Juggi Bhasin’s Bollywood Deception (Penguin, Rs. 299) has all the ingredients of a thriller. There is the quirky detective duo Kas and Kassata, sex, drugs, Bollywood and gory murder. After his trilogy of geo-political thrillers ( The Terrorist, Blood Song, The Avenger ) what prompted the former television journalist to switch to the whodunit?
“I am now back in Delhi,” Juggi says over the phone. “My wife works with a bank and earlier I had moved with her to Mumbai. I used to do theatre in Delhi and did the audition rounds in Mumbai. I did it for four to five years and even worked in some serials and entirely forgettable films. I did it more for fun. I was like a reporter observing the film industry. The idea was to marry Bollywood with a thriller. In a way the novel is a love song to Mumbai with the monsoon being a character.”
While Juggi has said Kas Batterywala, the disgraced cop with a substance abuse problem and the feisty Kassata, the suspended military doctor are “millennial interpretation of Holmes,” the crime fighting duo seem to have more in common with Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Lisbeth is now part of the modern lexicon. All my novels have strong feminine characters and there are shades of Lisbeth in Kassata. That was not by design.”
On being asked which did he prefer — the geo political thriller or the whodunit, Juggi commented that while the former is “Robert Ludlum like, Bollywood Deception is lighter, there is far more humour and irony. Both series have a different appeal, let me put it that way.”
Having done the defence beat, Juggi said he found writing the geopolitical thriller easier. “The terror bits come easily. Humour is difficult as you have to walk the fine line between clever and slapstick and ensure the jokes don’t fall flat.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Accepting that research was difficult, as access is not easy, Juggi says, “The crime genre is well developed in the West so if you were to approach a forensic pathologist, he would be able to help. Here the best option is to temper your resources and write within your limitations ensuring that you don’t write something that is easily provable to be wrong.”
The film industry in Bollywood Deception is full of unrelentingly-terrible people. “Well, Ralhan, the casting director, is actually quite a decent man. It is the nature of Bollywood that offers so much scope for deviancy. The film industry is schizophrenic. Most serials are shot between 11 pm and 4 am. It is not a normal nine-to-five industry. The fact that it is not regulated means the chance for exploitation is high. In any other sector, there are rules in place. Bollywood is a contradiction in that it is the most reported as well as the most unreported industry. The glamour and glitz is reported but not the seamier side of things.”
Juggi is not going to win any friends in Bollywood for his sharp portraits of the ugly people behind the glamorous masks. “I don’t depend on the industry for my livelihood and I don’t have friends in Bollywood,” the 54-year-old says with a laugh.
Future plans include “continuing with the thriller and also writing a literary novel,” which brings us to the genre fiction versus literary novel debate. “I agree that there are only good books and bad books. The classifications are what we make and thrillers can be literary. I find myself hamstrung by the need for pace. I feel I cannot linger to develop a character by sacrificing pace. That is the single hindrance.”
The breathless page turner has its share of violence. “I wanted to explore the mind of a killer. But most of the violence is suggested.” Juggi enjoys “Scandinavian crime fiction. They have hit the right vein. The weather lends itself to crime.”
When asked if he has a special place where he writes, Juggi says, “it would be nice to have that lakeside house, but my study is good enough! What a writer needs most is support and I have been lucky in that.” Like all journalists, Juggi says, “I am not a disciplined writer but deliver when I am on a deadline.”