Indian writer Anita Nair uses crime fiction to explore child trafficking horrors
In Bangalore, children are being trafficked to work in begging cartels and the sex trade, and it’s this bleak world that Nair focuses on in her second Inspector Gowda novel
Subterfuge, manipulation, rage, hatred, unsuspecting folk who end up with their throats slit, the blood leaching into the expensive living room carpet, and a driven, deeply flawed individual determined to find out just whodunit. Good crime fiction assures the reader that there is order in the universe, that our existence has meaning, that things aren’t random after all, and that evil – usually inspired by a tawdry yearning to possess another man’s wife or steal your sister’s inheritance – can be overcome.
In a sense, crime fiction (and its subset, the detective novel), despite the generous spilling of blood and the focus on humankind’s violent core, is the most optimistic of literary genres, and the most reassuring. Nothing could be further from real life. Within the universe of the crime novel, karma exists, the guilty are caught out, and baffling knots are unravelled.
Of course, most good detectives are tortured souls, wracked by self doubt, even as they set out to find out who exactly wedged that knife in the victim’s back and why. While the murder in the remote community with only a limited number of unlikely suspects and the “locked-room” mystery with its baffling setting are terribly satisfying, detectives sometimes have to go out into the wide world and grapple with organised crime and its political backers, and confront social decay.
“Chain of Custody is the second one in the series I’m writing with Inspector Borei Gowda and this time I wanted to write about child trafficking because it hasn’t been written about enough,” says the Indian writer Anita Nair. “There is a serious problem and the racket is so synchronised it runs like a multinational company in terms of processes, so it is very difficult to pin it down to a person.”