The premise of Sriram Chellapilla’s novel A Useful Death (Westland; ₹399) has the promise of a page turner.
An aspiring actress is dead and the scion of a prominent Telugu film family is under scrutiny. A group of three consultants, who are known to pull corporates and others out of sticky situations, are unwittingly dragged into the situation. The trio tries to navigate the power equations in the film family, while wanting to help unearth the truth and bring justice to the actress. Their search for truth leads them beyond the film industry, into ideology-driven fault lines at a city university.
The author, Sriram, has lived in Hyderabad for most of his life and has earlier dabbled with advertising, co-written scripts and now teaches screenwriting at the Ramoji Academy of Film and Television.
Edited excerpts from an interview:
What sparked A Useful Death ?
With novels of this genre it’s usually an interesting and unexpected motive for a crime that grabs a hold of you.
Working backwards from that, I saw this book would traverse an interesting terrain.
The motives of several characters were complex and secretive — nobody was as they appeared — and there was also a wide range of motivations. It was pretty exciting to work with these characters and develop a plot.
Very few English novels are set in Hyderabad and fewer still that touch upon the Telugu film industry. What went into the story development?
You cannot avoid news about the film industry even if you want to. As someone who teaches scriptwriting, I have an active curiosity about the industry. I wasn’t as interested in faithfully describing the industry as I was in creating verisimilitude.
More than the industry itself, I’ve long been interested in observing how powerful people wield their power. How influence is used and how one’s interests are defended (or even advanced) in a time of crisis — these were the questions that powered the book.
Multiple threads come together in the story — the film industry’s power equations, ideological conflicts in a university, among others. What were the challenges in putting these together?
Every significant event had to be observed from multiple points of view — how does this event affect various characters and how are they likely to react? This action-counteraction dynamic drove the story forward and into unexpected directions. Keeping an eye on numerous reactions even while building the protagonist’s step-by-step path of investigation, surprise, and discovery was the real challenge.
How much did you draw from real life incidents? The happenings in the 80s and 90s of Srikakulam and world of television ownership, for instance?
Things had to be based in reality for the reader to find the coordinates and feel engaged in this fictional world (verisimilitude again); that done, I was free to make stuff up as long as it was true to my characters and it served my story.
I was aware that readers would be familiar with the kinds of news-stories described in the book: the film-industry scandal, the political intrigue and so on. The specific events, however, are made up. I used the same principle for things set in the 1980s and 90s. As for media ownership, there’s been fantastic reporting on the subject in recent years — that served as a starting point.
The three consultants Partha, Harish and Seema seem to have longer back stories than what is presented in the book. Do you plan to develop a series with them as principal characters?
That’s the plan. I like these three characters as individuals and as a unit. I’m working on some ideas right now.
The fictional Hyderabad City University, as presented in the book, is a complex institution. What were the different real life campuses that influenced this ethos?
No specific campuses really. There’s a certain feel about Indian university campuses, regardless of where they’re located. Hyderabad City University is shaped by several impressions and memories, some from my student life and others from subsequent years.
I must say though that I recalled and thought a good deal about the student years while writing this book: the sheer excitement with ideas, the passion with which opinions are held and debated, and the aspiration to make a mark in the world. Looking back, one can’t help thinking about the darker realities that loomed then, and loom now, over such idealistic thinking.
Do you intend to adapt this story for a web series or a feature film?
It’s an intriguing possibility; troubleshooters are great on-screen protagonists.
