It Takes a Murder…

Interview: A murder is only part of everything else that happens in a small town over certain years. It’s never properly resolved. A murder was a dramatic way for me to ask questions. And there are still so many questions.

Author Anuradha Kumar in conversation with Amit Sengupta.

Anuradha (Anu) Kumar is a writer and novelist. She most recently wrote, ‘The Kidnapping of Mark Twain,’ a crime-historical fiction, and the non-fictional work, Wanderers, Adventurers, Missionaries: Early Americans in India, 1700-1950, ‘both published by Speaking Tiger Books. She lives in New Jersey with her family and is a graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program in Writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Catamaran Literary Reader, the Common, the Maine Review, the Chicago Quarterly Review, Numéro Cinq, Past Ten, and elsewhere. She writes regularly for Scroll.in, an Indian digital magazine. Her books include One Man Many Lives: Bhagwan Singh and the Early South Asians in America (Simon and Schuster India and Yoda Press); The Hottest Summer in Years (Yoda Press), and a book for younger readers, Her Name is Freedom: 35 women who fought for India’s Independence (Hachette India).  

You wrote an extremely interesting detective crime fiction located in the Bombay of 1890s. The protagonist is an unlikely subject, almost resurrected from literary oblivion: Mark Twain. You vividly describe the cultural and social ambience of the Bombay of those days. How did you do it? And, why, Mark Twain? Is it all fiction?

I’ll try and answer part by part. Mark Twain is one of the giants of literature, and, of course, literature in the US. Even now, he stands like a giant above others like John Updike, Philip Roth, and the rest. Ron Chernow, the historian, recently wrote a huge biography on him that I am wading through in stages, and pages.

When the idea for this book came to me, sometime in early 2018 or so, I was about a decade old in the US, and was still asking myself questions about what it means to be an ‘outsider’; how does a culture, familiar to one, appear to someone else, an outsider? Then too many things happened simultaneously, and I’ll try and get to them in some order.

Mark Twain’s Following the Equator, a book he wrote about his world travels (to pay off huge debts he’d accumulated) has always been a favourite. I like how he describes the world, acknowledging his biases, and still injecting his trademark humour into his observations. (I think as a white man travelling the world he had considerable leeway, and one might have an extended debate about this.)

Casi’s murder is mentioned in Twain’s book, by the way; all as part of how exciting and unpredictable Bombay—his first stop in India—could be. My novel adapted the young woman’s murder as a strand, but her detailed back story, its ‘resolution’ were something I made up, just as I made up the details of his kidnapping (which never happened in real life).

The other thing is that I was writing these series of essays for Scroll.in: on ‘Hindus’ (as South Asians were collectively called once in America) in the US, and later, I worked on the early Americans in India (then British India). I was curious then about ‘outsiders’: the perspectives they developed, survival strategies if any, that were subconsciously adopted. We should all strive to be empathetic outsiders, I feel; to have an engaged curiosity about the world and everyone who lives in it.

And to come to perhaps the last bit in your question. Modern Bombay, historically, has been a city made for outsiders, and by them. I lived there for a long time, I worked for the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), a magazine/journal I feel that could only thrive in Bombay, and it’s a city that for a long time has been welcoming to all outsiders, including me, at one time. For a long time, I felt I had no claim to write about Bombay, and then I finally thought, the city wouldn’t mind that at all.

I reviewed the book for the citizen.in, with seasoned journalist, Seema Mustafa as Editor. It was widely read. What was the readers’ response to your book, apart from the reviews? Did Mark Twain and his sudden disappearance click with the readers?

Yes, thank you. Yours was one of the first reviews, and a long engaged one. I like to think very many readers liked the book.

Besides the absent-minded Mark Twain, absorbed in filling up his diaries with observations, I thought readers liked the impulsive, intuitive, and very intriguing Maya Barton, and her ‘partner-in-crime (resolution),’ the American trade consul, Henry Baker, who is often as clueless as Mark Twain himself. But Baker, like Dr Watson, is happy to play second fiddle to Maya, and he also has his manservant, Abdul, to rely on. The Afghans were quite familiar in Indian cities then. One only has to read Rabindranath Tagore’s famous story to understand that: Kabuliwalla.

Anyway, it’s all these other people, teeming in this novel, this city, who also mattered, to me, and several readers. There were real life characters too: Baker himself who came as trade consul twenty years later, the doctors, Edith Pechey and Charlotte Ellaby, Police Commissioner RH Vincent, and others.

But I hope I am right about my readers. And I hope they’ll be as welcoming in the next one, Love and Crime in the Time of Plague, that is one month away from stepping into the world.

‘It takes a Murder’, your novel, I presume, was written in the name of Aditi Kay, along with some others. I have not read it. Tell us about it.

That was Anu Kumar (also me!) who wrote, It Takes a Murder. As Adity Kay, I wrote three novels of historical fiction, based on three ‘great’ emperors of ancient India: Chandragupta Maurya, Vikramaditya (Chandragupta II of the Gupta dynasty), and Harsha.

Cover design by Kunal Kundu

It Takes a Murder is sort of, as my editor at Hachette India then, the late Nandita Agarwal said, a work of ‘literary crime’. I think Anita Nair has called the genre, if one must do a labelling of sorts, ‘literary noir’.

However, in this book, a murder is only part of everything else that happens in a small town (Brooks Town) over certain years. It’s never properly resolved (a man does go to jail but as we know, that doesn’t necessarily mean a ‘resolution’); but the death lingers, and stays on in the backdrop of people’s lives and events—big and small—that happen in this forgotten small town. I was interested—though it took me a while to work this out—in all this, what I just said, and what the ‘death’ means to people who once knew the ‘dead man’.

The three books as Adity Kay involved a certain amount of fictionalizing, though one had to be faithful to certain broad contours of a life, to certain known facts. Like we know some historical truths about Chandragupta of the Mauryas, and Harshvardhana too, not so much about Vikramaditya, so I had to blend fact with fiction, and I tried my best to make that period, and the people, come alive, in a visual way, for the reader.

What draws you to crime fiction?

When I first began reading crime fiction, detective stories, historical mysteries, of course, it was the detectives one was drawn to; their quirks, and peeves, and again, how their ‘outsider’ status plays a big role in how successful they are – in crime resolution.

But crime fiction does so much more: how does crime, an act of violence, impact people, shape their lives, and thinking? What does it tell about a place? I was also hoping to learn more about things like trauma, the truths that lie buried, and/or are acknowledged. Crime fiction is one way of understanding one’s flawed world.

Great crime fiction like that of Hanning Mankel or PD James, or even Satyajit Ray and Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay in Bengal (Feluda and Byomkesh Bakshi as lead detectives), often have a social and political backdrop. While PD James writes literary classics camouflaged as murder mysteries, exploring the human mind in a desolate landscape by the sea, Mankell is rooted in contemporary contradictions. Often, his books dwell on immigrants, racism, totalitarian ‘socialist’ societies of East Europe, the alienation and loneliness in a capitalist, or, even Scandinavian societies. Your comments.

I’d love to read more of Mankell; thank you for telling me in detail about his work. That’s true, good crime fiction, works of mystery, invariably reveal a lot of the world they are set in.

Patrick Modiano, for example, the French writer who won the Nobel in literature a decade or so ago, sets his works in France, largely Paris, of the 1940s, and 1950s, a time after the Nazi Occupation of World War II. His works are all literary, but in the lives of the shadowy figures he explores, those who eke a living, make a life via petty crime (black marketing, or as double agents), he describes a city caught in an ambiguous, confusing time, when the choices confronting people aren’t just in black or white, but become a matter of survival.

I like to read books that invoke place, and how these affect people, and how place affects how one thinks. For instance, consider The Hound of the Baskervilles: you just know that when Arthur Conan Doyle describes the desolate, fog-covered moors, something sinister and shadowy is bound to come up. You can see it for yourself, step by step, word by word.

Tell us about your other books. Which is the favourite?

I don’t want to have favourites! I like Maya Barton and Henry Baker who came up in The Kidnapping of Mark Twain, and now again, in Love and Crime in the Time of Plague (October 2025).

But let me tell you about It Takes a Murder. I feel close to it because I lived in a town like Brooks Town for some years. And when I was writing this book, for almost a decade before it was finally published, I was intrigued, and still bothered, about the place; what Brooks Town had meant and still does for me. All the people there, some of whom turned up in the book, in different versions of themselves; I had never understood them then, and this was my way of asking questions.

A murder came into all this, but a murder was a dramatic way for me to ask questions. And there are still so many questions I have about that place, the people. Everything begins with questions like these.

You also wrote a unique book, which I have reviewed: ‘Her name is freedom: 35 women who fought for Independence’. Thirty fearless women. Great women freedom fighters in India, many of them unknown and forgotten, who have not really been recognized in the mainstream history of the freedom movement -- women from Nagaland and Chittagong, for instance. Tell us about them.

Yes, that book came out on the 75^th year of India’s independence (2022). Vatsala Kaul-Banerjee, my editor at Hachette India, had the idea first and I quite jumped at it.

Women have always been sort of marginal figures in great historic movements and moments; they have been seen as appendages or those who came along simply because of their proximity to some great male figures. There were, of course, great exceptions, like Lakshmibai, and this—being an exception to conventions—makes them exceptional still.

For me, this book was a marvellous chance to dig deep into history, to bring to life these brave women—free-spirited in their own way, independent and intelligent—and give them, in some way, their rightful place in history. I felt very responsible while writing about them. Like someone looking after young, vulnerable, forgotten girls, sending them out into the world, to be discovered anew. I was hoping, if I may say so, that this world would now see them very differently.

Cover design by Mistunee Chowdhury

 Who are your favourite detective novelists?

Agatha Christie has always been a favourite. I do think, oftentimes, that her characters are far too athletic than is possible in real life. Not to give away any spoilers but consider Death on the Nile, or even Sleeping Murder, just random examples: is it possible, I ask myself, for someone to run so fast, so quickly, or how easy is it to drag a dead body across long, rugged distances? Nevertheless, it does make one think.

Okay, favourites then: Satyajit Ray, Premendra Mitra, Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay (so many Bengalis!). And so many others really: Kate Atkinson (Jackson Brodie), Donna Leon (Guido Brunetti), Jacqueline Winspear (Maisie Dobbs), Georges Simenon, Alexander McCall Smith, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Dorothy Hughes; Seishi Yokomizo (Kindaichi Kōsuke in The Honjin Murders), Tetsuya Ayukama (The Black Swan Mystery).

I mention the last two because I am reading them just now. Madhulika Liddle, and her Muzaffar Jang books; in so many ways, Madhulika has been a pioneer for present-day detective fiction writing in India, and I wanted to tell her how much I appreciate this, really.

Cover design by Kunal Kundu

 You are fond of exploring the past. For instance, Indians travelling to America. Exploring their journeys, struggles, aspirations. Is this because you too were born in Odisha, if I am correct, and went abroad?

Yes, the fact of being an outsider, how it shapes one’s life and perspective, is something I’ve understood only after I read about so many others like me in the same situation. One feels left out, it takes years off one’s life trying to understand, and in the process of understanding, there are other things one discovers, in ways tangential and serendipitous. It’s easy to tell oneself all this now, and there’s so much noise around, a clamour to be a certain way, and have only one kind of story, that understanding the world through the past, and the journeys others have made, takes quite an effort.

How is it in America these days for writers like you, in the crazy and nasty atmosphere, whereby immigrants are being targeted, and censorship seems to be on?

I wish so much the United States would return to the time of the 1940s or even the 1960s when there was hope in a new post-War world, when dissension and debate were allowed. I know everyone is always nostalgic about the past, and xenophobia has always been part of American history and polity, but one needs to read the stories about people fighting for the right causes, accounts of struggle and perseverance. Only then does one get the courage to move on, to find allies on the same path as you are.

How have you felt, as a writer, day after day, about the genocide in Gaza, the mass starvation, the mass murder of women and children, backed by the US regimes of Democrats, and now Trump? Are you writing on Gaza?

All the writing one does, it’ll never be enough. I am not sure when I am asked a question like this, if what I am doing is worth it, if it’ll help create a better world, if people reading what I write, feel happy for a time. As a writer, you can’t help but think about the world you live in right now, and I feel all writers deal with this in their own way. One has to be a careful reader to figure that out.

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Photos of book covers: Courtesy Anuradha Kumar.

Also see: https://lokmarg.com/forgotten-fearless-women-of-freedom/