Book Review: 400 Days by Chetan Bhagat

Some things just don’t change. Or, rather, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The more Chetan Bhagat changes, the more he remains the same.

Chetan Bhagat is good at connecting with middle-class, tier 2 town India. His plots are always fundamentally good and usually revolve around an issue that today’s Indian youth can connect with. As a story teller, he is decent, taking time to slowly build up his characters, though I have always found that there is usually a surfeit of information about the characters that impairs the main story itself.

400 Days follows the usual Chetan Bhagat formula. There’s a hero who’s down to earth and constantly tussling with his parents, especially his father. Keshav is studying for the civil services – he’s targeting the IPS, while at the same time, he runs a detective agency. Keshav’s parents want him to ditch the detective agency, clear the civil services and get married, not necessarily in that order.  Keshav has a side-kick, Saurabh, aka Golu, who is, as his nickname suggests, fat and a whiz with software and related matters.  He is also quite dumb in matters of health and fitness and goes to the extent of swallowing cotton soaked in orange juice to lose weight.

In comes Alia, beautiful, married, mother of two, but still rather young – you see, she got married at eighteen. Alia is in distress, her elder daughter has gone missing, possibly abducted and pleads with Detective Keshav to take on the case. As is common in Bhagat novels, Alia is half-south Indian. 

Bhagat doesn’t do stereotypes in half measures and these are not restricted to the Punjabis, Malayalees and Rajasthanis.  Police officers in Gurugram also bear the brunt of Bhagat’s stereotypical wrath. As soon as Siya’s parents report the disappearance of their twelve year old daughter, the cops tell the parents that she might have run away with a grown-up man. Alia’s in-laws are more worried about the bad publicity for the family than that their grand-daughter is missing. The mother-in-law is really nasty. She resents that Alia has given the family two daughters and no sons and goes to the extent of organising a ‘Pishachini nazar utaar puja’.

Keshav is always on the moral high-ground. When after a trip to Kerala, his parents tell him, ‘here, take another roti. Must’ve been eating only rice in Kerala. Have proper food,’ he wants to shout back that even rice was proper food. He doesn’t actually shout back though.

However, despite all these minor pinpricks, 400 Days is a good read, or to use Bhagat’s language, paisa-vasoool. Bhagat’s English is clean and straight, no doubt, the result of some heavy duty editing and makes the digestion of the story easy and simple.

Spoilers ahead

Alia, an ex-model, the mother of the missing twelve-year old Siya, is in an unhappy marriage, a fact which she doesn’t hide from Keshav. Not just that, she desires him, practically swoons over him and appropriates him, despite Keshav’s misgivings. I just didn’t see any chemistry between Keshav and Alia, and found it hard to absorb how a mother whose daughter has gone missing would have a physical relationship with the detective she has hired to find her daughter, pretty much as soon as they meet.

More spoilers

The biggest flaw in 400 Days is that, like many crime novels, Bhagat takes his readers on more than one wild goose chase. One is led to believe that the culprit is about to be bought to book and then, no, its not the case. Then another chase, which goes on almost till the end of the book and the reader is convinced that X and Y are the criminals and suddenly, Z is revealed to be the villain. Some writers do this wild-goose-chase thing well. Bhagat doesn't. 

A few more spoilers

Detection of Z is not the result of painstaking detective work, but due to a sudden breaking wave, from out of nowhere, a eureka moment which is inexplicable and mildly annoying.

Final (non) spoiler

Does Keshav get Alia? Who was the villain who abducted Siya? How exactly do Keshav and Saurabh solve the crime? Does Keshav get into the civil services? I’m sorry, I’m not going to reveal answers to these questions. You’ll have to read the eminently readable 400 Days to find out for yourself.