Manohar Kahaniyan

Everyone loves a good crime story. And I for one, love many. I loved watching crime shows and of course their close link - detective shows which investigated crimes. The stories of ordinary people who committed crimes in rage and greed. And money, power, sex and of course my favourite, psychopaths. 

 

In Doordarshan days it was Saradhindhu’s Byomkesh Bakshi, one of the first shows I watched. Or the movie 100 Days, starring Madhuri Dixit and Jackie Shroff in the VCR age. And then Medical Detectiveson Discovery Channel in the Cable TV days and even the shoddy daily soaps of Saavdhaan India genre. The movie Psycho is my favourite all-time and gives you the inside view of a psychopath’s mind. 

 

When I was a kid, there was family who lived on the floor above our house. Husband (a Lawyer), wife and their twins (boy & girl). My mother was friends with aunty and together they had a group of four friends. This was the kind of friendship which happens in your forties - mature and understanding from the beginning. Sometimes mummy and aunty went shopping together. At such times my mom sent me to baby-sit the twins. The boy was generally naughty but was well behaved with me (probably out of fear of my elder brothers). The girl was sweet and simple, always smiling and spending time playing with her dolls. Both were too young to read and write. Initially, I didn’t want to go, complaining how I would get bored with the kids. Then my mother suggested I could study there. So I would take my books and go upstairs for the 2-3 hours while the mothers shopped in peace. Generally, these were shopping sojourns - visiting the cloth shop, tailor, dry cleaner in that order and sometimes, random household shopping. Other time, it was a ladies kitty brunch where all the women of the society got together to eat snacks, play Bingo and of course, share gossip, do some healthy bitching, complain about their busy husbands, ungrateful children and the mother in law. 

 Anyways, when I went to their place the first time, I found bundles of all kinds of magazines. From the women’s magazines like Grihshobha, there were also the more spicy ones like Manohar Kahaniyan. These were the kind of magazines which kids were not allowed to even look at. Probably, their kids were too small to read and so the magazines kept lying around the place. As soon as I saw one, I turned the pages to find the saucy pulp fiction stories of sex, murder, vengeance, revenge and deceit. 

 

There were shady and sleazy characters which lurked for their prey and sometimes they lost the game. There were cheating husbands, slutty mistresses, horny wives and incestuous plots. The stories were repetitive with Triangles and Quadrilaterals of relationships. Ambitious women married to loser husbands, or promiscuous women with jealous boyfriends. There were honour killings, unwanted pregnancies, rape and lecherous men. Women were things to be possessed and male egos getting hurt all the time. Property disputes and manipulated wills, changing fortunes of people overnight from pauper to king and vice-versa. You further throw in mafia, drugs, harlots, cops and the filmy drama came to life in these stories.

 

Sometimes there were the real life sensational stories and their own back stories or side stories. We all remember one or many of the unsolved mysteries of our childhood which became a national news, making newspapers and magazines sell for months. It made parents fear for their children, leading to curfews and a reassessment of the safety measures. In no way is it a mockery of these incidents - the happenings were tragic and affected you to the core. And, you secretly prayed that it does not happen to you or your loved ones. 

 

I spent many afternoons enjoying these colourful stories. There was always a moral at the end, as the bad guy was always caught or suffered in life. Life had a way of teaching a lesson and karma played quick and swift justice. There was no getting away from your own demons and the result if your actions. But in no way did they compromise on the glamour and shine of an evil life. The life of complex psychotic emotions which drove people to such extreme acts. 

 It somehow felt abnormal to find middle class ordinary people doing this. I was from an average middle class family but I never saw this happen around me. For days I was under the influence of these stories, trying to find hidden subtexts in normal conversations or discreet motives in people’s actions or relationships where there was none. I assumed that evil people roamed the streets as it grew dark, developing an OCD of waking up in the middle of night to check the locks of all the doors, or peeping outside the window at the strange sounds from the streets or listening attentively to the local watchmen tapping his stick while walking past. I wondered if there was more. Insomnia ran in our family and my imagination, fuelled by these stories, went on a turbomode imagining all kinds of scary scenarios of how I could be murdered any moment in various ways. I dreamt of new monsters or people turning evil murderers under the effect of dark forces.

 

Eventually I got over my fears, but I never got over the fetish for such creepy stories. So much so, that I once subscribed to the annual subscription of Manohar Kahaniyan. Other time, I watch the reruns of Medical Detectives. And of course, all the new British crime shows like Broadchurch. I think the British weather and gloomy sky is perfect for these crime shows. Probably murdering people in cold weather gives these killers a blood rush. My own theory, although I get my blood rushing enough with a good crime show or by reading Swedish crime books like The Laughing Man.