NO PUTTING HER DOWN

Even though her next book is set in an exclusive club, Anuja Chauhan’s writing is for everybody

- Bhavya Dore

Best known for quick-witted romantic novels, Anuja Chauhan seems to do the impossible—create wildly popular books that all have great literary appeal, too. This month she returns with Club You to Death, a gripping whodunnit set in Delhi. Her work has been adapted for film and television, and before becoming a full-time writer, Chauhan was a successful advertising professional. In a conversation with Reader’s Digest, the Banglaore-based writer talks about her paisa-vasool (value for money) work and charmed life.

We know that your book, Club You to Death, is a murder mystery set in Delhi. We also know it involves a gym trainer victim in a posh club. What more can you tell us?

It’s a very Delhi book, but it’s also a very universal story. So many of us have belonged to a club growing up. You go there to swim, eat French fries with tomato sauce, play Tambola and borrow books. There are Thursday ‘Nights at the Bar’ and May Queen balls and Diwali galas. Of course, this is Delhi’s most exclusive club—the Delhi Turf Club, in the heart of the Lutyens zone, no less. A club whose sticker people flaunt on the windshields of their cars with great pride. It’s a book about privilege, I think. About haves and have-nots, class and caste, social hierarchies and people trying to cross over these hierarchies. It has lots of cougar aunties and pompous uncles, wizened old gardeners and beautiful, young, idealistic people, and a genial old ACP on the brink of retirement who believes that if you beat up people, you loosen their tongues, but if you listen to them, you open their hearts.

How and why the shift to a whodunnit? Do you enjoy reading crime fiction, too?