Creating mood through setting and ecology in 1920s Bangalore - Harini Nagendra

This week's topic is a fascinating one. 

Creating mood through setting is important in crime fiction. Can you give examples from books that have inspired or moved you? Also, please share an evocative paragraph from your own work and tell us how you came to write it.

My books - The Bangalore Detectives Club series, set in 1920s Bangalore - are all about the setting. For me, the place and setting - 1920s Bangalore in the times of the British Raj - in a princely state, at a time when women were beginning to step outside the home in large numbers - is critical to the story. In that sense, I think of 1920s Bangalore with its bungalows, lakes, trees, monkeys and wildlife - as a character too, one of the protagonists that shape my tale. As an ecologist, of course nature plays a major role in my books. That's why, as soon as I read this prompt, I knew the book I would select as an example. These short extracts are from Sally Andrew's wonderful Tannie Maria series, set in the South African Karoo, a semi-desertic plateau dominated by heat. Tannie Maria is a baker, an excellent cook who writes an agony aunt column, and a woman struggling to come terms with her own traumatic past, as she gets entangled in murders. The combination of local food, ecology and geography that Andrews writes about conjures up a sense of place almost instantly, as the brief extracts below - from her first book, Recipes for Love and Murder - demonstrate.

Extract 1

I shifted in my chair. The shrike flew back up to a branch with something it had caught.

‘I phoned them on Friday,’ said Hattie, ‘to tell them, Sorry we just can’t do it, not right now, I said.’ Her throat became all squeezed like a plastic straw. ‘They said we can cut out the recipe column.’

Her voice sounded far away. I was watching the shrike; it had a lizard in its beak. It stabbed its meat onto a big white thorn.

‘Tannie Maria.’

Was the lizard still alive, I wondered?

‘I argued, told them how much the readers adored your column. But they said the advice column was non-negotiable.’

Was the butcher bird going to leave the meat out to dry, and make biltong?

 

Extract 2

 

The next morning my phone rang. It was Hattie.

‘Have you heard?’ she said. ‘Nelson Mandela died last night.’

When I put the phone down, I made myself a cup of coffee and took two rusks and sat out on the stoep. But before I could bring the coffee to my lips, the tears started leaking out of me.

Mandela was ninety-five and had been sick for a while, but it still came as a shock. I looked out at the brown veld and the wrinkled gwarrie trees and the distant mountains. My tears made it seem like rain was falling, but the sky was wide and empty. I knew that people all over the land were crying with me for Tata Mandela.

And now, for the next question - "please share an evocative paragraph from your own work and tell us how you came to write it." 

Here's an extract from book 3, A Nest of Vipers, out on May 2

The women navigated a muddy river of clayey, sticky slush, balancing carefully on the small slabs of stone as they made their way past the semicircular arena that served as the makeshift parking area of the circus, to the ramshackle homes at the back.

What a contrast the circus grounds were from the last time she had been there. The tent stood in a far corner, covering the stage where the performance was held. No longer exciting or magical, as it had seemed at night, its then attractive bright colours now appeared cheap and faded in the sunlight. The parking lot where they had encountered Pawan’s body was pitted with car tracks, seeming like it had not been swept in years. A high line of eucalyptus trees enclosed the clearing, pale and tall like eerie silver sentinels. The peeling bark on the trees appeared like distorted faces, watching them as they moved. She could not see people anywhere, though as they neared the wicker gate, she could hear sounds. Metal clanked and water splashed in the distance. Women, cleaning vessels and washing clothes, called to each other as they worked.

They had almost reached the edge of the stone path. Once they were out of the clearing, the women entered an area bounded by a makeshift bamboo fence, ill constructed shacks with crooked walls and aluminium sheets for roofs standing cheek-by-jowl with each other.

‘Strange, that a famous magician like Das would agree to live in such seedy quarters,’ Uma aunty said.

Occupied with domestic chores, the circus performers chattered to each other, shouting loudly to be heard above the din. After the silence of the open grounds, the noise seemed deafening.

Muscular grey-haired women squatted next to large stone slabs, taking out heavy bed sheets that had been soaked in large tin buckets. They bundled up the sheets, slapping them against the slabs to loosen the dirt before sluicing them with clean water, squeezing them dry and hanging them out on long clothes lines. Tied to the trees around the edge, the clothes lines dipped drunkenly down to the ground, creating an obstacle course that criss-crossed the clearing. Short and plump, Uma aunty was able to navigate them with ease, but long-limbed Kaveri had to bend and duck to move.

Children capered around playing with cork balls made from the pods of the raintree whose branches shaded them from above, making it even harder for her to get across. Crows cawed, diving down to attack the plates of food that the older children held in their hands as they chased their younger siblings around, trying to feed them. She saw a lot of older people, too, but most of the performers must have left for Mysore.

‘Do you know where Suman is?’ Kaveri asked an exhausted-looking young woman with a swollen belly, one child on her hip and the other tugging at her hand. But she only stared at her with compressed lips, not saying a word.

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How did I come to write this? The Sampangi circus is fictional, but the dried lake in which the circus is situated is real, and has an especially rich ecological history which Hita Unnikrishnan, one of my former PhD students, studied in detail. Through most of the 19th century Sampangi lake was one of Bangalore's largest lakes, a thriving water body used by farmers, fishers, grazers, weavers and potters. But by the late 19th century, the British administrators began demanding that the lake be drained, because water from the lake flowed into their bungalows and breweries (which they built on the lake bed!). The farmers protested, but the lake was eventually drained so that the British regiments could play polo on the lake bed. After the demise of the lake, the grounds were eventually converted into a sports stadium - we documented the sad tale in this short article here, but it was such a fascinating (and sad) story, that I knew I had to work it into a book somewhere! 

The Lake That Became a Sports Stadium

And now, I hope you don't mind the obligatory writer's pitch - A Nest of Vipers is now available for pre-order, so if this excerpt makes you want to read a bit more, here's the link!

A Nest of Vipers: A Bangalore Detectives Club Mystery