Book Review
Book: Secrets, Scandals & Lies: Tales from an Urban Housing Society
Author: Swarnendu Biswas
Publisher: Readomania Publishing
Price: Rs. 399
“All of a sudden why did she have to come to reside in the same housing complex in east Delhi where he had been living since the last decade? Why providence needed to make them meet after a journey of 43 years, in the midst of 2014, in a completely different India? It seems that the past never evaporates…they remain like dead stars in distant corners of the universe of our mind.”
– From the book, Secrets, Scandals & Lies: Tales from an Urban Housing Society.
Secrets, Scandals & Lies: Tales from an Urban Housing Society, by Swarnendu Biswas, offers an engrossing read through multiple genres. Each character in the book is living a lie and wearing a mask!
The writer, a journalist, has used a fairly innovative concept of dealing with a collection of stories which are not discrete or independent from each other but are interconnected through a series of incidents and characters. He uses hate, jealousy, fear, adultery, drug racket, prostitution, and murder as some of the aspects of the lives of some seemingly ordinary residents of a middle-class housing society in East Delhi!
This is the second book of Biswas, a journalist and a creative writer with over two decades of experience working across various media enterprises.
The book cannot be termed a literary fiction but it is a pure and unadulterated commercial fiction where the fast-paced stories focus more on plots and incidents rather than on exploring deep on the psychology of the characters and their complex web of relationships, socio-political issues, etc.
The stories are taut, engaging and lucidly written and despite some flaws in characterisation, the readers are expected to remain engrossed in the book. The ten stories cover multiple genres and some of the stories pass through decades (the book covers a timespan of five decades). Most of these stories have a deep element of intrigue and suspense ingrained in them. Some have twists in the end too. They mirror the very dark and sometimes also the good sides of human nature.
From a retired lecturer morbidly scared of his rich, businesswoman neighbour, to a tall woman going out of her way to help others, to a seemingly loving wife who kills her husband, to married couples engaged in adultery, to two out-of-the-world entities—As readers progress through the pages, slowly the coils of intrigue and suspense tighten their grip on their minds, with the climax coming in the tenth and the final story. The writer is quite crafty in withholding the suspense elements in the book and revealing them at the right juncture.
Except for the fifth story, which is majorly set in the turbulent Kolkata (then it was Calcutta of the late 1960s-early ’70s), in all other stories an unnamed housing society in East Delhi (obviously a fictitious one) prominently features. Most of the dramatic incidents in the book revolve around some of the fascinating characters of this housing society, among which one or two of them are quite dark characters.
The writer presents some real dark aspects of human nature through some of the characters, though the bright side of human nature gets its due share too. The book has some supernatural elements too, which are integral parts of two of the stories, which enhance the appeal of the book.
The turbulent periods of anti-Sikh riots and the Naxalite revolution are integral parts of two of the stories and the author has tried to candidly cover small slices of those periods. However, readers shouldn’t expect any scholarly analysis of those periods from this work. The book never intends to do that; it merely tries to tell captivating stories in the backdrop of such disturbing periods in modern India’s history and manages quite well in that endeavour.
Overall, one can say that Secrets, Scandals & Lies showcases a fresh and distinct voice in the realm of commercial fiction writing in India. In India’s literary space, the number of great introspective literary fiction has far outnumbered the number of racy, smartly written, entertaining commercial fiction. Biswas stands tall as a captivating storyteller despite having not much literary pretensions. We expect more page-turners like this from him soon.
– global bihari bureau
