The premise is interesting. A girl has gone missing from an East Delhi neighbourhood and the police appear disinterested in pursuing the case. After the initial media attention, the disappearance of Sakshi Prakash soon becomes old news, till Gloria Lama, a resolute journalist and award-winning author, decides to investigate the case on her own. Lama is incredibly resourceful and digitally suave.
Her contacts range far and wide — from officers of the local police department to intelligence operatives with a global reach. Nikhil Pradhan’s Cold Truth is a smart, pacy novel which follows Lama as she uncovers layers upon layers of twisted and unnerving details about what initially looks like a missing person incident.
A number of people assist Lama as the novel progresses. A cyber hacktivist, an IB operative by the name Dedalus, and finally an army veteran, Abhay Chowdhary. The novel teams up Lama and Chowdhary, relying on their individual expertise to guide them towards the final revelation. With a story that takes a missing person case across four continents, the novel soon opens into something more sinister than an ordinary rescue operation.
Expertly framed
The thing about the book that one immediately notices is its attempt to give storytelling a fresh, contemporary bend. Reading more like a detective’s case file and less like a neatly structured narrative, the novel’s awareness of its formal
ambiguity can be jarring at first. However, once the attention is fixed and the mind engrossed, the book becomes unputdownable. Much of it is written in the form of Whatsapp conversations, transcripts of audio notes, email exchanges and chat-window information, making this an epistolary crime novel.
Although the book’s principal POV character is Lama, the narrative is framed expertly to enable other characters to tell their stories too. Disturbing the already dismantled conventions, Pradhan finds enough space to even insert himself into the narrative as a crucial character. The sheer formal and structural audacity of the novel is so pronounced that it masks the occasional pitfalls.
Work in progress
Where the novel falters is in the writing department. There are few memorable lines, hardly a passage to quote. The prose just gives you the optimum amount of information; the writing is purely functional, serving to move the story forward. One gets familiar settings, familiar dialogues, but even familiar conversations blunder. You have the stock tropes of establishing character through innocent conversations of the how-did-you-end-up-here kind.
The dialogues sound a bit rough, and in some places unreal. It is bemusing to see a book taking such brave chances with form resorting to such stale prose.
Cold Truth combines a sharp journalistic style with a good plot. The result is not so much a novel as the outline of a novel. The feeling that we are reading something that’s a work in progress never quite leaves us. This may polarise readers and opinions. The novel also has a cinematic quality to it, as if waiting to be viewed and not only read.
However, in the end, it is the story that packs the maximum punch in Cold Truth . An incredibly twisted, unheard-of and yet probable series of events make for the novel’s strong core. The story begins in the present, reverses to the past, and uncovers some truly deadly ghosts. Each new twist only lifts the story to a higher plane. The intensity of each revelation dwarfs Lama and Chowdhary, whose lives turn more vulnerable by the page. When the climax comes, it chills the bone.
The writer is the author of Painting That Red Circle White , a poetry collection.
Cold Truth; Nikhil Pradhan, HarperCollins,₹250
