Outside Elphinstone College, within shouting distance of the city sessions court, a bunch of first years were smoking, chatting. Fifteen-year-old Piyush Jha was one of them. What he would witness on that noon of September 6, 1983, would both terrify and intrigue him: A piercing gunshot, a man trying to jump out of the court's first floor window, a cop shooting him in the leg and hauling him in.
Cradling a lemon ice tea at Cafe Samovar, Jha rattles off, "The man shot dead was gangster Amirzada Khan, who had killed Dawood Ibrahim's brother Shabbir. The gunman was Dawood's hitman David Pardesi." Although the live drama stoked his appetite for crime fiction by Frederick Forsyth and Robert Ludlum, it also sunk into the deepest recesses of his memory — until it came rushing to him two years ago.
Jha says, "I had to wait three months to discuss a script with John Abraham, who was shooting abroad. I felt like writing. That shootout returned to me. Surely, Pardesi had passed us by moments before. What if I had seen him with a gun? What would I have done? It's these answers that I try to find in my stories — the what-ifs."
On an impulse, Jha wrote a short story. "My wife Priyanka read it and asked me to write some more. I was surprised at how smoothly a crime thriller was occurring to me," he says. Jha hammered out two more, and contacted three publishers. Six weeks on, he had bagged a threebook contract. "It was bizarre," he says. Jha's debut Mumbaistan (three thriller novellas bound as one) met with such resounding success that his new book Compass Box Killer is the first of many in the 'Mumbaistan Series', starring the relentless Inspector Virkar. In Compass Box Killer, the formula stays, yet the plot shuns cliches. Jha isn't planning to make just a film out of Mumbaistan, but devour it as a franchise; game, graphic novel, TV series, the works.
Jha's unconditional love for the city reflects in how meticulously he details its less-glossier nooks with the enthusiasm of one showing off his home to guests. "You are in love with your home, aren't you?" he asks, "Mumbai isn't just beautiful. The gogetter attitude of its people is what sets it apart." He refers to a line in one of his stories that says how every Mumbaikar is "ready to spring into the new day to decimate it".
For now, Jha is far removed from such ideas. Since client servicing at ad agencies didn't cut it for him, the MBA-graduate began making ad films and features — Chalo America (1999), King of Bollywood (2004) and Sikandar (2009). "Though I'll continue making films, I also enjoy writing now," he says. In execution, Jha is a disciplinarian. His target: Finish a book in two months by writing 1,000-2,000 words a day.
Jha feels he benefits by rooting his fiction in reality. "Many of the nuggets for Mumbaistan's stories came from Mumbai Mirror's crime stories. Injectionwala, for instance, borrows the murky 'hidden lab' from reports on kidney doctor Amit Kumar. But then, I twist and bend facts to suit my plot," he says. Apart from channelling the noir genre, Jha turns to Roald Dahl for weaving in that unforeseeable twist. "Since I have grown up on pulp thrillers, I want to keep the reader hooked, compel him to turn the page, and end the story satisfactorily."
Why has he kept away from the city's underbelly fixture — the underworld? "I am bored of its overkill. My interest is crime fiction, which was non-existent in Indian English literature. There's definitely an audience for it considering how successful TV serials like CID and Crime Patrol have been." That's a clever assessment of demand-supply gap. "Not at all. I just happened to fall in that gap," Jha laughs.
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