Jerry Pinto’s latest book is a murder mystery — a genre he has never tested before and one he feels requires an extraordinary amount of work
I am, says Jerry Pinto, a work in progress. He had thought that the excitement of a newborn book in his hands would fade, that by the time he came to his tenth, it would be different. He was mistaken. He finds it just as terrifying and just as exciting. So, when he sat to write a murder mystery, a genre he had not tested before, Jerry finds the task challenging. And just as exciting as when he wrote his award-winning Em and the Big Hoom.
The idea for Murder in Mahim came when Altaf Tyrewalla asked Jerry to write for an anthology he was editing, Mumbai Noir. “That’s where I invented the retired journalist Peter and his schoolfriend Jende as a crime-solving pair. Then came the great excitements and disappointments over Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code and when I began to consider writing a murder mystery, all this began to coalesce,” says Jerry.
Peter sees a picture of his son taking part in a gay rights parade. There is another young man found dead in a toilet, with the last call from his phone made to Peter’s son. Growing up, Jerry had read the usual bunch of American and British mystery writers including Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham and Edmund Crispin. He says, “From across the pond, the hard-boiled school: Chandler and Hammett and Ed McBain. Later, Vachss and Larsson and... you get it, I’m an omnivore reader.”
Even with all that reading, writing a mystery book is hard work, “an extraordinary amount of work”, in Jerry’s words. “You have to build your story across several axes and that takes some doing.” The book is again set in Mahim, where his Em and Big Hoom was also set. Not that he loves Mahim in the obvious “Ooh, look how wunnerful my patch of the city is” kind of way. It’s just that he lives there, has always lived there and knows it fairly well. “Setting things here is easy because I don’t have to bob about in another area, discovering things and uncovering things.
The ideas also spring out of here because I can be walking down a street and thinking, ‘Why has the big sweet shop become five small sweet shops with the same name?’ and ‘How many turtles can there be in one well on Gopi Tank Lane?’ and ‘Why is that woman swinging a belt in the air madly? Oh she’s driving crows away from her drying bits of mango’ or whatever.”
He has also been busy with the translation of Daya Pawar’s Baluta, the first autobiography to be written by a Dalit. “When I read Baluta, I was struck by its passion, its extraordinary writing, the scope and sweep of the book... everything about it. I wanted more people to know about it and so I began to work. I was also aware that the book had waited for decades to be translated in English, so I had no time to lose.”
Working on Baluta has been exhilarating and tiring. Jerry says it was like a virus in his system. He wrote so much — his first draft is always handwritten — and he ended up with carpal tunnel syndrome. “My right hand turned into a claw. For the three or four days that this lasted, I simply dictated to my long-suffering sister.”
Despite the trouble, he finds it surprising and exciting every time he has a new book to write. “I thought words would become my allies and my buddies; they’re not. They’re still my lovers: they tantalise, they promise, they sulk, and then just when I am thinking, I can’t do this, I can’t take this, they show you once again what excitement they contain and what magic they can produce. (Then the next morning, some of it has faded.
Or the glitter has been fool’s gold and I must start again.) I now know why I do this. I think I do this because I find out who I am and just when I’m sure the ‘I’ changes, the lexicon changes and I must start again.”
