Unravelling the plot of Black Light is like digging deep in a dark dungeon and finding meaning from streak of colour in a monochromatic world

Unravelling the plot of Black Light is like digging deep in a dark dungeon and finding meaning from streak of colour in a monochromatic world

Though the abstract on the back cover gives away almost the entire story, reading this book is a pleasure one reserves for a lazy monsoon day.
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Author Rimi B Chatterjee admits spending over a decade to bring this black light into daylight, yet the narrative does not show any sag from prolonged production.
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The story develops as characters unfold and jut into the scene, almost magically taking pillar positions to hold the racy account of one journalist's quest into the countryside, etching out the mysterious psyche of his childhood idol, an aunt who died suddenly, one who was never fully understood by anyone in the family.
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The novel opens with the pandemonium revolving around the frenzy of a newspaper office, the late night shift and the crazy print deadlines.

Young journalist Satyasandha Sarkar has achieved a lot early in life, but his world comes crumbling down with a phone call from his mother informing him about his eccentric aunt Medhasri Sen's death. Or was it a suicide?

Our man plays detective, interconnecting five riddles that finally help him solve the puzzle. Sarkar's profile much resembles that of a Bengali detective, a role that so often appears central to many stories from Bengali writers with the protagonists playing a sleuth.

Yet his ventures remain confined to believable acts of an overgrown adolescent, exactly the kind of mind frame he slips into, realising his last close interaction with the departed person.

Chatterjee should also be credited for writing for an Indian reader, by not crossing irritable lengths to explain the cultural nuances that every Indian is already familiar with.

Since, it is the revised version of her first unpublished book Live like a Flame, its pages smell of the fondness an author has for the first work.

However, the plot does lean too much into evolving the unknown side of a dead artist that it does not do justice in etching out the character of any other character, for that matter even the protagonist, Satya.
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Also, large sections of the novel appear abruptly, as discovered stories written by the aunt and hidden at obscure places, much like the 'Da Vinci Code', but totally avoidable from the current narrative's purpose.
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With a proper balance over these aspects, this story has everything that it takes to make it unputdownable, raising the bar for Chatterjee's future writing.
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Black Light by Rimi B Chatterjee
Publisher: Harper Collins
Fiction: Pages 272; Rs 299