Shut the Lights | Fiction | Smita Bhattacharya |
Pixie Dust Publishing (2022) | ISBN: 978-1637545300 | pp 221 | Rs. 359

 

A Gripping Domestic Thriller

A startup enthusiast and management consultant, Smita Bhattacharya’s latest book Shut the Lights is a domestic thriller set amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. Tracing an urban upper-middle-class family in Mumbai during the quarantine, the novel uncovers dark secrets and aberrations that are very disconcerting. The outcome is a gripping reading experience.

The main characters of the book comprise, the Mehra family- a working couple, Suvini and Mridul and their teenage children Damien, and Tara. They live in the Golden Heron Apartment Complex, a tower of compact upscale homes. As the author says at the outset, “The Mehras are the quintessence of a successful Indian bourgeois family, having achieved all middle-class aspirations.” (p.1) When the lockdown is announced, the family does its best to reconcile differences, adapt to the newly confined life, and get along. But as the story progresses, we learn that each character has a skeleton in the closet that may just tumble out at any moment.

By being compelled to live together all the time, the Mehras seem to come closer. But soon, we pierce through the veil. Their sweet gestures and behaviours are only a ruse to meet their own ends.

The prose is simple and easy to follow. Also, the author successfully manages to sustain the sense of suspense throughout the book. At the beginning of each section in the novel, there is an interchange between two anonymous individuals in italics. This serves to foreshadow the main development in the section. The technique is an innovative one and heightens the sense of foreboding.

All the characters are presented in a rounded manner. For instance, while Mridul is caring and considerate, he is willing to bend backward to save his family, even at the cost of a precious life. Similarly, Suvini is concerned about her children but does not flinch from preparing for a life of greater freedom as she feels neglected at home. Neither of the characters is predictable. And even if they did appear as stereotypes at the beginning of the book, the story’s progress soon changes that.

Though we mostly gain insight into Suvini’s point of view at the beginning, when she contracts Covid and is segregated, Mridul’s perspective plays a more prominent part.

The novel is open-ended. The immediate crisis that each character was embroiled in is resolved, but even then, there is a note of uncertainty that lingers in the air. As Bhattacharya writes in the Afterword, she had completed the book in the period of the first lockdown in India and did not know what would happen next. She wanted to leave the reader with that same feeling. One question that reigns at the end of the novel is: Is sticking to the socially accepted structure of a family worth the debased lies and sacrifice of scruples?

The phrase “shut the lights”, after the book’s title, resounds when Mridul tells the children to switch off the lights in their room and go to bed, without worrying too much. We also come across it when the family, along with several other families, turns off the lights at 9 pm on a certain day on the Prime Minister’s directive – to pay their respect to health workers. The book accurately portrays the happenings of the pandemic such as the migrant worker crisis, long queues at grocery stores, difficulty in managing household work without helpers, and so on.

There are a few mistakes here and there. On page 68, Tara refers to Oscar Wilde’s Great Expectations instead of Charles Dickens. Even if this was a deliberate misappropriation by the author to indicate that Tara is lying to her mother about homework, it’s strange that Suvini, a modern educated woman, does not see through it.

But overall, Shut the Lights is a compact book that does not allow any diffusion of the narrative thread or the reader’s interest. If one is into thrillers, it is an enjoyable read.