Ram Murali: “My book is a love letter to Agatha Christie”

The author discusses the debut novel's structure, influences from Agatha Christie and Crazy Rich Asians

Tell us about the structure of your debut novel? Were you influenced by Agatha Christie in writing it?I was hugely influenced by Agatha Christie. She’s undoubtedly one of the best writers of all time. But, regarding the structure of the book, I made a choice very early on — and it might not have been the most commercial one — to start the novel with three short stories to take readers into the character’s social life before he [Ro Krishna] goes to India. It was important to me for readers to see what his world was like. One of the other major influences on this novel was Crazy Rich Asians (by Kevin Kwan), so I wanted to portray a world where Indian people were, in a social atmosphere, completely equal to everyone else. So, one of the first decisions I made was for the table of contents to read like this — Bermuda, London, Paris, India (Ten Days to a New You) — because I wanted to make it clear that India is a super glamorous place. Just as glamorous as each of these other places.

Ram Murali, author, Death in the Air (Jaipur Literature Festival)

Early in the book there are mentions of the Beatles coming to Rishikesh. I think for so many people of Indian origin, who grew up in the UK and the US, the Beatles are all they’d ever heard about Rishikesh. At least that’s all I ever knew about Rishikesh before I went there for the first time. So, in a way, many of us saw India through these Western cultural touch points rather than having our own deeper relationships with places in India. That’s absolutely one of the themes of the book: how we, in the diaspora, have often been taught to see India, which is through the eyes of a white person even if you’re of Indian origin. And you can never really take for granted what anybody knows about anything.

I remember one of my best friends from high school, who’s white was offended when I explain in the book what Partition was. She said everyone knows about Partition. But I wasn’t really sure, so I showed the manuscript to several other friends and they thanked me for explaining Partition to them. You know, this is what I was thinking during the panel discussion with Vikash Swarup at the Jaipur Literature Festival when Vikas said he writes books set in India for Indian people. I never grew up with the knowledge to be able to do that. I ended up having a lot of the same cultural references to India that a random white person does, so yeah, I wanted to depict that in the book

368pp, ₹499; Penguin

Both litigation and fiction-writing in a way deal with the murkiness of fact and fiction. How did your legal career inform your fiction writing?

I approached this book as a lawyer and as a litigator. In a detective story, you’re basically setting up a case the same way you’re as a litigator. You’re coming up with facts, assembling them, deciding how to place them and tell a story. Then, the last thing you write is the beginning because you write the beginning only when you know everything else. That’s pretty much what I did.

I tackled this novel the way I would have tackled any case. For example, just planning everything as much as I could in advance, trying to leave as little to chance as possible, and writing the most important scenes only when everything else around them was either drafted or very clear in my head. But at the same time, I don’t think I could ever write a book that wasn’t a mystery novel. Having trained as a litigator, that’s just the way I work. And I don’t know if this way of working would be good for a literary novel.

Usually, murder mysteries and thrillers possess these propulsive narrative engines. Your book unfolds in a way that doesn’t conform to this norm. Was its slowness intentional?

Partly it has to do with the fact that it was my first book, and I was learning as I went along. I do feel pacing is something I would pay more attention towards going forward. But the choice to make the pacing a bit slower was deliberate. I wanted the book to be a bit more than just a murder mystery that people are reading for the plot. I wanted to explore the characters’ journeys a bit more. And maybe I’m wrong, but I do think the book picks up towards its last third, which was also deliberate — I wanted the readers to first experience that they’re slowly getting into the story, then all of a sudden, all they want is to keep turning the pages until the end. Was it the right way to do it? I don’t know.

You mentioned the Agatha Christie and Kevin Kwan influence. Were you conscious of that while working on this book?

I was very conscious of it. The book is dedicated to my grandmother, who died a few years ago. And it’s also obviously a love letter to Agatha Christie, too, so one of the very first decisions I made was not to use a single obscenity in the book. Not a single one! So, the book is very chaste in terms of sex, and it’s very chaste in terms of violence too because I wanted it to have this sort of timeless feel.

Like a good Indian boy [laughs], I wanted the book to be something that my parents could be proud of and share with their relatives. And they did. I was very concerned about what my family would think of the book, what my grandmother would’ve thought of it. But having said that, I don’t think keeping my family in mind has restrained me in any way. If anything, writing the book the way I did was both freeing and challenging because you realise that you don’t actually need obscenities. It’s so much harder, and so much more satisfying, to be funny without them. I don’t know that I’ll ever write a book with obscenities now because I don’t think you need them. Anyway, why offend somebody if you don’t have to?

The characters are really filthy rich and many people don’t relate to the problems of the rich. Were you concerned about that?

My father always says that the West is obsessed with making India look dirty and poor. And I really wanted to write a book where India wasn’t that. In fact, at the very beginning, Parvati says, ‘If I ever write a book, I’d make sure India was on top the entire time’. And that’s what I did. That’s what I wanted to do from the start. I wanted my Indian characters to be superior to the white people, and the easiest way to do that was socioeconomically, so that’s what I did.

What are you working on next?

I really don’t know. I never expected this book to go where it did. I never expected any of this to happen. Death in the Air is obviously not a perfect book, but I’m really happy with how it turned out. I’ve some ideas that I’m working on but, you know, I would say this — if this is the only thing I ever write, I’m happy with that. I don’t know what’s next. But we’ll see how it goes.

Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.