Diplomania

ONE does not often come across a thriller in Indian fiction, and after reading Krishnan Srinivasan's The Eccentric Effect one begins to understand why: it requires the tightest of narratives with the lightest of touches, coupled with an ability to surprise the reader from the first page to the last. The thriller-writer's path is strewn with landmines: digressions, homilies, moralising can mean instant death of the reader's fragile attention. Krishnan steps blithely into each of these traps. But funnily enough, it is the digressions in this predictable and thinly-plotted "diplomatic thriller" that are the most engaging, and manage somehow to salvage it from the oblivion that awaits most thriller-writers here.

Not too many readers will be attracted to the storyline, run-of-the-mill stuff that thrillers are made of: three African envoys disappear mysteriously from a party at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London, setting a Somalian diplomat on their trail, uncovering diplomatic intrigues, kidnappings, rape, an extra-marital affair, and a mugging on a dark London street. But there's another, parallel story readers are likely to find fascinating, especially when they know that the author is a former foreign secretary who retired in 1995: the intrigues in South Block, and the games bureaucrats play with their ministers, colleagues and country.

The plot is set in the Commonwealth Secretariat in London and the ministry of external affairs in New Delhi, "with the sole purpose," the author assures us, "of giving greater realism to the narrative". But hang the narrative, the setting will suffice. From the peons who make a pretence of running up to their officers' car to carry in his briefcase and jacket, to the water-bearers who half-heartedly sprinkle water on the mosquito-infested coolers to the receptionists who briefly "lift their backsides" in salute, to the four phones of varying priority ranged on the desk, South Block is recreated with an insider's unerring and dyspeptic eye. So is the morning meeting in the foreign secretary's room among hillocks of files and rawsilk sofa sets and shelves of unread reference books, the daily drone of diplomacy conducted by the four heads of the ministry, laughing enthusiastically at stale jokes cracked by the FS about diplomacy being like the mating of elephants. ("It's all done at a very high level, with much trumpeting and thrashing around, but the results are not evident for 12 years.") But it is the intense rivalry and politics between the four top bureaucrats of the ministry that's most instructive: they'll stop at nothing to embarrass each other, including rifling through sealed letters and tipping off Pakistanis, taking care, however, to protect their behinds by building direct lines to the minister. It is the minister, surprisingly enough, who emerges a better man than his officers in the intrigues rampant in the ministry. A man of the masses, "relatively honest", who spends an hour and a half each day on his morning puja, the minister is shrewd and only too aware of the games being played in his ministry. "We spend our time," he complains to his official, "keeping factions apart; without the ministers you people would be at each others' throats." The bureaucrat's attitude to those above him is best summed up in the way the FS responds to the call from the red phone that is the hotline to the prime minister. "The PM is calling me," he announces to his colleagues; in his voice is a mixture of "awe and complacency".

Less engaging is Krishnan's unfortunate habit of interspersing his narrative with moral, political platitudes, his patent disgust at bureaucrats who live in the "tundra of their air-conditioning," oblivious to "the sweating masses". But many of these vignettes, including a cabinet meeting, are sharp enough for insiders to do some name-spotting. For most others, the real revelation in the book has nothing to do with its plot: the real story is that bureaucrats are too busy with their quarrels to have time for anything else.