You Beneath Your Skin by Damyanti Biswas
/
I’m Paterson Loarn, book blogger and author. You’ll find me writing about comedy, community and crime. This is my very first blog tour with Anne Cater, whose team I’m very proud to join, and I’m delighted to begin with a story that touched my heart - You Beneath Your Skin by Damyanti Biswas.
Lies, ambition, family are the words used on the cover to define this book. All three are accurate, but there is much more to the story Damyanti Biswas tells so movingly. On the very first page, the reader is catapulted into a distressing situation, when the protagonist’s young son, who has special needs, goes missing, and she is forced to call on her diverse extended family to help her locate him.
It’s a dark, smog-choked New Delhi winter. Indian American single mother Anjali Morgan juggles her job as a psychiatrist with caring for her autistic teenage son. She is in a long-standing affair with ambitious police commissioner Jatin Bhatt – an irresistible attraction that could destroy both their lives.
Anjali, described by her friend Maya, who suffers from vitiligo, as ‘tall, graceful, put-together’ must rely on her adopted family for help with her son. She and Maya, who runs her own detective agency, are so close they are almost like mother and daughter. However, there is a darkness beneath the warmth of their relationship, because both women have something to hide. As the author perceptively puts it, ‘Maya wanted to hide the marks on her body, and Anjali the scars of her past.’
Jatin’s home life is falling apart: his handsome and charming son is not all he appears to be, and his wife has too much on her plate to pay attention to either husband or son. But Jatin refuses to listen to anyone, not even the sister to whom he is deeply attached.
Throughout Jatin’s long police career, he has been driven by ambition. Now, he is at the peak of his profession, on the point of taking over from his father-in-law as Chief of Police, but his success has come at a cost. His long marriage is troubled, and he is tormented by the enduring pain of a gunshot wound to his shoulder. He and Anjali have carried on a passionate affair for ten years, under the noses of their ‘intertwined’ families, with a constant risk of exposure. In spite of his secret love for poetry, Jatin’s emotional responses are so damaged that when a rash of terrible crimes against women is exposed, by an alert female colleague, he sees it as an opportunity to raise his profile.
Across the city there is a crime spree: slum women found stuffed in trash bags, faces and bodies disfigured by acid. And as events spiral out of control Anjali is horrifyingly at the centre of it all….
Biswas takes her readers from the large, comfortable family house, once shared with Jatin’s family, now occupied by Anjali, her son and Maya, to slums where little children sleep in drainpipes and drug addicted men sell their womenfolk. It’s as if ‘….the boundaries between worlds had blurred’.
In a sordid world of poverty, misogyny, and political corruption, Jatin must make some hard choices. But what he unearths is only the tip of the iceberg. Together with Anjali he must confront old wounds and uncover long-held secrets before it is too late.
What did I love about this tale of violence and betrayal? The truth and honesty of the author’s style. Damanti Biswas writes about communities and locations she knows intimately, and the terrible events she describes are based on actual crimes. Alongside her depiction of societal breakdown, she skilfully brings to life relationships based on friendship, kindness and passion. There is a cast of supporting characters, each of whom brings depth and charm to her narration. I also enjoyed the inclusion in the text of snatches of Hindi, both conversation and lines of poetry, occasionally translated fully and otherwise left to be explained by the context. This is an effective way of conveying the experience of those of us who live where multiple languages are spoken.
What would I change? The progress of the investigation is painstakingly tracked, and at times I felt this slowed down the pace of the story. However, unlike most readers of crime fiction, I am not a fan of police procedurals, and many people may find that this increases their enjoyment of the book.
In conclusion, I recommend ‘You Beneath Your Skin’ to lovers of beautifully crafted fiction, with a plot that has both enormous significance in the real world, and an undertow of genuine emotion.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Damyanti supports Project WHY, a programme that provides quality education to underprivileged children in New Delhi. Her short stories have been published in magazines in the USA, UK and Asia. She also helps edit the Forge Literary Magazine. Her work is represented by Ed Wilson from the Johnson & Alcock agency.
Damyanti’s reading journey started at the age of 3, and the obsession continues. Her most precious memories of her childhood are of summers spent reading books of all sizes, for all ages. Her favourite authors form a never-ending list that features names like Truman Capote, Kate Atkinson, Lionel Shriver, Margaret Atwood, Anton Chekov, Tana French, Jodi Picoult, Jo Nesbø, Amy Hempel, Toni Morisson, Gustave Flaubert, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Even as a child, she has always been intrigued by the lives behind the faces, the contrasts between appearances and reality. Most of her stories happen at a point of crisis in a character’s life because it is then that the layers peel away and the real person emerges. She’s been a reader of true crime, and books like ‘In Cold Blood’ by Truman Capote inspired her to write crime stories — narratives that would document the unravelling of characters, their relationships, and the society they are part of.
Apart from being a novelist, Damyanti is a blogger, animal-lover and a spiritualist. Though she loves dogs, her travel schedule doesn’t permit her one. She contents herself with keeping fish and is able to take care of them enough for them not to die on her watch. Except once, when someone happened to turn off the oxygen pump. There will be a story about it someday.
Damyanti enjoys working out of busy cafes and food courts, as that helps her focus. When not pottering about with her plants or her aquariums, you can find her nose deep in a book or baking up a storm. Her ambition has always been to live in a home with more books than anything else, and she continues to work towards that.
http://www.damyantiwrites.com/
Twitter @damyantig
