(Did this review for Reader's Digest)
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The murder mystery can be a tough genre to work in, but it’s even more of a challenge if you locate the narrative in a distant period, adding historical research to the mix. In her fine debut novel, Sonia Bhatnagar juggles these two tasks. Set in 1930s Shimla (and briefly in Bombay), In Your Blood I Run is about a young man named Ratan who is forced to go into hiding after his employer and lover – a married Englishwoman – is murdered. Also caught in the thick of the subsequent investigation is Ratan’s estranged childhood friend Lavanya, and much of the narrative moves back and forth between these two protagonists until their paths gradually converge.
Though Lavanya is not a suspect in the case herself, she is useful as bait to lure Ratan out. Besides, a collection of her transgressive short stories had been found near the body, and the publicity directs a lot of attention to her book. Many people – including the men leading the investigation – are not pleased about these “dirty” tales in which women express desire, reach for autonomy, slip across the boundaries that society has set for them.
In a sense, then, In Your Blood I Run is also about literature’s power to provoke and to emancipate. One startling passage is from Lavanya’s story “Sitara”, in which a young widow, being forced to commit Sati, defies her entire village in her final moments by pleasuring herself even as the flames begin to consume her. (She is thinking of her English lover while doing this.) Here is an image of a woman ensuring that those who have murdered her in the name of tradition will never be able to feel comfortable or self-congratulatory, that they will be haunted by her memory. It also serves as a reminder that different types of freedoms and constraints can intersect, or run counter to, each other – for instance, an Indian woman, bound to a traditional social order, achieves some self-actualisation and freedom through a relationship with an “Angrez”, even though her country is fighting valiantly for independence from the Empire.
The basic premise of this thriller – two people, one on the run, the other being bullied and under threat but trying to help her friend – lends itself to a few cliches, and there is a bit of repetitiveness in how it plays out: for instance, on two separate occasions a suspenseful scene involves Ratan trying to escape pursuers by getting to his car on time; and on both occasions he momentarily can’t find his keys (the first time they are fallen on the floor of the car, the second time they are in his pocket). Such passages are a little flat and stretched out, but Bhatnagar is on firmer ground when it comes to the characters’ relationships – in the way, for instance, that Lavanya’s interactions with a Shimla policeman named Amrit Singh start off as antagonistic but soften into something resembling understanding.
And, throughout, there is the question of the effect that Lavanya’s stories have on various people, and on what has transpired: might they have influenced the actions of the victim or the murderer, or both? For conservative readers, the Sitara story is made obscene by what the protagonist does, and by her extramarital affair – not by the ghastly practice of forced Sati. For other readers, Sitara becomes a lodestar, possibly showing them the way out of their own traps. Little wonder that the book also invokes the spirits of real-life figures like Jaddanbai and Amrita Sher-gil, known for their determination to compete on equal terms with the men in their fields.
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