Missing in mystery

Murder in Seven Acts by Kalpana Swaminathan is a collection of short stories featuring the detective Lalli as she works her way through seven cases. Each of these is different, all of them are mysterious, and Sita, Lalli's niece, is the narrator guiding the reader through it all. As for the mysteries, they appear baffling, and only Lalli has the ability to piece seemingly random clues together.

In A Face in the Crowd, Auntie May has a problem - she keeps seeing a face. And she sees the face everywhere. She keeps talking about it until everybody around her, except Lalli, thinks she's a little unbalanced. Naturally, the face is more than a face. This story was peculiar, and when Auntie May speaks of a 'face', it is never really clear whether she's seeing an image or an actual person.

The Quantum Question tries to make use of physicists and quantum theory to solve the case of a dead person who has apparently come back to life. The use of Schrdinger's Cat to try and unravel the case by an all-knowing Lalli was a confusing take on a mystery. Sita also smugly declares that Schrdinger's Cat is merely common sense. If only quantum mechanics were that simple. Lalli, of course, guides the bumbling physicists to the truth.

The Sixth Pandava simply could not resist the temptation of portraying the right-wing as book-burning zealots. A novelist wrote a book in this story, and the right-wing sets out to burn his book just because. Unfortunately, the author is burned as well, leading to a mystery. And there is a politician in here who thinks he stands for the majority. Lalli tells him that he does not. She does.

Murder Prt--Porter is about a blouse and an unscrupulous designer, and Sita's premonition that somebody is going to lose his life. There is also a fashion show, a murder, and the designer's self-conscious and glamorous girlfriend. A game of Scrabble only makes matters more complex.

Teddy of Suicide Point has a 'ghazal in his glance' and features 'iambic with intelligence'. He is known to Lalli and he seems to have stumbled upon something important. He disappears, but not before leaving Lalli a cryptic note. That note leads to a certain well and alkaline tests.

In The Incident of the Desk Ornament, Sita comes across a desk ornament in a shop. And then, she returns home to find it there. There is also a cake, her brother in the midst of it all, an abduction, an old rivalry, counterfeiting, and the scent of violets. None of these faze Lalli, who manages to find order in bewildering chaos.

Murder in Seven Acts concludes with Threnody. At one of Lalli's get-togethers, Sita chats with an old friend and learns that the old friend has a mystery. She was in London in the 1960s, and she was given, by a mysterious 'Mary', a bag of what looks like broken pottery and old honey. Naturally, Lalli knows or guesses exactly what everything is and even knows who 'Mary' actually was.

All the stories do have a kernel of suspense in them, and they are, to that extent at least, quite unique. Yet the mysteries that unravel seem implausible, impossible even, with unrelated events being linked to each other most unconvincingly. Some scenarios are decidedly vague, as in the case of the 'face' in A Face in the Crowd. Or even why old fragments were given to an almost stranger in Threnody.

Sita, who narrates all the stories in the first person, has a liking for long words and odd comparisons. She compares, in Murder Prt--Porter, a man's nails to the talons of a cassowary. Why she would compare a human nail to the talon of an emu-like bird native to Australia is quite inexplicable.

As for Lalli, she is usually stoic and rational, and calm under the most exacting circumstances. In spite of all that, however, she also knows far too much. She is primarily a detective, but she knows more physics than a physicist. She has powers of deduction that would baffle any other mortal. She sees old fragments and immediately dons the garb of an archaeologist. She can even date the said fragments. She knows, from the mere mention of a name, that someone has been murdered. As in The Incident of the Desk Ornament. To top it all, she is also an expert on mythology, as she demonstrates in The Sixth Pandava.

Unfortunately, Murder in Seven Acts deals with unconvincing scenarios and several characters slipping in an out of the tales. The prose is at times jerky, the dialogue is not always realistic. There is too much going on at once, too many unrelated events that are forcibly strung together, too many confusing plotlines.