdery summer dust. Its soul has remained half a century behind [..] Delhi’s frenetic, restless activity.

Every summer, the heat grows more fierce. The dhak trees in the forests that the villagers have protected and held sacred for centuries shrivel in this furnace. Even the peafowl that roam the slopes are too listless to call out to each other.

As the temperature soars, the red rot spreads across Chand’s land. The blight races from field to field, no matter how diligently the farmers of Teetarpur uproot the infected clumps of sugarcane. The stench – fermenting, gangrenous – rides along the fields along with the smell of burning crops. Bugs fatten on the spoils and white grubs scuttle out of the way of the flames, fastening onto new strands. The rot takes hold easily, the land smoulders.

In a place where humans are struggling for survival, it is unavoidable that animals — those pressed into service of humans, like the oxen and horses, as well as those that simply live alongside like the stray dogs — get shorter shrift, often starving, often abused. The animals are part of the background of this novel, and their plight is described realistically, but with a sadness and sensitivity that made me like the author even more.

If I have a tiny complaint, it is that the ending is a little too neat, but it is very satisfying nevertheless.

~ Black River, by Nilanjana S. Roy ~ Penguin Random House, 2024.