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Book Review: The Girl in Room 105 by Chetan Bhagat

The Girl in Room 105 by Chetan Bhagat has been into buzz for a while. Yes, it is not an ordinary love story, like his other books, the author claims that with this book he intends to get into ‘mystery and thriller’ kind of genre. Let’s see how good he fared up with this new book. Unlike his other novels, this one is lengthy one, around 312 pages.


The story opens with Chetan Bhagat travelling on a midnight plane from Hyderabad to Delhi. Next to him seated is this guy, Keshav Rajpurohit – the hero cum detective of this novel. After initial boring conversation, Chetan agrees to listen to the unlove story of Keshav. Please note that it’s not a love story, rather in snatches, otherwise a pure mystery. Keshav hails from Alwar and his father is a senior RSS worker there. Well, Keshav is not influenced by RSS – he drinks and often eats non-veg, including beef. Keshav passed out from IIT Delhi in 2013. IIT and IIM are some of the favourite settings of Chetan’s novels. So, no wonders here.

When Keshav was about to leave IIT, he fell in love with Zara Lone, a stunning beautiful girl from Kashmir. She's an engineering student at Delhi University and after that takes admission in IIT Delhi for PHD. How they fell in love is something of not significance. Unfortunately, their love story did not go as per their plan, because of religious conflicts. Zara and her family wanted Keshav to accept their religion i.e. Islam, if he wished to marry her. Keshav couldn’t do that as you know he comes from RSS background.

Things go awry and they break. Zara’s character shown complex and her true nature is rather put up in some objectionable fashion. Be it, that’s not important. On her birthday, that is 9th of February every year, Keshav receives a barrage of WatssApp messages from her and on an impulse Keshav goes to wish her in her hostel room number 105 in IIT Delhi. He breaks inside by climbing a mango tree. With him there is this interesting character named Saurabh.

Actually, Keshav after passing out from IIT didn’t get any good job offer. So, he teaches as a Maths faculty at Chandan Classes, there he gets into strong friendship bonding with this chap Saurabh, who is damn good at hacking websites, especially Tinder App. Anyway Chandan Classes was meant for page filling.

The real story starts when Keshav in pure drunken state breaks into the room of Zara. To his surprise, he finds her dead and cold. Scared like anything, Keshav and Saurabh call up the police to report the murder. Soon there is commotion nationwide because media stirring the case like anything. Keshav and his friend find themselves in a trap but their honesty saves them. They come clear off the case. Because of media and political pressure, the Delhi police put the blame on Lakshman Reddy, the security guard who was missing for exactly 40 minutes on the night of murder, and once he threatened Zara to kill as she had slapped him hard when he was caught making video of campus girls.

Zara’s current lover cum fiancée Raghu Venkatesh (whom she often teased as a black guy from South India) was admitted in a hospital in Hyderabad. So, clearly he is not the murderer. But why is Zara in love with this lanky black fellow? Because he is a genius and his startup receives millions of USD as venture funding. See here, the girl is clearly after his money.

To avoid pressure, police keeps the security guard in custody. But Keshav has a hunch that the murderer is someone else. And from this point, he along with his friend Saurabh starts investigating the case. They get the help of the police inspector Rana, who is obsessed about his promotion and nothing else. As they start investigating, one by one the blame begins falling on a number of persons, like the dean of campus Prof. Saxena, as he wants to have had Zara, then on her father Safdar Lone on account of honour killing, and then on Sikander, the younger stepbrother of Zara, he is a terrorist in Kashmir. Since the girl was from Kashmir so we see that terrorism angle gets added up in the story without a say.

Keshav is hell bent on solving the case. He even goes to Kashmir to meet Sikander and Zara’s officer friend Faiz. Though for some time Sikander seems to be the prime suspect but when he commits suicide, the story veers towards Faiz, as he had an extra-marital affair with Zara. A lot of people have been put under the suspect radar but no one thinks of Raghu. But in the end it comes out that it was Raghu who murdered her out of sheer jealousy, because Zara was double dating, and planning to rob his wealth.

The story remains predictable in snatches, but the way Keshav solves the murder mystery is some delight to readers as the language was not supportive to its tightly-looking plot. Overall it was a good attempt by Chetan Sir.

Read another girl story by Chetan Bhagat - http://www.keveinbooksnreviews.in/2017/04/book-review-one-indian-girl-by-chetan.html
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