Black River

by Nilanjana Roy

Genres: General Fiction; Thrillers; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN, THE SUNDAY TIMES, AND THE FINANCIAL TIMES

A searing debut set in a modern India simmering with the tension of growing religious intolerance, by a major new international voice

This shockingly powerful “psychological thriller” and “riveting murder mystery” is “a magnificent work of literary fiction” perfect for fans of AGE OF VICE and WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING (Kiran Desai, Booker Prize winning author)

Teetapur, an unassuming village just a few hours outside of bustling Delhi, is famous for nothing—until one of its children, 8-year-old Munia, is found dead, hanging from the branch of a Jamun tree.

In the largely Hindu village, suspicion quickly falls on an itinerant Muslim man, Mansoor Suspicion ignites like wildfire, fueled by religious tensions that simmer beneath the surface.

The responsibility of uncovering the elusive truth – and prevent the lynching of the prime suspect – now rests on the weary shoulders of Sub-Inspector Ombir Singh. With only one other officer beneath him, and just a single working revolver between them, can he bring justice to a grieving father and an angry village – or will Teetapur demand vengeance instead?

Offering readers a gripping mystery and a sweeping state-of-the-nation saga, Black River stands as a searing critique of modern India, weaving an intricate narrative that captures the essence of a nation grappling with its own complexities and contradictions.

Release date: September 24, 2024

Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo

Print pages: 352

Sample

TEETARPUR, 2017


Blight  
 
Munia’s eighth birthday falls on the hottest day in June, with the smell of burning cane scenting the air. She forgets the heat in her excitement over the slice of cassata her father has brought all the way from Teetar Bani, the main town. Chand had ordered the precious gift from the only shop in the town that possessed a freezer, and carefully packed it in a tin pail filled with jute sacking and ice purchased from Raju Golasharbatwala’s cart.
The cassata melts, a puddle of bright colours. She eats
it slowly, bending her head to the dented tin plate and lapping up the last delicious drops of strawberry. It is a rare taste, a flavour she has not encountered before. Her father asks, ‘One more slice?’
She nods, but halfway through, she holds out her plate to Chand, presses the spoon into his hand. ‘You also eat. One spoon for you, one for me.’ He takes tiny bites.
r There is nothing Teetarpur is famous for. The older residents say proudly that their village is not known to have inspired a line in a film song or even a mithai, has never produced

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so much as a celebrity or a famous politician. They cherish its anonymity, though the younger generation would have preferred a more rousing history.
Chand’s hut, and his brother Balle Ram’s equally modest establishment, are almost the last houses in the village. They are set on a slope just before the soaring forests arc upwards on the first hill of the Aravalli range. A canal flows behind Chand’s home, opening out onto untended fields.
Their huts are about an hour’s walk from the tumbledown police chowki that marks the start of Teetarpur, a fifteen- minute ride on Chand’s ancient Rajdoot 350cc bike. In their boyhood, the two huts were part of a dozen-strong cluster, but most of their neighbours had moved to the village proper, disliking the isolation, the dark shadows cast by the forest at night.
Balle Ram and Chand stayed on after their father’s death, unwilling to abandon their ancestral land. Chand plants a few food crops in the field near his hut and leaves the trees to flourish as they please. Balle Ram and he reap fair harvests from their other fields, which are a long walk away, part of the patchwork of village lands that lie behind the police chowki.
Chand’s only other   neighbour   is   the   richest   man in Teetarpur, Jolly Singh, who brings some of Delhi’s briskness with him. Jolly Villa rose brick by brick fifteen years ago, its brightly painted gates and balustraded roof one of Teetarpur’s wonders. It rests like a gaudy crown on a low ridge, looking down at Chand’s hut and the village below.
In the mornings and early evenings, pilgrims pass by Chand’s hut to pray at the shrine of an animal-loving








 

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sage who lived high up on the first of the great hills of the Aravalli range. But they are otherwise undisturbed. During the day, only peacocks and snakes travel up the hill to the quiet shrine.
Chand has grown to cherish their isolation and independence, though he tells Munia many tales of Delhi, of other faraway places they find in her school atlas— the Arabian Sea, the winding silver ropes of the Yamuna, the Ganges, the towering snow-covered ranges of the Himalayas. She has hazy memories of the capital, which she had visited once with her father when she was just five years old.
‘An ocean of cars and a sea of houses,’ Chand says to Munia. ‘At first you put your hands over your ears because of the noise from the traffic, but you liked Delhi after a while. We’ll go again, someday.’
‘But I like it here the most,’ she says firmly. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere else.’
‘When you’re grown up, you’ll want to see the capital.
Everyone does.’
‘I want to see the Himalayas.’
And Chand says, delighting Munia, ‘Some day we’ll take the Rajdoot, you and I, and we’ll go all the way to the mountains, you’ll see.’
r Chand’s fields, the trees and the mehendi bushes that surround them, are set down from the road, hard to see even from Balle Ram’s home. Chand knows that when he leaves to farm his other fields, this small patch of earth becomes his daughter’s private kingdom.

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He has seen Munia whirr across the ragged green carpet of the cowpea fields when she thinks no one is watching. Her thin, sunburnt arms, speckled from the sun, and bare feet put him in mind of the tiny brown bird she’s named after.
Munia is quiet with strangers and with family, rarely speaks in front of Balle Ram or his wife Sarita. She is an explorer at heart, fond of illicit excursions, absorbed in the games she invents, and plays with birds and insects.
She talks only to her father. Him she tells everything, the conversations she overhears, stories she has made up. Her piping words patter as rapidly as monsoon rain against a thatched roof. She tells Chand about the four men hanging at a steep angle off bamboo scaffolds that appear to be anchored in the sky itself, stringing long ropes of lights like twinkling green stars in Jolly Singh’s massive farmhouse, and about the new carp pond there, gleaming with fat red- and-gold fish. About the bus that collided with a truck at the crossing up ahead, both drivers unwilling to be the one who braked first, and how the loosely packed sacks of marigolds, the truck’s cargo, had burst and spilt in an orange river across the road.
That time, she had carried one of the marigolds back home to show him, allowing him to cradle her in his arms as he inspected the small, crushed petals. ‘You smell of woodsmoke,’ she had said to him.‘I smell of mud and sweat and dirt,’ he had replied, but his daughter was already asleep, her head a tired smudge against his checked kurta.
r Every summer, the heat grows more fierce. The dhak trees in the forests that the villagers have protected and








 

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held sacred for centuries shrivel in this furnace. Even the peafowl that roam the slopes are too listless to call out to each other, and the silence in the forest settles heavily around Chand and Munia.
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 across 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 stands. The rot takes hold easily, the land smoulders.
Smoke from the cane fires hangs thick and acrid over the village. Chand has to leave Munia behind when he sets out to tend his sugarcane fields. He ignores his daughter’s pleading eyes, even though it’s her birthday week, gently turns down her soft demand to be carried there on the high throne of his shoulders, to be included as an essential part of his working life.
Chand tells her, ‘You’re eight years old—all grown up now. Don’t give your aunt any trouble while I’m away. You promise?’
She nods reluctantly.
Munia’s silent prayers work. Her aunt leaves to collect wood for the stove. In a flash, she is out, exploring.
The sun leaves thorny prickles on her skinny, bare legs as she steps into the cool grey mud where her father had watered the plants that morning. She likes the way it squishes up between her toes, a friendly massage from the earth. A strip of sun-baked earth, powdery and ferociously hot beneath the soles of her feet, spans the gap between the bund and the neem and jamun trees. The thin silver chains

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of her anklets set off a faint carillon as she fits one foot, and then the next, into the wide cracks in the scorching earth. She shudders at the delicious change in temperature, the coolness secreted away deep inside the furrowed land. Placing her cheek against the bark of the trees, she feels the difference between smooth bark and scaly bark, the texture of each tree as singular and well known to her as her own family’s faces: her uncle’s rich dark skin, her aunt’s papery, delicate skin, the comforting touch of her
father’s rough-skinned, gentle fingers.
She walks warily over the fallen nimbolis, careful not to tread on the green berries, hard as stones. It is quiet in the orchard, with no spring breeze to cool the air, only the first heavy stirrings of the summer heat rising up from the dust. A worker’s scaffold, the shape of a swing, lies at the foot of the tree, anointed by a thick coil of rope. A leftover from the construction on the Lovely Pure Veg Bhojanalaya. She has seen her father use it to repair the roof thatch.
She ducks beneath the jamuns. Their slender, long- fingered branches reach out and brush her tangled, sun- browned hair.
Munia has plucked a skirtful of berries when she sees the man. He is in the nearby plot, leaning back against the makeshift planks of cart wood that wrestle the thorny bushes into a low fence. Strangers rarely come through these parts. There is nothing to tempt them in this untended plot of common land that separates the fields from the forest soaring above. But this man is no stranger.
r The heat dries out the sugarcane leaves. They thrust upwards into the sky, black against the harsh white glare.








 

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Chand squats in the mud, sees the grey mould sprayed across the sugarcane stems, the bruises on the stands of cane. Inhales the sour, fermented air, the kind of stench that rises off the skin of alcoholics drunk on the hooch sold in plastic packets up and down the length of the state. The exhalations from the sugarcane on this side of the fields seem almost human. He probes the stem with his cane knife.
The stem splits easily. Inside, there’s discolouration, and Chand has to turn away, take a breath of fresh air before his nostrils inhale the red rot again. He sights along the line, along the stands. An untrained eye would see little—just a hint of grey fuzz on the stems, a few black spots here and there. But he knows what he will find inside: red bruises, maroon discolouration. The damaged cane reminds him of the fragility of pulped flesh and broken bones. He brushes the thought away.
Chand stands at the edge of the fields. He is covered in the dust scattered by the wheels of trucks on their way to the stone quarry, masking the summer tan of his skin, turning him into a ghost. The trucks link Teetarpur with the brisk rumble of the new industries springing up around the Aravallis, and the elongated mansions where they grow only trees and flowers but no useful crops.
From the stench across the embankment, Chand guesses that many will have no sugarcane crop at all. This, in a year when many of the villagers have been selling their land, some for money, some because their children no longer want a life tied to farming.
Chand walks home as swiftly as he can, ignoring the scorching sun, harsh on his back. Munia hates it when he stays out in the fields too late. She likes to tell him about

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her adventures, real and imaginary, in these quiet evening hours. The sweat pools and prickles between his shoulder blades, and he quickens his step, glad to be returning to his daughter.