When the world first met Hari Majestic in Mr. Majestic! The Tout of Bengaluru , he was pretty much what was promised on the tin — a low-life, a fixer, staggering along the lines between the expedient, the exploitative and the illegal, without, mostly, falling into the downright criminal.
He had been found as an infant in the Majestic cinema theatre in Bengaluru — which gave its neighbourhood the name by which it is still referred to, though it no longer exists, and was brought up, in a manner of speaking, by a debarred lawyer and sot.
Golden core
He is not an attractive young man; at least for this reader, it was difficult to find anything likeable about him. As the plot unfolded, and one met other denizens of his world, each seedier than the next, there seemed even less reason to read on. But somewhere, through his regular winding up in all kinds of filth and/or trouble, one started to get the feeling that there was something worth knowing about this battered chap.
By the end, one came to like him a little, to admire that golden core of self-belief that seemed to keep him going despite the physical damage that would put a less hardy specimen in hospital for extended period, that let him become a detective simply because he thought he wanted to be one.
In the second book, Hari — A Hero for Hire , there was more of the same. And here, finally, Hari got the girl, the nurse from Kerala with the chipped tooth, and also found the mother who abandoned him. We left him on his honeymoon, happy in a very un-Hari-like way, reasonably sure that Zac O’Yeah had finished what he had to say about this unlikely protagonist.
But here we are with a third novel. Tropical Detective picks up the story a few years later. Hari is still rather far away from being People Like Us, but he’s a family man — Diamond and he have twin daughters — and she has insisted that he hold down a real job.
He still runs his detective agency (Diamond is the sleeping partner and his reprobate friends are his staff) but he’s not doing any fancy sleuthing. Rather, he’s in the security business, at the unglamorous end, as a watchman outside an ATM.
All’s well
It doesn’t last, of course. The ATM gets robbed while he’s on duty. Like, the entire ATM, unbolted from the floor, and taken away, and not before Hari gets brutally beaten again. That’s just the first chapter. From then on, it’s life as usual for our, erm, hero, and pretty soon, he’s almost dead again.
Without giving away too much, Hari sets himself the goal of recovering an idol from a temple out in the hinterland, and also jewellery scammed from a woman, meets an assortment of retired spies — Hari’s Bengaluru has become a retirement haven for spooks — and even puts in a bit of foreign travel, to O’Yeah’s birth country.
As ever, there is no trace of a smidgen of a hint of a suspicion of doubt in his mind that he can do what he sets out to do, though he will most certainly be battered to within an inch of his life a few times.
Oh yes, Herman Barsk, that other unlovely O’Yeah creation from his Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan makes more than a cameo appearance. (This is a younger Barsk, from a time before India colonised Sweden.)
It would not be a spoiler to say that it all works out in the end, because for one, if you know Hari, you know that will happen, just not quite in a way that he would want it to, and two, because none of the Hari Majestic books are quite detective stories, at least not to this reader.
The plot twists, and Hari’s extrication of himself from numerous mishaps, are not exactly credible. At times, to pick a nit, the humour is crude; at times, to squeeze another zit, the authorial voice and Hari’s inner monologue — we hear a lot more of what goes on in his head in this book than in the first two — wind up sounding much the same (one thinks a HM story written by HM would work really well, and eliminate that occasional irritant); and all the time, there is no character other than Hari with more than two dimensions.
But one reads Hari’s adventures for none of those reasons. What they are are books that are a unique combination of noir and juvenile humour, with large doses of social commentary mixed in. This one delivers on that count.
And one hopes there will be more.
Tropical Detective: A Hari Majestic Mystery; Zac O'Yeah, Pan Macmillan India, ₹350
