Sting in the tale

What happens when an undercover reporter turns writer? He surprises you with every new book. THE GUIDE caught up with Sting King Aniruddha Bahal who's given a match-fixing angle to his Greek tragedy

What happens when an undercover reporter turns writer? He surprises you with every new book. THE GUIDE caught up with Sting King Aniruddha Bahal who's given a match-fixing angle to his Greek tragedy

Aniruddha Bahal has the face of Everyman. It's the eyes that give him away. They bore into you, trying to read what you want you want to hide. The eyes of a spymaster or one who carries a spy cam to peep into the dark and the debased. Not those of a dreamer-poet.

From sting to script
But then, Bahal is not one for sugary coatings. Like the narrator Seleucus, in his new novel, The Emissary, who says, "It is my intention to narrate the story of my life as it happened, without any of the embellishment that authors of my time are inclined to furnish. I will give you accounts of battles and escapes and vendetta, which you must not confuse with imaginary tales, for these were real happenings and what I didn't witness myself, I had other witnesses tell me.... I am not a man of letters, and that's an advantage, for I will not try to dazzle you with words but by the truth of what I say," Bahal scripts it like it is, even when he is creating an alternate world.

Such style served him well in Bunker 13, his last book; a thriller best remembered for the Bad Sex Award it fetched him. Does it work in a historical novel, with little sex, set in Greece during Alexander's time? "I find it boring to do the same stuff once again. After the last book, I wanted to try something new. VS Naipaul suggested I read history. So I dug into books on ancient Greece." The result: A 456-page novel on the life and times and treacheries of the great conqueror and his coterie, replete with tales of battles, bloodshed and chariot races that were fixed before they began.

Match-fixing in Greece?
Match-fixing in chariot races? Has the Sting King mixed up fact and fiction? Bahal had after all famously exposed match fixing in cricket that had made the venerable Kapil Dev cry on camera. "What's the harm in imagining things?" Bahal shrugs. "There definitely was betting in chariot races. There could have been match-fixing too who knows."u00a0

Such confidence served Bahal well when he took on the might of an elected government after the famous Operation West End that exposed corruption in defence deals. Or when he asked silly questions with a straight face to celebrities as Tony B in the show with the same name on Channel V. "That was fun," remembers Bahal.
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But what makes him tick is the relentless pursuit of public-interest journalism. "India is a land of stories. There is so much to write about. But it is very important to focus on corruption, be a whistle-blower and keep going after the big guns," he says. "I engage with India through my journalism. And with the rest of the world, through my fiction." Which is one reason why his novel is set in faraway Greece. Bahal offers another: "There is a need to get over the literary obsession of Indian writers with the colonial past. Why should our stories be only about India?"

Which is why Bahal's next novel is set in Iraq. With lots of bad sex, hopefully.

The Emissaryu00a0- A Tale of Love, Vendetta and War, Aniruddha Bahal, HarperCollins India, Rs 699. Available at leading bookstores.