Challenging the Romance of the Techno/Metropolis: The Social Critique of the ‘ City ’ in Zac O’Yeah’s Crime Trilogy

Introduction

As the capital city of the South Indian state of Karnataka, Bengaluru stands as a spatial testimony to the massive social, political and economic shifts since its foundation in the early sixteenth century. However, like many other metropolises in the Global South and especially South Asia, it was the liberalisation of the Indian economy in the 1990s which stimulated rapid metamorphosis of this once serene, peaceful town into a bustling cyber city (Carvalho 2016; Colaco 2003; O’Yeah 2012, 2015, 2017). When India adopted neoliberal measures such as opening the economy for foreign direct investment, lifting restrictive trade licences and reducing the size and scope of the public sector (Tickell 2016), Bengaluru gained momentum as the ‘Silicon Valley of India’, moving away from being a ‘pensioners’ paradise’ for retired government officials and bureaucratic elites. This new avatar has helped the city orient itself as a significant reference point in the global cartography. In this process, both the borders between the urban space of Bengaluru and its adjoining areas, and between the city and the other parts of the country, have grown thin and porous, which in turn has facilitated movements not only of people, technology, fashion, food, ideas and ideologies but also of crime, criminals and violence.

Critical humanities and social sciences see space as a discursive entity which is constituted by social relations. Claval (1984) reminds us that the idea of a ‘social space’ (L’espace social) ‘was apparently first coined by Emile Durkheim at the end of the nineteenth century’. Our analysis later in the paper regarding the rapidly transforming urban space of Bengaluru and the social relations redefining and being redefined by this space is broadly situated within the ‘spatial turn’ theories on social relations (Foucault and Gordon 1980; Harvey 1990, 2006; Lefebvre 1991, 2003; Massey 1994; Urry 1985). Globalisation and neoliberalisation processes have been key factors in transforming socio-spatial relations (Jabareen & Eizenberg 2021). Urban restructuring, socio-spatial divisions and internal geographies are explained within the context of these epochal processes, which further crystallise social and cultural divisions in the society (Castells 1996; Harvey 2001; Soja 1989).

As Westphal (2011) indicates, the referentiality of fiction enables it to point to a recognisable ‘real’ space while also fictionalising that space at the same time. Literature partakes in social and cultural map-making and represents space in a complex skein of imaginary relations (Tally 2019). The ‘Mr Majestic Trilogy’ (2012–2017) by Zac O’Yeah uses the crime/detective genre to investigate the problems and promises of fast globalising and rapidly urbanising Bengaluru through their representations of socio-spatial relations. With Bengaluru gaining in stature economically and growing population-wise, a burgeoning drug trade and illegal smuggling of both people and goods have also come to characterise the city. With this as the context, the series portrays the real and fictive connections between crime and urban space (Messent 2013; Scaggs 2005; Worthington 2011) and creates a universe of crooks, criminals and delinquents as the (by)products of the urban social space under the present cultural logic of late-capitalism. The Majestic novels depict Bengaluru as an integral part of what can be referred to as ‘the globalization of crime’. The city’s rural outskirts and hinterlands often act as outsourcing hubs for crimes rooted in and routed through the city. This paper analyses socio-spatial relations spread within and around Bengaluru to explore the engagements between city, crime and criminality.

The first section of this paper locates Zac O’Yeah and his Mr Majestic crime-detection series within South Asian genre fiction in English, with a focus on the South Indian subregion. The second section discusses the spatial transformations of Bengaluru through the fictional representation of the city in O’Yeah’s trilogy. The final section examines how crime and criminality builds connections between Bengaluru and its hinterlands, as represented in the novels. It also delineates how in Bengaluru, many socio-spatial borders and divides are re-drawn and reinvented when the contemporary era is defined by the celebration of borderlessness and non-fixities.

Locating O’Yeah in the Landscape of South Asian Genre Fiction in English

The geopolitical and economic shifts since the 1990s have led to the emergence of an urban aesthetic in the South Asian literature as seen especially in the emerging genres such as chick lit, crime narratives, fantasy fiction and graphic novels (Tickell 2016). Over time, the South Asian genre fiction in English has grown remarkably popular with regional as well as global readers. Maha Khan Phillips’ The Curse of Mohenjodaro (2016), Osama Siddique’s Snuffing out the Moon (2017) and Shazaf Fatima Haider’s A Firefly in the Dark (2018) are well-known genre fiction from Pakistan, whereas Saad Z Hossain’s fantasy novels, Escape from Baghdad! (2015) and Djinn City (2017), represent Bangladesh well. Indian genre fiction includes chick lit, crime writing, pulp fiction, crick lit, dystopian and futuristic writing, mythological narratives and graphic novels. Chetan Bhagat’s The Three Mistakes of My Life (2008), Anuja Chauhan’s The Zoya Factor (2008) and Geeta Sundar’s The Premier Murder League (2010) are crick lits; Advaita Kala’s Almost Single (2007) and Partha Sarathi Basu’s With or Without You (2010) are some of the examples of the chick lits produced in India. What is interesting to observe is that, especially with the digital revolution and the scaling up of the publication industry in general, the burgeoning local markets seem to be rapidly integrating with the global market for genre fiction (Tickell 2016).

In this changed literary landscape, the genre of urban fiction has also risen to popularity as South Asian cities have achieved great representational significance in fiction in English. Rupa Bajwa’s The Sari Shop (2004), Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011) and Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) are novels fictionally located in the South Asian cities of Amritsar, Bhopal, Delhi, Bangalore and Karachi. As Tickell (2016: 9–10) writes:

Urban existence in South Asia is now more fast-paced and competitive, more globalized and resource-hungry, more technologically networked and socially fragmented than ever before, and these transformations have proved productive for novelists, fostering urban popular genres such as crime-writing and inspiring new, increasingly inventive literary expositions of citizenship and civic identity.

Lehan notes that as literature gives imaginative reality to the city, urban changes in turn help transform the literary city (1998: xv). This formulation is crucial for this paper as it addresses the urban social relations at play in the novels. The new urban fiction in English in India reflects the results of the rapid and unequal urbanisation of the last few decades, the crisis in the cities of the Global South emerging from the stark reality about the disparity in the ownership of urban resources such as money, land, water, education and livelihood opportunities. According to Stuti Khanna, South Asian novels in English,

are able not only to address some of the most significant social, economic and political changes that continue to convulse the region, but also to challenge and extend Anglo-American meanings of the urban, as well as to invoke newer forms of narrative that map, linguistically and stylistically, the experience of a fractured, incommensurable ‘citiness’. (2016: 103)

As the Indian writing in English has seen an escalation in the production and consumption of urban crime fiction (Varughese 2013), one can also observe that the main focus of crime novels has shifted from what to where the plot unfolds, often bringing the background to the foreground; and this is where urban geography emerges as a central character in these narratives (Pepper and Schmid 2016: 2). The centrality of the locale in these narratives implies a closer engagement with the spatial politics and poetics of the urban especially as neoliberal inequality and social disparity dig their roots deeper in these cities. In this context, the Hari Majestic novels belong to a new subgenre which deliberately and minutely engages with geographical and spatial realities that exist outside the text: these include Madhulika Liddle’s Mughal Murder Mystery series (2009–2015) set in Delhi, Esther David’s The Man with Enormous Wings (2010) set in Ahmedabad, and Kalpana Swaminathan’s Lalli mystery series (2006–2010), Smita Jain’s Kasthuri Kumar mystery series (2010), and Aatish Taseer’s The Temple-Goers (2010), all set in Mumbai. While the Indian metropolises Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata have long been fertile landscapes for Indian writers of crime fiction, Bengaluru is a new and late addition. We attribute this to its recent emergence as a ‘global’ technopolis and as a site for both capitalism and capital offences (Guttman 2017). While Anita Nair’s Inspector Gowda series comprising Cut like Wound (2012) and Chain of Custody (2016) establishes a Bengaluru noir, other notable works on this city include Nilanjan P Choudhury’s The Case of the Secretive Sister (2014), Vinay Ramakrishna’s Bangalore Chronicles: A Kidnap (2015), Agni Sreedhar’s The Gangster’s Gita (2019) and Manreet Sodhi Someshwar’s Girls and the City (2020).

Zac O’Yeah’s ‘Mr. Majestic Trilogy’ adds to this corpus of genre fiction based in Bengaluru. His novels portray the Bengaluru underbelly through the everyday spatial negotiations of the protagonist, Mr Hari Majestic, and his neighbourhood, the Puncherwallah Complex on CD Road, located in the Majestic area. Hari aspires to create his own urban legend by saving the world from impending catastrophes. To do so, he assumes a new avatar—a tout-turned-detective. He establishes a detective bureau, ‘Mr. Majestic, OK & Co Proper Investigations by Heroes for Hire’, along with his Uncle OK Mamool, a lawyer, debarred from practising law, and currently working as a forger, and his friends, Doc (a computer expert), Triplex (a connoisseur of pornography who also sells illegal pirated DVDs) and AC Gaadi (a jaunty autorickshaw driver). While the first novel of the series, Mr Majestic! The Tout of Bengaluru (2012), revolves around Hari investigating the disappearance of a young NRI woman, Madhuri, the second novel, Hari: A Hero for Hire (2015), delves deep into the transnational network of human organ traders in Bengaluru. The third in the series, The Tropical Detective: A Hari Majestic Mystery (2017), deals with the illegitimate trade in antique idols routed through the city and the country.

Zac O’Yeah is a Swede from Gothenburg who has lived in Bengaluru for almost two decades now. He translates Indian literatures into Swedish and also is a well-known travel writer. While this is not the main aim of this paper, it is also interesting to dwell on Zac O’Yeah as an outsider to the city he writes on. O’Yeah’s position as the non-native observer of the city’s life adds a new dimension to the narrative. He is a privileged white man in his resident city but not quite the embodiment of the coloniser-white that Indian literature and scholarship has been hegemonised under. The ‘foreigner’s gaze’ of his writing slips into the narrative every now and then: ‘As a Bengaluru boy, [Majestic] was unused to situations where there were less than a million people around at the same time’ (O’Yeah 2018: 117). The ubiquitous ‘crowds’ that mark Indian urban spaces would not have had left such an imprint on a native narrator’s consciousness. That aside, O’Yeah represents the growing phenomena of non-Indians residing among the common ‘city’zens ¹ in Indian cities, and the twenty-first century cosmopolitan sensibilities acquired by the city which has to be differentiated from its preceding epochs.

Mapping Majestic, Mapping Bengaluru

The Majestic Trilogy maps Bengaluru as a city with a significant past, present and future. There are several instances in the novels that narrate the history of the city and its evolution into the ‘global’ city that it currently is. Primarily, the (hi)stories of Bengaluru are interwoven into the fictional landscape through the toponyms employed in the Majestic novels. Street names belong to the urban geographies of everyday life. The cultural convention of investing the name with mnemonic function is based on the premise that speaking or reading the name triggers memory (Ryan et al. 2016). For instance, Lalbagh and Cantonment mapped in the novels invoke specific fragments in the history of the city. Lalbagh is where Kempe Gowda (1521–1569), the founder of the city, built one of the four towers to mark the limits of the city’s growth. The Cantonment area evokes the city’s colonial past, when the British defeated Hyder Ali and his son, Tipu Sultan in the final Anglo-Mysore War (1799) to establish their military base in Bangalore in 1809.

Each commemorative street name is also a ‘title’ of a story that encapsulates a person’s life story or an account of an event (Ryan et al. 2016: 143). This way, history and memory are intertwined with spatial practices and everyday social discourses of the city, as depicted in Mr Majestic:

The Ulsoor Lake was old, dug and dammed at a time in history when people realized that the growing town had no natural source of that most essential commodity – portable water. It promptly got polluted. It was rumoured that Lt Winston Churchill used to pee in it nightly for three years he was stationed in Bengaluru. He had stood on its shore ranting into the tropical night about what a third-rate watering hole this was, after getting over-freshed at the United Services Club. Some claimed that the echoes of the Lieutenant’s voice were still heard on weekends. (O’Yeah 2012: 197)

The plots of the trilogy are centred around the Majestic area in Bengaluru. Majestic is a bustling transport hub that connects the city to its hinterlands and the rest of the country with its Kempegowda bus terminus and the KSR railway station. The land on which Majestic currently stands has always been in flux since the foundation of Bengaluru in 1537 by Kempe Gowda. It was earlier the Dharmambudhi lake, a major source of drinking water, until the city was struck by a famine between 1876 and 1882, and also the black plague of 1898. The lakebed was polluted and became a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Thus, to prevent pestilent diseases, the open-channel water supply in the city was replaced with an enclosed system. Gradually, Dharmambudhi became the first sewerage network of the pete area or the old City, ² leading to further pollution of the lake. Moreover, as part of the misguided efforts towards malaria eradication in the 1900s, Dharmambudhi was also drained out like many other lakes in Bangalore (Nagendra 2016). However, the lakebed came to be known as the ‘maidan’ that used to be the venue for the famous ‘Congress Exhibition’ in the 1950s. The Exhibition was a celebration of the (indigenous) material culture through a proud display of everyday and industrial commodities like soaps, lamps and machine tools produced by the state-run small industries (Nair 2005). In 1964, a portion of this land was allotted to the Transport Department to build the Kempegowda bus station, which later gained popularity as the ‘Majestic bus station’ after a famous cinema hall in the locality, the ‘Majestic Talkies’.

Interestingly, Hari is also popularly known as Mr Majestic because he was discovered at the same Talkies by Sannamma, a floor sweeper from a nearby slum. This interestingly not only provides Hari his name and fame but also creatively ‘locates’ him in a moment and space indelibly mapped into the history of the city. The Majestic’s evolutions from a space of nourishment, to one of pestilence and later to a public urban space reflective of its unyielding chaos, is reflected in Mr Majestic’s origins and adventures. Read in this manner, it is interesting that a train ticket from Khatpadi Junction to Bengaluru City Station, punched on 12 August 1983, the same day as the blockbuster Hindi film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro was released, is the only document that establishes the year of his birth. The film, quintessentially urban and a brutal satire on urban corruption, connects seamlessly to the urban chaos and the absurdity of urban existence which Hari’s investigations later reveal. Sannamma saw the baby boy as a divine gift she found between the matinee and the first evening show and named him ‘Hurree’. ‘She also used the Anglicized spelling of Hari because she wished him the best possible chances in a globalized world’ (O’Yeah 2012: 93). In the novels, Hari uses phrases such as ‘the previous millennium’ and ‘the old days’, implying how he has witnessed the transformations in the urban geography of Bengaluru since its economic liberalisation and cyber revolution, and he straddles the two epochs with his signature light-heartedness and irony.

Each phase of the economic growth has spawned various spatial practices that have shaped the current urban form of Bangalore in specific ways (Nair 2005: 87). For example, the techno–social–economic revolution of the 1990s influenced the urban transport patterns in an unprecedented way (Krishna et al. 2019: xiii). The spatial specificities dictated by new economic patterns often trigger newer conflicts as in case of the transformation of the urban transport systems. Bengaluru is known for its horrific traffic conditions, which is a topic of perennial complaint among its citizens (Bengaluru 2021). The roads originally constructed for small Ambassador cars fail to adequately service the giant SUVs, Audis, Porsches and sports cars with their low chassis traversing through potholed roads and causing accidents and other havoc.

O’Yeah’s Bengaluru shows how more roads, bridges, lanes and by-lanes are constructed to manage the rampantly changing traffic demands in the city. The vehicular frenzy on CD Road represents the chaotic traffic patterns visible in the Majestic Bus Stand area, Bengaluru Fort Road, Sankey Tank Road, Infantry Road etc. It is interesting to note that the narrative’s description of this chaos is both embodied using exoticised metaphors such as ‘jugular vein’ and at times defamiliarised using a ‘tourist’ gaze:

this jugular vein of existentialism with its kaleidoscopically shifting streams of rickshaws, tempos, scooters and trucks loaded beyond capacity, had a mesmerizing effect on tourists. Normal pedestrians who wished to cross a street, went and stood halfway out from the kerb, like pins in a bowling alley. One plunged through whenever there was a gap in the traffic. Only fools and foreigners waited on the pavement for the traffic to abate. (O’Yeah 2012: 22)

The din of the traffic, the blare of horns, dusty roads, the rush-hour traffic on the Outer Ring Road and the lack of sidewalks for pedestrians feature regularly in the novels. These descriptions collectively engage with the politics of sharing, using and producing urban infrastructure. Unlike Jayaraj Sundaresan’s (2011: 73) idea on how urban life is characterised by shared ‘mobility systems’, Hari’s Bengaluru points to a depletion that essentially undermines the idea of the ‘common’. For a city to be sane and equitable, De Angelis calls for ‘forms of direct access to social wealth, access that is not mediated by competitive market relations’ (cited in Sundaresan). The ‘commons’ are the ‘public sphere’ of urban life that is to be closely guarded against private greed. It is to be produced, monitored and fostered with the whole community’s engagement and consent. The chaos narrated in the Majestic novels points directly at the failure of the ‘common’:

Urban public infrastructures [including public transport] are urban commons that need to be produced and reproduced through re-imagination and mutual engagement. Casualties caused by the deficit of such public infrastructures characterise urban life in India today – traffic congestion, flooding, declining health, accidents, ... (Sundaresan 2011: 73)

The novel’s social critique of the declining urban space needs to be read in this context:

The traffic had stalled and at the centre of attention was a brand new pink Porsche. It had hit a cow munching on plastic bags. Luckily it wasn’t possible to speed on the potholed roads, so the cow was more alive than the car and was limping undeterred into the middle of the road. A tired street lamp lay on top of the Porsche. (O’Yeah 2012: 12)

Built heritage ‘comprising historic monuments, museums, archaeological sites, and masterpieces of art and architecture carefully conserved as identity and architectural accomplishment’ (Hosagrahar 2018: 14) has a definitive role in revealing both the character and history of an urban space. The Majestic novels invoke signifiers of built heritage and their overtime transformations to convey the pace with which Majestic has been changing, since the 1990s, much like the city itself:

Once upon a time, the area surrounding CD Road had been famous for having the greatest number of cinemas per square foot. Motion pictures were so popular … [and] the Majestic Talkies itself had now been replaced with a construction site for a shopping mall. (O’Yeah 2012: 26)

The burgeoning real-estate industry and the construction boom following the digital revolution have elicited remarkable transitions in the social, Lefebvrean space of Bengaluru. In Hari: A Hero for Hire, Kamaraj Road is drawn as a giant treasure trove of vintage furniture, carved doors and window frames but are discarded like trash when the ancient bungalows in the city are demolished to make way for modern amenities like gigantic shopping malls, multiplexes and international food outlets.

In the trilogy in general, the reference to the upcoming layouts, colonies, gardens and townships indicates how new residential and commercial centres constantly germinate to accommodate the neoliberal needs of the hastily growing urban population, mainly constituting software engineers, call centre professionals, nurses, students and informal sector labourers, from various parts of the country and the world. Indicating the aggressive growth in the population, we are told:

The City Junction and the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation Intercity Bus Station next to it were like two pregnant women competing in population growth. If the town grew by a million per year, some 999,990 of them squeezed through here in an endless queue clogging the footbridge-cum-tunnel system ... A vasectomy performed on the tunnel might halt the human overflow, but only for a minute. (O’Yeah 2012: 156)

The expanding employment opportunities following the state-sponsored industrialisation of the 1950s and the market-driven liberalisation of the 1990s have opened the borders of the city to not just the Kannadigas ³ but everyone (Nair 2016). The cityscape of Bengaluru is imagined with a diverse, floating population of non-natives, including European foreigners and Indian migrants from the rural outskirts and the hinterlands of the city and beyond. Hari Majestic’s wife, Diamond, a nurse from Kerala, his friend KF Pinto aka Doc, a Catholic of Goan ancestry, and his school teacher, Hochiminh Meshtru, share the same CD Road neighbourhood. The only clue to the latter’s origin is his name which reminds one of a former Vietnamese prime minister.

The interstate and the intrastate migration into the city since the 1950s and the multicultural/multilinguistic demographic profile of the city have perhaps led to the definition of Bengaluru/Bangalore as a ‘cosmopolitan’ space:

The truth was that any kid who grew up on the streets of Bengaluru was not only bilingual but a virtual polyglot – apart from the local Kannada language, one was likely to pick up some Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi, English and perhaps a bit of Urdu, Kodava, Tulu and Konkani. (O’Yeah 2012: 269)

Thus, Bengaluru was a ‘cosmopolitan’ space, much before the 1990s, when the city gained significance as the booming IT capital of South Asia.

However, in Mr Majestic, when Hari is held captive by an Ambassador car full of ‘tough bhais of the north-Indian type’ (O’Yeah 2012: 111), he thinks of playing the jingoist card and persuading the highway looters to lynch them in an improvised ethnic riot. This invokes claims and concerns of cosmopolitanism and vernacular identity politics that have for long haunted urban spaces in India. As Hari reflects, ‘cosmopolitan nature of the town [is] sometimes a boon, sometimes a bane’ (111). In 2017, Bengaluru joined the ranks of global cities such as New York, London, Melbourne and Singapore in having its own logo, one that combines the typography of English and Kannada to underscore its cosmopolitan and global ethos. As a cautionary remark on its claim for cosmpolitanisation, Janaki Nair (2017) reminds us:

That overused term [‘cosmopolitan’] has only meant that millions (of particularly middle-class migrants) have felt no obligation to learn the local language, Kannada. The concept was given a sobering knock when thousands of Indians from the north east fled in terror following racist rumours and attacks in August, 2012. Tamils (1991), Muslims (1994) and the poor (all the time) generally have been targets of non-cosmopolitan violence. (n.p.)

Nonetheless, Bengaluru is largely celebrated as a hybrid space in O’Yeah’s novels, a city that embraces diversity and differences even if it struggles with old preconceptions, and a space straddling two epochs as much as Hari himself. Their cast of characters also suggests an urban assemblage of cultures and a palimpsest of languages and identities. This myth-making of Bengaluru as a ‘cosmopolitan’ city goes hand-in-hand with the construction of city as an ‘entrepreneurial city’, best exemplified in Hari’s own constant reinvention of himself as an entrepreneurial streak. It is interesting to read this in the context of Young et al.’s (2006) formulation of ‘cosmopolitan city’ as a strategic ‘imagery produced by the private sector’ in the construction of an entrepreneurial urban geography. The city in Hari’s narratives is a place where the outsider can reinvent him/herself and find his/her own place in the landscape. As Hari believes, ‘There’ll be an end to existence, but unless that day is printed in red letter on your Bangalore Press calendar, there’s no point in taking tension’ (O’Yeah 2018: 369).

Crimes, Borders and Hinterlands in O’Yeah’s Bengaluru

The cyber boom of the 1990s and the subsequent influx of IT companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Wipro, and Infosys have reshaped the urban space of Bengaluru in manifold ways. Internet parlours and cybercafés form an inevitable part of daily life in Hari’s universe along with more conventional commercial spaces such as grocery stores, restaurants and automobile repair shops, even in a shady neighbourhood like CD Road:

Doc ran a seamy Internet parlour where regulars got a discounted rate. Ten plywood cubicles were crammed into the space. Each had room for a PC, a chair and, if one wriggled a bit and wasn’t too fat, a person. The doors were adorned with blow-ups of Doc posing next to Sabeer Bhatia or Steve Jobs, with daubs of vermilion dotting their foreheads like flambéed brain. (O’Yeah 2012: 1)

It is this cybercafé that Hari uses to run his online felonies and scams, some of which have transnational roots, implying how a city transformed by new modes of communication and technology can become a rife ground for new forms of crimes such as cybercrimes, including cyber espionage, data breach and hacktivism. In Mr Majestic, Mrs Bulala, allegedly the deputy manager of the Risk Capital Bank of Nigeria, connives with Hari to perpetrate her online fraud beyond Nigeria, in which they succeed to a great extent. A South Indian city like Bengaluru is integrated with the urban geographies far beyond its physical borders as it becomes a fertile market for crimes in the West and the ‘rest’.

Language, technology and crime-related curiosities are what help Hari transcend the boundaries of the city he resides in. His command of English language is asserted early on, and his affinity with the city-tourists helps him familiarise with the Cantonment area and other elite neighbourhoods in the city:

[H]e felt that he knew [Cantonment] better than the people who live there. He had spent years hanging out with tourists, smoking hashish with them in lodges, so that now he was as comfortable in the upper strata of Bengaluru as he was in CD Road … His English had become perfect, too: he felt he could speak like a Britisher or pretend to be an American, and he knew select phrases in most other languages that tourists spoke, plus he had memorized many cool Arnold Schwarzenegger and Clint Eastwood one-liners. (O’Yeah 2015: 50)

The fluidity obtained through colonial and cosmopolitan abilities helps Hari transcend its cartographic borders and social divides as he goes about in his criminal endeavours, with great ease. O’Yeah’s Bengaluru is a city where crime and criminality are truly globalised, trans-bordered and organised. Through the descriptions of the ATM burglary and the antique idol trade in The Tropical Detective, the author depicts a broad range of crimes that make use of technological tools and transnational networks. The computers and other materials listed as prerequisites for Hari’s detective agency reach India after being smuggled through Nepal. There are Tamil, Mumbai, Andhra and Agra gangs who turn up in Bengaluru only to commit scams and then quickly leave for another town (O’Yeah 2018: 176). The list of crimes run under the name of the Sandalwood ⁴ Film Industry is exasperating, but most outrageous are the trade of human organs and antique idols. Under the exalted tag of medical tourism organs are illegally harvested out of the bodies of the goons, rowdy-sheeters, and other inhabitants of the CD Road neighbourhood for transplantation into the bodies of the global and the rich such as Alice Frankenheimer and Baiju Ganbei. Immigrant settlers such as Doug Maddox and Salvatore facilitate the creation of crime spaces in Bengaluru. Maddox, an old British MI6 agent, has been in Bengaluru for ages. In his 80s, he now trains rowdies in Cooke Town and is still involved in petty criminal activities. Salvatore is an Italian-American who was stationed as a foreign correspondent in Bengaluru during the turbulent Emergency Years of the 1970s. Now, claiming to be the son of the Ku Klux Klan founder, he lives in the by-lanes of Kamaraj Road near the Cantonment area. The privilege they enjoy as foreigners is evident in their conversations with Hari stating how the native goons and touts respect these veterans for their prudent foresight on crime and detection. In narrating these expatriate lives, Hari imagines the city as a space of refuge for the unwanted and the misfits of the world.

The relentlessly changing urban geography facilitates the urban crime rates in Bengaluru while its colonial history of spatial division and the haphazard city planning of the independence era have turned the city into a palimpsest—a juxtaposition of contradictory and contrasting spaces. Kempe Gowda’s Bengaluru of the 16th century was a mud fort with a settlement quadrisected under caste by two main streets—currently, the Chikpete Main Road and the Avenue Road (Srinivas 2001). Caste formed the boundaries of livelihood choice then: selling rice was restricted to Akkipete, ornaments to Nagarthapete, general trade to Chickpete and petty merchandising to Doddapete. The colonial city planning also followed stringent zoning regulations to ensure separation between the natives and the foreigners and also between residences and workplaces. The non-Kannadiga Indians who helped the British with their domestic chores lived in Shivajinagar (called Blackpally during the colonial rule). Despite its proximity to the Cantonment, the layout of Shivajinagar resembled that of the City with narrow streets and mixed-use buildings. The crime and criminality depicted in the novels can be read as the result of the collapse of this neatly organised order and hierarchy.

In Hari: A Hero for Hire, the close proximity between the old Malleswaram Market, a colonial establishment, and the newly constructed Modern Mantri Mall, leads Hari to think that ‘separate worlds [are] located in the same street’ (O’Yeah 2015: 77). Putting this in Foucauldian terms, the city of this novel is written as a heterotopia of antithetical spaces such as the ‘upper-class’ British-built Cantonment area or the UB City with five-star provisions juxtaposed against the ‘underclass’ CD Road neighbourhood comprising the Kama Boardless Lodging House that doubles up as a brothel and the Main Drain Semi-Slum. CD Road is represented as a ghetto with the fuzzy and indistinct borders separating itself from the rest of the city. The Porsche of the famous Sandalwood actor, Jagatprasidhha, traversing the gully proves this. It is the working-class ambience of the automobile repair shop in Puncherwallah Complex that camouflages the felonious and deceptive character of the neighbourhood:

It was a normal building designed in an architectural style known as ‘modified localized art deco’, based on the Associated Cement Companies’ standard plan books from the time when fashions hardly changed between one five-year plan and the next – and yet to a foreigner’s eye it presented a mind-boggling riddle.

Its façade was covered with large and small hoardings: ‘DTP Elec. Typing Xerox Scanning Lamination’, ‘Unlimited Internet Downloading’, ‘Indus Pride malt Beer’, ‘Pandit Pundit Forecast Consultations’, ‘Puncherwallah & Sons Pre-Owned Car-cum-Tyre Mart’ (O’Yeah 2012: 26–27)

Such spaces remain almost always in transition and keep the disguise to evade the penalties imposed by law. For instance, Pandit Pundit, a self-proclaimed astrologer and palmist, conducts fake medical camps for ‘low-cost clients’ and extort money from them. However, whenever somebody comes with a complaint, ‘such a camp usually moved on to the next location before customers came back to complain’ (O’Yeah 2012: 44).

According to Charlotte Spinks (2001), a combination of the urban anomie and the spatial juxtaposition of extremes generates excess crime potential. The narrow alleys and backstreet spaces with byways barely distinguishable from jungle tracks and no main roads vivisecting it (O’Yeah 2012: 133), amidst the busy, fleet-footed city proves beneficial for those who wish to stay out of sight. In Hari: A Hero for Hire, ‘Mediclinix Resorz’, a luxurious hospital catering to the needs of the local rich, is built opposite the Globalized Sickly Super Specialty Hospital on CD Road—the ‘disreputable part’ of Bengaluru. It is ironic that rather than preferring a peaceful and quieter street to build such a ‘zero-bacteria’ hospital, they chose a noisy market-area, crowded with people and unhygienic surroundings. The bourgeois, middle-class urban populace either stays away from such spaces or does not care enough to interrogate their (in)visible spatial dichotomies. It shows how CD Road acts as a camouflage to Dr Viral’s illegal human organ trade at the Sickly Hospital. Under the charade of a ‘charitable slum-dweller scheme’ and his forged narrative about investing all his life savings in buying the Sickly Hospital, Dr Viral illegally ‘harvests’ internal organs from the poor who visits the hospital and sells them to the rich patients at Mediclinix Resorz. The unaware urban poor fall prey to such exploitative capitalist forces. The CD Road neighbourhood is employed as a façade for the crimes perpetrated by corporate companies and those belonging to society’s ‘upper’ strata. They take advantage of such a floating population to keep their business running in this rapidly mobile and continuously changing globalised world ridden by ‘new structures of prejudice and inequality’ (Srinivasan 2015: 313).

The mixed camouflage of migrants, visitors and natives provides anonymity and obscurity to those who commit crimes and want to stay out of sight (Spinks 2001). Hari’s city is teeming with rowdy-sheeters and other floating population with no fixed address. As its name implies, the CD Road is the ghettoised neighbourhood of seedy and seamy area of the larger Majestic where everyone uses pseudonyms to evade the patrolling eyes of city police. Even the roads are known by their aliases, and here the ‘buildings were like people. Sometimes a modest exterior concealed the scariest things and vice-versa (O’Yeah 2015: 3). The Puncherwallah Complex is one such decrepit building—a honeycomb of semi-unregulated, small-scale livelihoods including Doc’s Cyberspaced-out Internet Paradise, the astrologer Pandit Pundit’s office, Suleiman’s canteen, known as Veg-Non-Veg Friendly Mess, and the garage on the ground floor. It is home to touts, scammers, unauthorised tourist guides, thieves and goons, including Hari’s own adoptive uncle OK Mensinkai aka Mamool who is a forger supplying criminals with false documents. He used to be an aspiring lawyer spreading messages of democracy and social awareness through street plays in the 1970s. Nevertheless, he was debarred from practising law, transforming him into

an ‘entertainment industry’ lawyer for most of his career. He had assisted in hostile takeovers of production companies … He knew the methods by which wannabe actresses were snared into the flesh trade, as well as how to negotiate a buy-back deal with the pimps when a client fell in love. He still functioned as an informal legal advisor to one or two brothels … He counted many emi-retired crooks among his drinking buddies. (O’Yeah 2012: 54)

Hari has lived on the CD Road for almost 28 years following its deviant paths, and even inventing new paths on his own. Since such ghettos are often inhabited by people from diverse cultural backgrounds, it becomes difficult for them to come together as a homogeneous social group pre-empting crime; thus, they remain the exploits of the crime–politics nexus as in the case of the illegal organ trade (Sampson 1986; Spinks 2001). O’Yeah’s Bengaluru seems to substantiate this point.

The Majestic novels also illustrate how the fluidity of the borders allows crimes to travel between the hastily growing city of Bengaluru and its hinterlands. These crimes affect the dynamics and dialectics of the borders and the geographies they separate and connect. Just as the Majestic transport hub connects the city to its hinterlands, Hari Majestic establishes the connection between the city and its hinterlands through his investigations. Mofussiluru, Halegudehalli and Angrezihalli are the fictional villages and hinterland towns represented in the Majestic novels. Mr Majestic shows how the national highways lined with Dhabas and liquor shops are effective channels for trafficking crimes between the city and the pastoral borderlands:

Apparently, the highway with its heavy cargo traffic had a tendency to develop into dens of vice at points … The borderland was also the major conduit for stolen motorcycles: two-wheelers from [Karnataka] were sold in Tamil Nadu, and Tamil motorcycles were shipped to Bengaluru, in a never-ending exchange. (O’Yeah 2012: 233)

Hari narrates Mofussiluru as a bucolic version of the CD Road where 7,000 cars and scooters are stolen and re-sold annually by the Puncherwallah clan. It is also a nexus of shady dealings. The easy availability of liquor permits on that side of the border has increased the competition between illegal traders. A tout is always placed to keep an eye out for supari (hired) killers and investigators arriving by bus so that he can report back to the ruling don, AA Sura, who is involved in illicit arrack business and land racketeering in Mofussiluru. He owns a fraudulent business school that issues degree certificates against cash. His hotel AA Paradise functions as a secret studio where illegal pornographic videos are shot and later marketed in Bengaluru and other cities with the help of rich businessmen in the city. These fictional snippets show how the permeability of borders and the proximity between the metropolis and its hinterlands have increased rural associations with urban crimes, thereby reducing the purported cultural and ‘moral’ gap between the urban and the rural.

The trilogy of the Majestic novels writes how the geographies of the countryside villages and the hinterlands are different from that of the city. Unlike the crowded sooty streets of Bengaluru, the hinterlands appear ‘simple and sober’, as in the landscape of Halegudehalli with its beautiful patchwork of yellow and green paddy fields as well as the toddy palms near isolated farmsteads. Mofussiluru has a dusty rural bus station with herds of bleating goats shepherded across the platforms, and to Hari Majestic, the inactive Angrezihalli railway platform and its town premises seem to be the end of the earth:

People loitered on the platform, waiting, half-asleep, listless. A pig pirouetted past Hari, chasing its tail. A lone constable lay back in standby mode, resting on a stack of jute-covered parcels, absolutely not on the lookout for fugitive tourist-killers … He looked around. Not a trace of other passengers. Hari went to the ticket office. Shockingly empty of amorphous queues. (O’Yeah 2012: 160)

This is in stark contrast with the Bengaluru railway station where people ‘spilled through the breaches in the station boundary walls as trains offloaded tens of thousands of passengers from Ahmedabad, Bhubaneswar, Coimbatore, Lucknow [and so on]’ (156).

In Angrezihalli, a group of smoking elderly gentlemen seems like they had been sitting on the road for at least a couple of decades. It ‘seemed a plausible spot for a pre-liberalization-era tree’ (O’Yeah 2012: 165). This implies how this small town is yet to encounter the globalising world in terms of spatial planning and lifestyle changes. Angrezihalli is a small town with romantic aspirations, characteristic of many such developing spaces throughout India and South Asia. Its efforts towards achieving that goal seem like an inefficacious spatial mimicry of a romanticised city life. The blackboard at the enquiry counter in the railway station notifies erroneously in English, ‘All Trains Counselled due to Monsoon Floodings’, although ironically, ‘Angrezihalli’ literally translates into ‘English Village’ (O’Yeah 2012: 160). The barber shop named ‘Hi-fi Wi-fi He-Men’s Hairdos’ and the hoarding broadcasting the ‘Spoken English Tuition’ as a way to get out of Angrezihalli suggest how such small towns in India try to mimic the urban culture and lingo in an ironic effort at self-effacement.

As Richard Fox (1972) argued, problems of spatiality often seep into its social and economic folds. Mofussiluru is an example of how the gentrified city’s shabby ramshackle periphery becomes a space of oppression for its economically and politically vulnerable inhabitants. Simanti Dasgupta has extended Matthew Gandy’s work on the peri-urban in Mumbai to study the small towns at the margins of Bangalore. She argues that the peripheral setting of the hinterlands and rural outskirts—adjacent yet separated from the city of Bangalore—lends a unique opportunity for neoliberal experimentation with the new organising tool, the market (2015: 68).

Hypothetically, in the era of globalisation and neoliberalisation, the market is a means to intervene so as to stop and desist from corruption and structural distrust; however, it gave rise to a different kind of class/caste politics that isolates inhabitants of urban margins as ‘residual’ and an undesirable socioeconomic group (Dasgupta 2015). Thus, exclusionary urbanisation has become the new norm in the neoliberal world (Choudhary et al. 2020). This eventually produces some of these marginal regions as crime hubs—crime often becoming a way of reaffirming the marginal’s existence in an inherently marginalised new urban world. Alienation resulting from social disruption and segregation may motivate people to aspire for unachievable goals often encouraged by lawless activities (Spinks 2001). In Mr Majestic, the young tout assisting AA Sura with his criminal activities is an exemplar of this. Faced with limited opportunities in such a small town, he chooses to join the lawlessness of the ‘underworld don’. Other migrations (primarily seeking economic safety and security) are no less chaotic: A joint family seen squatting on the floor of the Angrezihalli railway station seems to be travelling with almost everything but the kitchen sink. Why such chaos? Most rural migrants do not believe they can achieve legal housing in the city and hence make peace with chaotic living verging between legality and illegality (Soni 2021). Their space is ‘neither a complete slum, nor quite part of the city plan’ with no water supply so that women and girls carry drinking water in colourful plastic pots from the hand pumps near the railway station and the sewage drains out of the alleys into a canal, the eponymous Main Drain (O’Yeah 2015: 15).

The lapses in the implementation of urban planning exacerbate socioeconomic inequalities and cultural rifts between its ‘city’zens’. Although modern-day Bengaluru appears to be a democratic cosmopolitan space welcoming people with open arms, the city’s ‘safe and clean’ spaces are clearly separated and are guarded from the ‘unclean’ ghettos. While the neoliberal city needs this underclass to serve as labourers, maids and touts, the cityscape reinforces deeply embedded exclusionary mechanisms that have always been a part of the idea of the city/urbanity (Dasgupta 2015; Spinks 2001). We recently witnessed a stark example of this when the entire city was shut down due to the COVID-19 crisis of 2020 and the labourers were forced to walk back to their villages, this reverse migration playing out on our TV screens as a reminder of how easily the city could expel them. In the following days, this mass exodus threw urban infrastructural development into disarray as both state-run and private building activities stalled in the absence of necessary labour (Navami 2020). Projects, such as the ‘Namma Metro’ suburban rail project and airport expansion projects, came to a complete standstill, making it necessary for the government to incentivise the return of the migrant population. Being a high-tech metropolis and a state capital, Bengaluru has to offer certain experiences to its inhabitants which demands the deluge of migrants into the city. However, when the bourgeois class finds planned housing spaces in the city, the migrant/poor ‘city’zens or the proletariats are rendered invisible from the planning imaginary of the city (Nair 2005). The Hari Majestic novels present to us this fragmented social and material urban fabric.

It is no wonder that the novels invoke the absurd in its narrative voice while narrating the erasure of the poor from the cityscape or the marginalisation of the immigrants. Hari’s negotiations with the city of crime and criminality are peppered with a sense of absurdity which can be read as a defence mechanism in navigating a city that is steeped in contradictions. For instance:

The situation was clearly dangerous. The hostile entity made Hari think of a stuffed rhinoceros—he had this mental cataloguing system for slotting people as various dead animals, possibly because he was able to see their previous reincarnations. A professional trait, it also helped him do a quick risk assessment: a Tyrannosaurus Rex for example meant red alert, an aepyornis was no alert. (O’Yeah 2012: 7)

Hari’s take on the city is both ironical and deeply sarcastic. Perhaps irony is the only way to deal with a ‘semi-posh villa with a numberplate that said, ‘Working Class Hero’ (O’Yeah 2015: 117)’. Later in the novel, he wonders why ‘Bengaluru hadn’t already been buried in its own garbage’ (118). What Hari and the narrative voice of the novels are laughing at is the naïve romanticism that has long been the norm in the narratives of the city:

Hari felt that a major problem today was that people still thought Bengaluru was the placid and provincial town it had been in the previous millennium, when it was known as ‘the Garden City’ and ‘Pensioner’s Paradise’, and all too frequently they mixed it up with bucolic places like Kerala. (O’Yeah 2012: 306)

It is this bubble of the romantic city imagery that the Majestic Trilogy seeks to challenge. In Hari: A Hero for Hire, the medical tourist, Alice Frankenheimer, who is superstitious about reincarnation and karma, dreams of an old vegetable market and a vegetable seller with an inviting smile, from the Maharajah era (O’Yeah 2015: 229). Such dreamy narratives erode the specificities that mark neoliberal, urban experience. It is this visceral experience of Bengaluru that the trilogy seeks and narrates.

What stays with the reader at the end of reading this trilogy is the ‘underclass-ness’ of its protagonist. Characters like Hari Majestic have traditionally occupied marginal roles in fiction. O’Yeah gives him the spotlight and the centre stage that allows him to tell his tale and exposes for us a visceral experience of the city. This experience foregrounds the unvalued and marginal urban dwellers and their peripheral spaces. Also, the ingenious plot turns and devices move the narrative away from the archipelagos of Bengaluru’s premium living spaces of the urban elite as it enters into the ‘twilight zones’ of poverty, dereliction, crime and violence (Khanna 2016: 117). In this way, O’Yeah’s trilogy truly invites us to read the ‘urban’ socio-space of Bengaluru as a testament of neoliberal marketism which has implications for urban spatial practices, and overly commercialised (and hence criminalised) cosmopolitanism.