| The Princess Diaries  Forts wait mute with frozen operas. Murders punctuate the corridors of decadence. Innocence takes a tour of the spectacle. These are some of the images that hyphenate the pages of 36-year-old author Shivani Singh's debut novel The Raja is Dead (HarperCollins). Dripping with drama and despondency, Singh drafts a cerebral plot at a time when most authors celebrate hackneyed exotica. In an unhurried style, the story opens with a murder at the Raja of Sirikot's palace-a dead body is found with "marks on the throat". Royalty, even in fiction, needs to have a debauched voice to be a page turner. The murder triggers a series of tales that churns the insides of the palace. Suggestively set in circa 1947, a time when Indian monarchy was crumbling down like a pack of cards, Singh unfolds the thriller through the eyes of Leela, the 13-year-old punk of a princess. Singh says, "I chose Leela's age as it brings in the part girl, part woman curiosity and ambivalence to the story". So while the subjects (murder, palaces, incest) are conservative, the imagination of this "soccer mom" can put the fits and foils of Desperate Housewives to shame. Dreamy in parts, the book richly describes the twisted tales of excesses. And the lack of it. She weaves in an element of karmic boomerang where sins committed by parents return to haunt the children. This philosophy graduate now plans to explore the inscrutable mysticism of religion in her next book-which she has already written. "Every religion has a saint but their path to sainthood is so secretive," she says. Which is what she aims to unravel in a tale set in Nalanda. Over the last decade, India has proved that it has a bankable bunch of scribblers who have scripted everything from their brown childhood to odes to paani puri, much to the excitement of blue eyed bookers. Even while these authors auctioned India, what remained shrouded in mystery was the art of telling a story, with er, a story. They lost a plot or never have had one. This is where Singh scores. With her pen poised like a javelin, Singh provides the respite readers crave from the musty tales of the ordinary. "I think I found my Zen after writing this book," she says with relief. So have her readers.
-By Supriya Dravid | 
