Manohar Kahaniyan

Everyone loves a good crime story. And I for one love many. I have 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. It was mostly 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 video movie age. And then ‘Medical detectives’ on discovery channel in the cable age days, even the shoddy daily soaps of Saavdhaan India genre. The movie Psycho has been my favourite and gives you the inside view of a psychopaths mind. 

When I was a kid, there was lawyer family who lived on the floor above our house. husband, wife and their son daughter twin. My mother was friends with aunty and together they had a group of four friends. This was the girl friendship which happened in forties. The one which is mature and understanding from the beginning. Sometimes mummy and auntie when shopping together. At such times my mom may send me to babysit 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. The few initial times I didn’t want to go complaining how I would get bored with the kids. Then my mother suggested I could study there. I would take my books and go upstairs for the 2-3 hours so the mothers could shop in peace. Generally these were shopping soujorns visiting the cloth shop, tailor, dey cleaner in that order and sometimes random household stuff. Sometimes it was a ladies kitty brunch where all the women of the neat society got together yo eat snacks, play Bingo and of course share gossip, do some healthy bitching, and complain about their busy husbands, ungrateful children and the mother in law.

Anyways, as soon as i got there. I found the bundles of all kinds of magazines. From the women’s magazines like Grehshobha, etc there were also the more spicey ones like Manohar Kahaniyan. It was the kind of magazines which kids were not allowed to even look at. Probably there kids were too small to read such things so magazines kept lying around their place. As soon as I saw one, I turned the pages to find the sausy 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 incestutus plots. The stores were repetitive with triangle and QuadraterAls of love relationships. Ambitious women married to loser husbands, or promiscuous women with jealous boy friends. There were honor killings, unwanted pregnancies, rape and lechrous men. Women were things to be possessed and male egos getting hurt all the time. Property desputes and manipulated wills, changing destinies of people overnight from pauper yo king and vice versa. You further throw in mafia, drugs, harlots and police 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 unresolved mysteries of our childhood which became a national news, making newspapers and magazines sell for months. It made parents fear that they set curfews and reassessed the safety measures for their children. In no way it is a mockery to these incidents, but the Happenings were tragic and affected your hard core. You secretly prayed it didn’t happen to you or your loved one. 

I spend many afternoons enjoying these colorful stories. There was a moral at the end always as the bad guy was always caught or suffered in the end. Life had a way of teaching a lesson and karma played quick and square justice. There was no getting away from your own demons and result if your actions. But in no way they compromised the glamorous and shiny 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 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 OCD of waking up in the middle of night to check all the locks of all the outgoing doors, or peeping outside the window at the strange sounds from the streets or Listening attentively to the banging stick sounds by the watchmen. I wondered if there was more. Insomnia ran in our family and my m imagination fuelled by these stories went on a turbo mode, imagining all kinds of scary scenarios of how I could be murdered any moment in various ways. I dreamed of new monsters or people turning evil murderers under the effect of dark forces.

Eventually I got over my OCds and fears, but I have never gotten over the fetish for such creepy stories. So much so that I once subscribed to the annual subscription of Manohar Kahaniyan, sometimes watch the reruns of Medical detectives. And of course all the new British crime shows like Btoadchurch. I think the British weather and sky color is perfect for  the crime shows. Probably killing people in cold weather gives killers a blood rush. My own theory although I get my blood rushing enough with a good crime show or read Swedish crime books like The Laughing man. 

Like I said, I love a good crime story.