I have been eagerly waiting to read Club You to Death by Anuja Chauhan ever since I heard the news last year. There’s something about Chauhan’s books that give you enough chuckles and a swoon worthy couple to put you in a good mood; my favourite being Those Pricey Thakur girls. Club You to Death deviates from romance (yet there are specks) and gives you a dead, handsome trainer, too many suspects, and the prestigious Delhi Turf Club (DTC). The 180-year-old club caters to the elite of Delhi — you either wait for 37 years and pay 7.5 lakhs to get a membership or you can snag one with ease if you are born in the right family.
Talking about the plot, Club You to Death is a classic mystery, reminiscent of an Agatha Christie cozy mystery, but peppered with Delhi’s elite. When a hot Zumba trainer and Youtube star Leo is found dead, the DTC has to save face and conduct the upcoming club elections. What looks like a gym accident is soon established to be a murder. What’s more? — Leo seems to have presented a fake persona of a half Jamaican, half desi man to the club members and is rumoured to be in an affair with the election candidate, the successful entrepreneur Urvashi Khurana. Romance is sparse, mostly limited to men with six packs, and a barely surviving love triangle, both never overpowering the mystery at hand. After all there’s a corpse with a tad too many scandals attached to it.
ACP Bhavani Singh, is investigating this murder with the help of lawyer ‘Kashi’ Akash Dogra (who hates the selective club privileges) and his ex-girlfriend Bambi Todi, the bubbly butterfly of DTC. Bhavani Singh is a darling, really. He is naïve, not too macho like your Bollywood hero, and diligently follows Canadian Air Forces’s 5 Basic Xercises routine (something that he doesn’t shy from advising others). He also doesn’t bend to pressure from higher ups and drops truth bombs like “the definition of anti-national is very very broad today”. His subordinate Inspector Padam Kumar is a man in search for a wife, and does not think having the cops follow his prospective brides for background check should be frowned upon.
While the whodunnit remains predictable, the cast of Club You to Death promises thrills, frills and slight chills. There are Zumba aunties who love exercising with hot bod trainers, jealous husbands, Shivblings (lingams decorated with bling and costing an arm and a leg), bright red organic beetroots, Whatsapp gossips, tambola games and ample nicknames (behra (deaf) Mehra, Ghia-Lauki gang). Chauhan also delivers sly pokes at the hypocrisy of our society — very good looking boys maybe be “secretly gay or important (impotent) according to gossip circles; female feticide pooh is pooh-ed by the aunties because for every twenty girls there’s only one decent boy that the girls have to fight over as “somebody is tracking down all our tall, fair, strong, handsome boy fetuses and bumping them off in the womb only! Maybe it’s a Pakistani conspiracy”; Padam Kumar has second thoughts about spending money for a date with a potential bride because it would be a waste of money if she isn’t ‘finalized?’ .
Anuja Chauhan is really the best in commercial fiction. Her books are slick, fun and so relatable that you can almost hear the characters — the tune, the tone, the pitch. Chauhan also has a knack of making her characters wholesome in dialogues, not caricatures. The Hindi-English lingo, accents (nat, curryars, daffynitely, the emphasis on some English words) and snob talk blend perfectly in her latest book too. But the novel isn’t without flaws — you can guess the villain very early into the book, but the twists make you feel satisfied after the final reveal; the plot drags in the middle but the gossip and amateur detective aunties with their set of conspiracy theories keep the pulse thumping. Sometimes the personification feels a little slippery — “The intrepid bits of female cleavage, shoulder and thigh that braved the late February chill begin to goose pimple all over the lawn.” But then Chauhan wins you right back with aunties going “kya kya” or “juttis chwing-chwonging noisily”, “dishoom-dishoom, full on mukka-mukki” and “I thought ki just-for-this-once” and you are comfortably back and snug in Chauhan’s Delhi. I enjoyed speeding through Club you to Death over the weekend. It was just the thing I needed in this pandemic. It delivers what it promises — a snazzy, murdery, clever entertainer.
Rating : 4/5
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Yet another clever, smart novel CLUB YOU TO DEATH from Anuja Chauhan — about a murdered hot trainer, scandals, club wars, social butterflies and gupshup. This snazzy entertainer is just what you need this year Click To TweetDisclaimer : Much thanks to Harper Collins India for sending a copy of Club You to Death. All opinions are my own.
