Short review: I Met a Man Who Wasn't There

Arunava Sinha celebrated his 100th book as a translator recently, a staggering achievement even for someone whose work ethic many of us have been in awe of for a long time. One of his comparatively minor achievements of the past week – still a hefty one, though – was dragging me out of my 1930s/1940s crime-fiction reading into a more contemporary mystery, Sakyajit Bhattacharya’s I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There (translated by Arunava from the Bengali original Shesh Mrito Pakhi). I finished the book in less than a day and was gripped throughout, even though I wasn’t all that enamoured by its central character.

Having said that this is a contemporary work (the present-day narrative being set in 2019 Darjeeling), the story deals with an attempt to solve a much older mystery, the murder of a young poet named Amitava 44 years earlier, and the cloud of suspicion that has since hung over Amitava’s one-time friend Arun Chowdhury, who went on to become one of the country’s best-selling crime novelists. This story, now as mist-covered as the terrain it unfolded in, comes to us through the investigations of a reporter named Tanaya, who has travelled from Delhi to Darjeeling to uncover new material and a fresh perspective on the case for a series she has been writing about unsolved mysteries. What Tanaya can’t anticipate is that almost as soon as she begins her interviews, she is presented with a confession – as well as a never-published manuscript written by the long-dead Amitava, a murder mystery that may contain important clues to the real-life crime.

This means that for a large portion of I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There, we are moving between two stories: Tanaya’s own investigation, and the story contained in the manuscript she has been asked to read, about the locked-room murder of a possible blackmailer sometime in the mid-1970s. As parallels gradually emerge between the crimes, she must figure out how they dovetail, what is reliable and what is misdirection.

This was a solid page-turner. Tanaya and her precociousness got a little annoying at times (she only half-jokingly likens herself to Mycroft Holmes at one point, never mind that most unlike Mycroft she 1. gets out and about a great deal, 2. makes a series of mistaken assumptions and faulty deductions) but this didn’t really affect my enjoyment of the book. At one stage in the second half I did worry that this might be an anti-narrative that would turn out to be more about sociological observation and political commentary than the actual mystery (much of the 1970s back-story has to do with the Naxalbari conflicts in the region involving the local police and dissident youngsters), but that wasn’t the case: though there is some thoughtful commentary about the arrogance of the privileged, and how easily some people become dispensable in certain situations, the resolution of the whodunit/howdunit is satisfying and well-worked-out too; even though the final explanation could have been shorter.

*And* there are little references to golden-age crime fiction and even to Shin-Honkaku, as you can see in the image included here – coincidentally two of the books I set aside so I could read this one are the Alice Arisugawa mentioned here (The Moia Island Puzzle) and Carr’s Death-Watch.