Moumita Sinha

A must-read for the thrills, reality and tedium of crime, in uniform. 'F.I.R.' launches the story of DSP Bikram Chatterjee, chiselled rather than hardened by the WBP, as the murder of Robi Bose leads him to dig up the notorious deals of high-society Calcutta. With his bellowing boss Toofan Kumar, his old faithful Ghosh and informers at his heels, Bikram must navigate duty and instinct to nab the guilty. For a moment, DSP Bikram and his crew of overworked police officers in their sweaty uniforms and routine persistence seem hopelessly out of place, in Nisha Bose's manicured living, Robi's turbulent moods and Tara's tragic self-sacrifice. The police are the usual butts of ridicule when the indignant middle-class respectability of people like Tara's father is wounded by being mixed up in a police case. Promising nothing but high-handed harrassment every time an F.I.R. is lodged. But as someone who grew up religiously on crime shows like C.I.D. and a barrage of detective novels, what 'F.I.R' gets right is the tangled, messy nature of dealing with crime when you are in uniform, unlike ingenious detectives who show up with eccentric habits. What this book gets right is the intimacy of crime to the lives of police officers, where personal considerations have to take a backseat and the work demands a struggle just to do good. Bikram is unusually human. The author has hit just the right balance to make him a character the reader loves to follow around and yet, be surprised by. Ghosh, his second in command, has a polished policing instinct that, I suspect, may be found lurking behind many a deceptive appearance in the uniform. Bikram's energy and drive is perhaps the best way to describe the pace of this novel - gripping and relentless. It is no mean feat that the author has managed to contain a credible story with credible characters, feelings and emotions, lives of the elite as well as seedy criminals within a compelling narrative in lucid language. It pulls you in and invites you to tail their shadows breathlessly, root for them when no one would and impatiently wait to pick up the next in the series to enter their world once again.