The land of a million mutinies and not even half-a-dozen good crime novels. The routine violence of contemporary India honour killings,teenage suicides,political skullduggery and more goes cold in news headlines when it can be turned into racy narratives. Witness the Night is one such novel that was waiting to be written. On a rainy night in Jullundur,13 members of the towns wealthiest and most respected family are murdered in their sprawling home,Company Bagh poisoned and then stabbed. The sole survivor is Durga,raped and battered. She is the 14-year-old daughter of Santji and heir to his large fortune. She is also the prime suspect in the murder investigation. A senior police officer invites his friend Simran Singh,a social worker from Delhi,to talk to the traumatised girl and get her to open up about the events of that night. Simran was once,like Durga,a young girl growing up in stifling Jullundur,with its ice-pink houses and velvet Victoriana furniture,Mummyjis obsessed with flower decorations and sons,and the silent,brusque dismissal of women. In Punjab,many people wonder how you could live without sons. Simran fled her future by breaking an engagement to a sardar with a Very Promising Career in Hosiery. She is now an outsider in her hometown,an unmarried Sikhni who smokes and loves her stiff drinks. As she tries to help Durga come out of her silence,she realises not all is kosher with Jullundurs most respected family and the power it wielded another daughter disappeared four years ago after she was found pregnant; Durgas pregnant sister-in-law left the house for England days before the massacre,shortly after a hastily conducted ultrasound at a family-run clinic. Kishwar Desai takes one of the most shameful failures of modern India,the murder of millions of girls before they are born,and turns it into a neat crime novel,one that spits anger as it entertains. The novel pans out in the cream of Punjabs society,a state with an appalling record on female foeticide. Desai gives faces and characters to this vast social complicity,but perhaps not enough motives. While we feel the overwhelming presence of evil,we do not come close to understanding it. The novel is told largely in Simran and Durgas voices and the other side remains distant. There are other cribs too: the plot becomes a little wild towards the end and the resolution leaves many questions unanswered; there are slip-ups in a characters description: is Durga fair,as Simran tells us,or is she dark,as the pages of her own diary say? Finally,dont judge this book by its misleading cover. A grim girl,pigtails barely visible,stares at you from out of an imponderable darkness that suggests poverty or caste violence,or both. On it is scrawled the kind of tosh that publishers think impresses readers: Sometimes the truth is too much to bear. The only truth that is difficult to bear is that the publishers had an engaging,intelligent murder mystery in their hands and came up with packaging fit for a crusty PhD.
