Forty-year-old Nikhil Juneja, a playboy-wannabe police officer, and his oafish-but-saintly sidekick Joseph must solve a murder in posh South Delhi. The victim, 23-year-old Saudamani, was retarded, unattractive, unmarried and pregnant. Ouch. Her three elder brothers put on a show of brotherly grief but we discover they’re not sincere. How do we know? Because St Joseph interrogates the servants and discovers that chicken was cooked in a house that should have been meatless in mourning.
Some 250 pages of melodrama later we are told that the butler—or rather, Ram Singh the cook—did it. Not just the murder, but the knocking-up too. However, he’s not really guilty because the girl’s father paid him to service the homely girl. Why? Out of paternal concern for a daughter whom "nobody else loves". But when she gets pregnant, the cook panics and murders her.
The Man-Asian website suggests the novel was meant to be a satire. Alas, it is merely inept. The plot is severely undercooked, the language sub-literate: "guffawed" instead of "roared", "impotent" instead of "sterile". Yet the author means well and has worked hard. She needs help developing her craft before she can afford to write her next book.
