The Paperbackers

The snake-in-the-grass is a little less mythical in Where the Serpent Lives (Hachette India,Rs 595),poet and non-fiction writer Ruth Padel’s first novel. As befitting someone who is Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter,Padel writes with great sensitivity on the natural world. The opening pages,for instance,feature an evocative she-cobra-eye-view of a rainforest floor. But the Londoners who populate Padel’s novel are about as wild as the perm on a soap-opera star. The lead character Rosamund’s philandering husband is variously caricatured as “groping a breast like a bird-eating spider” and “a rock god capering like a satyr”. Read only if you like your melodrama served up with lashings of awkward poetry.

Lashings of chilli ketchup and his wife Rumpi’s garlic pickle are more detective Vish Puri’s style. Tarquin Hall’s latest whodunit,The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing (Hutchinson,Rs 499) has the rotund,safari-suited sleuth get to the bottom of a brand-new mystery,and enough calorific snacks to feed several busloads of chubby Delhi children. Was it really Kali who killed Dr Suresh Jha,ace “Guru Buster” and star of DIRE (Delhi Institute of Rationalism and Education),while he and his fellow Laughter Club members “ejaculated hee-haws like drunken men”? And what was the secret behind the powers of his adversary,Holiness Maharaj Swami,the dark star presiding over the Abode of Eternal Love?

Vish Puri is an endearing hero,with his cheery malapropisms and fondness for sobriquets. He addresses his assistant as Tube-light; his tea boy as Door-Stop; and his driver as Handbrake. The real star of the book,however,is Delhi,which is inimitably observed and instantly recognisable — from its seething hot summer,which melts tarmacs to “licorice”,to the pampered kiddies squealing down the water slides of Fun-N-Food Village,and the bicycle-borne broom-and-mop salesman who resembles “a kind of punk porcupine”.