‘The Death of a Sarus Crane’: Ambai’s detective stories excavate the murky depth of human behaviour

She is a bit of a decoy, Ambai’s Sudha Gupta. First introduced to the reader in A Meeting on the Andheri Overbridge (2016), Sudha, at first glance, is your average middle-class working woman, efficiently performing multiple roles as she runs her household and her detective agency in the city of Mumbai. Playing within the normatives of detective fiction, she has a mentor, the expert detective Vidyasagar Rawte, and, in a departure from the trope, she often works with the law enforcement officer, Inspector Govind Shelke. Her husband, Naren, is a scientist, and her daughter, Aruna, is pursuing her MA degree. This leitmotif of wholesomeness, stability and domestic felicity runs through all four stories in this selection and is nothing but Ambai setting the reader up. The title participates in this sleight of hand. Sudha Gupta’s Adventures in Detection, it announces, situating reader expectation plumb in the middle of a Christie-like easily plottable world, promising resolution and a return to order. The text does anything but. Detection remains secondary to the scope of the text. Murders need solving and wrongs need to be set right, but the real canvas of Sudha Gupta’s work is the murky depth of human behaviour. The Death of a Sarus Crane is...

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