Book Review : The Jeera Packer

Name: The Jeera Packer
Writer: Prashant Yadav
Publisher: Fingerprint! Publishing
Publication date: 26 December 2016
ISBN-10: 8175994185
ISBN-13: 978-8175994188
Pages: 344
Price: Rs.295
Format: Paperback
Rating: ★★★.5

Blurb:

I once changed the history of this Uttar Pradesh with a gun and a finger. One shot, one man. Right man, wrong man. But that was thirty years ago. I shot people through their heads then. I pack jeera in a basement now.
This is me and here is my story.
He was the best sharpshooter in the state. A true bullet artist. But he gave it all up to lead a happy, normal, stable life . . . with his loving wife and dear son.
And that proved to be his undoing.
Resonant and deeply affecting, The Jeera Packer is the gripping tale of a man who after three decades of playing the happy family man returns to his profession of old for one final work—to shoot the chief minister. Convinced that this is his raison d'etre, will he manage to pull off this one last act, as his concluding hat tip to the man he could have been? Will he be able to brush away the jeera dust and rediscover himself? Or has the middle-aged family man already throttled the sharpshooter in him?

“Every artist needs his own Taj Mahal, a labour of love and craft, something which only he can create, something which he can be proud of, something under which he can spend his entire life never once feeling like a waste.” 

My thoughts:

Plotline:

The story is set in Utter Pradesh and revolves around the life of a former sharpshooter who now owns a grocery store and packs jeera for a living. After spending thirty years away from the underworld, he is back to square one after his old friend, Abdul Khan, makes him realize that he too should create his own Taj Mahal. He decides to rediscover the shooting artist in himself by killing the Chief Minister.

Will he succeed in his mission and find the ultimate purpose of his life? Will he be able to keep himself undercover or get caught? Will the Chief Minister survive the attacks or become a target of dirty politics?

Characters:

Dada, the Chief Minister was once a major part of the underworld under whom worked the protagonist, along with Abdul and Lal Mani Singh. Lal Mani Singh continues to work under Dada and is now the Home Minister. The protagonist, on the other hand, moves away from the underworld and starts his own family. Abdul is now a bike mechanic who wants to build a glorious Bullet, which would be his own Taj Mahal. There are quite a lot of characters in the book which seemed sort of unnecessary and diverted the attention of the story.

“From power came money and from money came everything good, including more power.” 

Language and writing style:

✪ The author has done an impeccable job at depicting the dark secrets of politics in Utter Pradesh. To gain power in the political world, your own blood could be your closest enemy.
✪ All the characters are well developed.
✪ The author does employ abusive language to give the Bihari vibes, but I personally didn’t like its extensive use.
✪ The story was extremely slow paced initially, but slowly gains momentum in the following chapters.

Title and Book cover:

The title and the book cover are apt and correlated. It exhibits a jeera packer who once was a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious sharpshooter and decides to get back to his old self to kill one last time.

“God loved jokes. The meaner, the better. They garbled the message when they sent it.... Whoever got more messages right commanded power in this world.” 

Dislikes:

💔 The blurb does not give true representation of the actual plotline. Instead of being a ‘criminal thriller’, it focuses more on political drama.
💔 The story does not pick up pace in the first half of the book which made it extremely difficult to proceed ahead.
💔 The excessive use of abusive language does not make this an appropriate read for the underaged.
💔 The decision of the protagonist to kill the CM was too abrupt and was even left unexplained.

Recommend?

I would recommend this book to the ones who are interested in political satire/drama.

“What you don’t do never really leaves you. What you let go of never lets go of you.”