The Longest Night

Would it be unfair to judge Vikas Swarup’s The Girl with the Seven Lives harshly? After all, the book is squarely playing off his past successes and is meant for a specific audience. Even within this context, however, the novel is overwritten and underwhelming.

Swarup remains faithful to the structure of his first work, Q&A, better known as Slumdog Millionaire. His formula is to thrust a character into a high-stakes situation, which serves as a springboard for a series of linked stories. In the process, he explores the inequalities and ambitions of contemporary India.

Thus, in his earlier The Accidental Apprentice, a Delhi salesgirl needs to pass seven tests to become lucratively employed. In Six Suspects, guests at a party accused of murder narrate their backstories, shedding light on possible motives. It is an appealing recipe to keep the reader hooked, with the obvious caveat that it needs to be skilfully handled on each outing.

In the derivatively titled The Girl with the Seven Lives, the 25-year-old protagonist, Devi, faces the character-building experience of being abducted from a Mumbai street and thrust into a basement to confront a masked kidnapper. He claims to know everything about her: “How you’ve changed names and locations more times than a chameleon changes colour. How you’ve lied, stolen, cheated, even murdered your way across the country. How the police in four states are still looking for you.”

At this point, one of the book’s many cliched observations goes through Devi’s mind: when you are about to die, your whole life flashes before your eyes. Later, we’re accosted by other ordinariness such as “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”, “born with a silver spoon in my mouth”, “blood is thicker than water” and even “tall, dark and handsome”.

Back in the basement, the kidnapper has something else in mind. He produces a list of ten people Devi has hoodwinked and demands that she record a detailed confession that will be broadcast live to them. After that, he plans to hand her over to the highest bidder. Fasten your seatbelts and suspend your disbelief.

The first of the seven stories that Devi narrates deals with her hardscrabble childhood in a slum (yes, again) during which her so-called lower caste origins are given a token mention. From Delhi, she moves on to Punjab, Kottayam, Goa, and Mumbai. During her travails she encounters a crooked banker who wants to be a novelist, a spiritual leader who likes to be bathed in milk, a bookstore owner who creates fake degrees, and a rogue’s gallery of abusers, backstabbers, and crooks.

Swarup packs an impressive number of contemporary topics into the story, and it is evident that The Girl with the Seven Lives is not something he has simply dashed off. The issues include surrogate pregnancy, drug addiction, the business of forged educational documents, and online dating scams, with guest appearances by demonetisation and the coronavirus lockdown.

However, the easy coincidences and stereotypes do the book no favours. Add to this the usual tropes, including more than one person mistakenly believed to be dead, as well as a last-minute revelation that’s farfetched.

Take a look at some other recent works by Indian writers that incorporate crime and skulduggery, and you’ll find Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice, featuring complex characters with immersive, intertwined lives, and Rahul Raina’s How to Kidnap the Rich, which is narrated in a droll, satirical voice. Such virtues are absent from The Girl with the Seven Lives.

booksEnglish literatureIndian societyVikas Swarupwomen