Sleepy Hollow

Cloaked as a suspenseful mystery, Anupama Mohan's debut novel is more concerned with metaphysical matters

- Aditya Mani Jha

WHERE MAYFLIES LIVE FOREVER

By Anupama Mohan

PAN MACMILLAN

The first half of Anupama Mohan's debut novel Where Mayflies Live Forever is a series of eyewitness interviews conducted by a police officer, an ACP called Asha Peter, who we only meet after several 'POV chapters' centring other characters are done and dusted. ACP Peter (who, as per genre trappings, is a divorced and world-weary maverick) is investigating the murder of Senganoor Adhiban, a political bigwig in the small town of Sittanavasal, Tamil Nadu. We learn that Adhiban has recently been decapitated. The head is missing, as is the chief suspect Veni, a young woman who teaches geography at the local school and who was gang-raped by Adhiban and his cronies four years ago.

The beauty of Where Mayflies Live Forever lies in the fact that during the course of these testimonies, as we learn more about Veni, the novel unfurls its true nature-a sociologically adept character study about the contrasting ways in which we bring up boys and girls, respectively.

Veni, irreverent nature-lover, knowledgeable midwife, masseur to babies and new mothers, possessor of a singularly beautiful head of hair. By all accounts, she is an unusually sensitive, kind person with a lot of goodwill in Sittanavasal (at least before she goodwill in Sittanavasal (at least before she is 'spoiled', the novel's damning metaphor for rape). How could she decapitate a man in cold blood and the allegedly-burn off her own hair and vanish into thin air?