Take a single young professional, place her in Mumbai’s TV soap industry, throw in a murder and lots of (traffic-jammed) chase scenes, introduce a handsome ex-best-friend and voilá – you have a piece of desi chick-lit. If it sounds stodgily formulaic, rest assured that Smita Jain’s racy Kkrishnaa’s Konfessions is actually a toothsome devil’s food cupcake of a novel. The roguish streak running through this witty detective comedy is due to Jain’s irreverent indulgence in oddly specific stereotypes (creative directors are universally described thus: “short, fat, chain-smoking bitch”), unabashedly frequent instances of deviant behaviour and the feisty main character, Kkrishnaa herself.
Kkrishnaa, like her creator, is a scriptwriter for teleserials and an amateur student of psychology. She’s also brazenly competitive – to the point of suspecting fellow script-writer, closet existential novelist and sexy love interest Dev Trivedi of plagiarising her every line. While our heroine is secretly observing a swanky apartment block for source material, the two happen to witness a celebrity murder. As the bickering pair try to stay a step ahead of the assassin, they hook up with a bumptious police inspector and a stuttering CBI agent and stumble into webs of conspiracy spun by hypocritical politicians, pimping swamis and adulterous housewives. Somewhere between dodging bullets and seducing her seniors, Kkrishnaa discovers that she still has feelings for former friend Dev, and that those feelings go beyond the merely Platonic.
Despite the broad strokes with which Jain paints her characters, this book is an engaging and offbeat caper. Like Kkrishnaa’s scripts, it’s “convoluted enough to guarantee viewer interest, but not to the extent of leaving them confused”. As the protagonist overcomes a case of writer’s block by weaving the murder investigation into her serial, the reader also notes that the book’s characters are thinly veiled allusions to actual dons, gangsters and film stars. Jain liberally cartoonifies her characters, but Kkrishnaa has the right blend of wit, sex and twists to keep this reader interested – at least for a few hours. Sonal Shah
Source : Time Out Delhi ISSUE 11 Friday, August 20, 2010
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