A Viagra-popping inspector meets his nemesis in ‘The Menon Investigation’

As the young officer moved towards the beach, four men drove up to him. One of them shot four rounds at him, missed his mark a couple of times in the rainsplashed darkness, but scored a hit eventually. Moses staggered on to the sand, but didn’t die instantly. So the others had to step in. Two men stabbed him, slashed his Achilles’ tendon with knives and, as Moses collapsed face down, one of them doused him with diesel and set him on fire.

The scene is clinically described, with every trace of titillation wiped out of it, and with the same cold control that Kannanari had demonstrated in his brilliant debut novel, Chronicle of an Hour and a Half, last year. Set in the village of Vaiga in the Western Ghats, his first book had described the mayhem that unfolds over an illicit love affair between an older woman and a younger man. It is fanned as much by the waves of misinformation and malicious rumours circulated on social media channels and WhatsApp groups as by ancient enmities and long-held grouses. The incident that triggers the tragedy becomes just a catalyst for Kannanari to explore the claustrophobic moral gaze of a close-knit community, led by a group of men, who are still grappling with the arsenal laid out before them by new technologies and forces of globalisation.

In The Menon Investigation, the author follows a similar strategy. Vijay Menon, the IG who takes up the cold case of the Moses murder nearly a decade later, becomes, in Kannanari’s deft hand, a conduit for the many contradictions that riddle his home state, Kerala. The eponymous hero is an embodiment of the conflicting urges of a certain type of Malayali man: educated, progressive but weighed down by his caste and class privileges. Towards the end of the novel, Kannanar sums it all up with a finely etched seriocomic potted portrait of the investigating officer, who, by this time, has cracked the case, but also disgraced himself as a pathetic bigot.

“Vijay Menon was a tragic man. He was a vegetarian and he had piles. He never smoked or drank, desisted even from tea and coffee, exercised as regularly as he could, and yet he had erectile dysfunction," the author writes. “He was an uppercaste man in dark skin. He was the son of an inter-caste marriage (...) and yet in his actions he ended up almost a mirror reflection of the man behind the killing." If you are expecting a flawless, upright police officer who brings justice to one long dead and forgotten, this droll biodata of the protagonist should disabuse you.

Without giving away any spoilers, Kannanari’s novel throws into sharp focus the live-wire issue of antecedents and the question of perpetuating the family line through the “right" kind of marriage. These aren’t matters specific to Kerala, but exert a pan-Indian hold. Kannanari explores the faultlines that specifically run through Kerala’s history—the suppression of Maoism by the state, the strategic conversion of Adivasis to Christianity, the fixation over skin colour—which turn into a lethal brew to enable the murder of Kannan Moses. The trajectory of his plot, especially the twists he adds to it, becomes a ringing critique of the variety of communism Kerala has followed over the decades.

As with his previous novel, Kannanari writes his characters confidently, though he does often have a tendency to belabour their oddities. He also shows a peculiar fondness for adjectives and adverbs that can only come from a seasoned fan of the thesaurus (“gibbous", “adenoidal", “uroboric", “abreact," to list a few). Vijay and his wife Padmini, a forensic surgeon by profession, enact an elaborate ritual of sex, involving blue pills and pornography, every week to keep their dwindling marriage alive. It is their last-ditch attempt to rekindle their “love", which, as Padmini defines it to one of their daughters, is only “a feeling of being confusedly monogamous." The cynicism of her view meets a counterpoint in their elder child Kalyani’s relationship with her boyfriend Ranjit. In the end, much like the hypocritical politics of his state, the confused and selfdoubting patriarch of the Menon family caves into his worst instincts with his own family.

Kannanari has previously written strong women characters, especially their complicated inner lives. In this novel, he takes us into the mind of the male protagonist instead, the insecurities and past abuses that lie hidden in the nooks and crannies of his being. Despite being at the centre of the story, and cracking a seemingly unsolvable case, Vijay Menon is not a hero, not by a long shot. Even in his moment of triumph, he is put in his place by the invisible hands that control the machinery of power. He allows himself one small moment of grace in the end, but only notionally, since the outcome of his investigation remains far from what he had hoped to achieve.