Usha Rajagopalan can tell a story. She can lead you into a tale, catch your attention and leave certain tantalising blanks, ensuring that you will read her novel to find out what happened. As you catch up with her in her beautiful ancestral home just behind the Secretariat annexe in Thiruvananthapuram, she tells you that her novel also has an old rambling house that plays an important role in the plot.
With five published works behind her, Bangalore-based Usha decided that it was time to move on to a genre that had always intrigued the writer in her. Usha’s crime buster is certainly not Ms. Marple, instead she is a young rookie reporter in her twenties. Aditi Sridhar, a reporter based in Bangalore, who is given an assignment to track forgotten stars of the silver screen, is the sleuth of Tracking Purnima , Usha’s first crime fiction. With this novel, Usha joins the ranks of writers like Kishwar Desai, Anita Nair and Kalpana Swaminathan, who, in the recent past, have successfully spun off stories about crime and crime busters of all kinds.
Usha, a lake conservationist and activist, writes this novel under a pseudonym, she is Usha Kathir. Since many in Bangalore tend to identify her name with a neighbourhood initiative to save a lake, Usha did not want her novel to be read in that light. “Moreover, all these years, what I have written is very different from this book. Hence, I thought I would choose a pseudonym, Kathir, which means a ‘ray of light’ or young panicles of rice. I like Kathir, a ray of light,” she explains.
Writing crime fiction is a challenge because authors have to dream up the plot and also lead readers through the plot to find out whodunit.
“In fact, years ago, my first attempt to write resulted in a crime fiction and a reputed publisher wanted to see the manuscript after I send them the synopsis. But then I lost my nerve. I wondered if I would be able imagine the perfect murder and talk about it in my book. It has taken me five books to get over my fears and get around to a plot that satisfied the Agatha Christie fan in me,” says Usha who also lists Roald Dahl, P.D. James and Stieg Larsson as her favourite writers of this genre.
It was Kathryn Skoyles, a British writer Usha met in the United Kingdom when she was on a Charles Wallace Fellowship, who encouraged her to turn to crime fiction, and the book is dedicated to her. She read the manuscript and helped Usha to add subplots and characters to add meat to the novel. Usha remembers with a smile how Kathryn’s library was stocked with crime thrillers.
To understand how the print media works and the pressures on a young media person, she talked at length to a young journalist, who helped her get the details correct. Aditi also has a sidekick in her friend Reshmi, a press photographer who works with her in an English daily. Serendipity lands the two in a mystery and they embark on a dangerous path to investigate the truth.
In addition to pressures at the work place, Aditi also has to deal with her mother’s attempts to find a suitable boy for her. As Aditi stumbles forward in her investigation to trace Purnima, she takes us through the changes in Bangalore’s landscape and society. “I want to turn this into a series of books featuring these two youngsters. Now, both are in their early twenties and, I hope, as the series progresses, Aditi and Reshmi become wiser and mature in their outlook and dealings with the world,” adds the author. Usha is already plotting to write her second detective fiction to follow Aditi’s adventures.
