The Goa Connection By Bappaditya Chakravarty

Throw into a pot cooking up fiction a dash of intrigue, a pinch of cloak-and-dagger and gore, a soupcon of sleight-of-hand connection of the dots, a hint of James Bond-like characters and not-so-femme fatales, and a potpourri of villains, and you end up with a…thriller!  Well, at least spaghetti thriller, if you allow me the liberty to indulge in an analogy to the more commonplace term "spaghetti Western".  Bappaditya Chakravarty has written just such a book in The Goa Connection.

In my younger days, I devoured the works of the master writers of the generic thriller, people like Ian Fleming, John le Carre, Alistair MacLean, Frederick Forsyth, James Hadley Chase, Len Deighton, Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, among others, and have been rather spoilt in only being satisfied with works of their standard.  The Goa Connection does not match that standard, though it has its moments.

The action begins on 14 July 1939 in North Goa with the murder of Joachim Brunel, a Belgian national, who was "an engineer and a geologist --- a rare combination."  His killer offers this theatrical (also, considering the situation, rather comical) parting shot to his dying victim (who, with the demise of his wife, was now all alone):  "I am sorry to leave you like this, but you have to go.  You do not have the right to be at the end of what you have begun.  Very sorry…rest in peace, Monsieur Brunel."  And thus begins the saga of a bewildering (sometimes making it difficult to keep track of the events being narrated) array of incidents and individuals in far-flung places of the world.  The reader is taken through (not in chronological order of occurrence) India (Delhi, Kolkata, Jaipur, Mumbai, Mussoorie, besides Goa), Ostend, London, Port Said, Cairo, Alexandria, Mersa Mutruh, Beni al-badr, El Sallum, Athens, Brussels, La Roche, Zeebrugge, the Arabian Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the North Sea.  There is also a brief tangential reference to Islamabad, home of the trouble-creating ISI.  And all centering on the discovery of rare minerals (vital for state-of-the-art advanced strategic weaponry) found in Goa, and the dastardly deeds done by diverse bad guys to get their dirty hands on them.  

To confront such an array of villains (adept at double-crossing each other as well), along comes the debonair, but steely, Rudra Sengupta, who had served in India's special forces, to confront arch-villain Radovsevic (a Croat), his principal henchmen, Pieter Reicht (a former South African soldier) and Ivan Petrov (a Russian who was with the KGB and its successor organization FSB), and a host of other bad guys and girls.  He was temporarily employed by India's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, but was really an undercover secret service agent working under the direction of Brigadier (retired) Paramjyot Singh, a formidable crusty spymaster with an immense and impressive reach to the top spy agencies of the world, including the UK, the US, and the major continental European countries.  Singh's outlook on life is summed up by Chakravarty:  "The Brigadier never wished anyone luck.  Those who were unlucky never succeeded in anything; not in war, not in politics, and certainly not in Rudra's profession."  Rudra was a Bengali, "Tall and fair-complexioned.  A square face, hair cut short, perhaps a little unruly." 

Enter the two young women, both Bengalis in their mid-twenties from Kolkata, and both, through force of circumstances, about to get entangled in a dangerous game of international cloak-and-dagger.  Shushmita Mitra was a geologist, and Sharmila Chatterjee was a chartered accountant, and they were childhood friends who had together engaged in "many escapades".  They were (not at all unexpectedly) very attractive and looked good in Western attire.  The two, carrying some papers from Shushmita's thesis supervisor, Professor Mitra, for delivery to his friend Professor Deshmukh of Bombay University, go off to Mumbai and get to be a house guest of Shushmita's uncle Mr. Chowdhury, a senior officer in a major bank, whom she is visiting for the very first time.  And find time to inadvertently involve him, her aunt, Sharmila and herself in a harrowing series of events that placed them in serious danger of their lives.  They were saved on more than one instance by the ever-vigilant Rudra, who seemed to dispatch the villains with extreme prejudice within precisely two minutes.  The two-minute timeframe comes up on numerous occasions.

The author also uses a no-nonsense catchy device from the popular old TV series "Mission Impossible":  Rudra is told by Shukla, another agent:  "Digital reorder.  Open with your code.  Will self-destruct after you put it off."  Other hackneyed expressions found in thrillers from the US and the UK are invoked by Chakravarty.  For example, there is this (really inane and irrelevant in the context of their utterance by the protagonist) in a couple of places:  "Hope we do not have to meet again."  Back to the story.  Halfway through the book we are introduced in quick succession to Vijay Upadhyay, Rudra's sidekick and a tough guy himself, and Derek, a Canadian merchant navy officer, who later on joined Rudra along with his senior officer John McAllister, a Scotsman, to fight and defeat the bad guys, and who justifies his credentials as a fighting man with this gem:  "Once shot a grizzly too."  Wow! In spite of occasionally using Western phrases as if to make his book appear to be a thriller in the classic master Anglo-American writers' mold, Chakravarty lets slip an instance of fairly typical South Asian penchant for self-pity when he has the hard, tough Rudra tell Shushmita:  "if I had been a philosopher I would have said that people like me are the last living examples of the outsider.  We don't belong to ourselves, and we don't belong to the world."  

To the author's credit, he did not make Shushmita and Sharmila anything resembling the Bond girls.  Highly intelligent and industrious, they often use their presence of mind to outwit the villains, although both evince veiled and not-so-veiled romantic interests, in Derek and Rudra, with Sharmila going for the Canadian (reciprocated).  Eventually, the multifarious villains, who are drawn from multiple countries across the world, get their comeuppance at the hands of the good guys and women from India, Britain, other European countries, North America, and Arab countries.  In the process of building his story, though, Chakravarty fairly frequently takes recourse to constructing convenient connection of events, of people fortuitously being in the right places at the right times, of offering fitting solutions.    

To take a few examples.  Professor Mitra apologizes to Sharmila and Shushmita for not being able to send them to his home from his office because "the bloody driver had taken unauthorized leave."  And, of course, they promptly ran into a dicey situation almost as soon as they hit the street.  Then, while being held prisoner aboard a ship, even though their other personal belongings, like iPod, flash-drive, etc., had been confiscated by the bad guys, a large needle, their credit cards, and a small pair of scissors were miraculously overlooked!  These came to great use for the women soon after.  There are also some snide remarks about blacks in the form of black prostitutes in London.  The Goa Connection will not give the reader a taste of well-constructed, taut high standard thriller, but will satisfy those for whom a pastime in going though a spaghetti thriller will do just fine.

The reviewer is an Academic and Actor.