Thriller zooms in on business of blood

The tale of the hunt, if told by the lion, would be a totally different one,” reads the epigraph of Shantanu Dhar’s fast-paced, edge-of-the-seat thriller The Company Red that brings vampires, yes the vampires, to the familiar setting of the national capital region of Delhi. The premise: Humans have no natural predators. But what if they had one In this tale of the hunter and the hunted — dark, baleful and bloodcurdling in bits — it is the humans who fall prey to the thirst (and hunger ) of their invented predator. A thirst for blood — pure and unadulterated! Red corporation, world’s fourth largest life sciences company, is all set to open its largest research & development (R&D) lab in Uttaranchal. The company aims to develop the next generation mutating medicinal drugs at the lab. And, for that, it is seeking the government’s permission to allow them to carry out initial testing of their new drugs on the homeless, impoverished people. The company promises to take care of thousands of such people every year, fulfilling their basic needs, like healthcare, food and education, as well as rehabilitating them, if the government allows the company to carry out testing of its drugs on them. The Commonwealth Games is round the corner. And for the government that wants to temporarily get rid of the vagabonds and beggars, this comes as a blessing in disguise. It gives the company the nod, being wilfully unaware of the company’s sinister vested interest. For Ardhendu Bose, the novel’s protagonist, a fresh MBA passout, who wants to steer away from the stodgy Indian companies and wants to work for a multinational, the opportunity to head Red’s India operations seems too good to be true. Later, Ardhendu discovers that his father, Amitava Bose, a famous doctor who was believed to have died in an accident in the US, had worked for Colton White, the company’s patriarch, with a taste for luxury. There is more to White, however, than meets the eye. And when Ardhendu gets to know about White’s reality, he must put everything — his mother, wife and child — at stake to defeat the latter’s evil designs on the human race. Ardhendu, with a little help from someone I shouldn’t reveal as well as the CIA, eventually wipes out Red from India. And, at the end, he’s offered to be a “CIA mercenary” to weed out Red from the world. But let me not play spoilsport and kill all the fun by telling you how he does that. Suffice it to say that Dhar weaves a riveting tale. And a credible one at that. His research on vampires and vampirism, which gleans through the novels, lifts the story by a few notches. And the beauty of it all is that nowhere does the weight of research bog down the narrative. A self-professed fan of Greek tragedies and Gothic novels, Dhar’s credo has been to create believable characters. “I always wanted to write something believable and not just a supernatural story,” he says over the phone from the Landmark Bookstore, where he had an interface with his fans and media on the day the book hit the stands. Dhar’s trigger has been the fact that India has not given the world “someone like Harry Potter”. He says: “It’s high time we crossed the bridge and gave the world the ingredients of a desi superhero.” A collector of graphic novels, Dhar prefers Frankenstein over Dracula. But it is Shakespeare he swears by. “No one can tell a story like him. In the Indian context, the Bard is the Manmohan Desai of emotions,” says Dhar, who is struck by Shakespeare’s character-building. “That drives me,” he says. The Company Red, he says, is based on his study and understanding of human behaviour. And the target readers are people “as young as 16 or 55”. Dhar’s son is 9-year-old. And he finished three chapters in half an hour. “Anybody can read it. As a writer my success lies there,” says Dhar. The Company Red is not a novel that you read to quench your literary thirst. It is not a novel likely to whet your literary appetite. It is not a novel that the “literary types” would deem worthy to talk about. But if you are game for a desi thriller, care for a simple story — of vampires running amok in your own backyard — told well, it doesn’t disappoint. Finally, if the mention of vampires urge you to pick this one up to foray into the familiar Twilight’s world of Bella and Edward, here’s a forewarning: The Company Red is no Twilight, even though it is as easy, enjoyable and eminently unforgettable a read. Filmmaker Satish Kaushik has expressed his willingness to adapt the novel into a film. It will be interesting to see The Company Red’s celluloid avatar. Vampires, anyone