Your book Enter the Dangal has been widely read and critically appreciated. What made you switch from non-fiction to fiction, specifically crime fiction?

I’ve been interested in crime fiction since I was a child. Growing up in Kolkata, you read your first Feluda and your first Byomkesh, and you’re completely enamoured by this hero detective who is the saviour and can see through other people’s lies and little details that nobody else can see. So it fascinated me that aspect of somebody who can observe so much and who knows so much about human nature and can extricate the truth from a web of lies and sort of set the social order back again after it has been disrupted by the crime. So that was something I was always interested in as a child, and it had been on my mind that I would like to write a crime fiction book one day. But what I realised soon enough is that I don’t have the necessary knowledge to actually do it because I didn’t know anything about the world of crime. I had no exposure to police or detective work. What I was exposed to was reading about these in crime fiction novels set in the UK or the US. So I knew more about the way police behave or talk in those countries than I did about my own. And I realised that that just won’t pass muster.

So what happened was that in my journalism career, I started to do more and more stories around crime, and I got more exposed to the world of crime and the world of policing. And as I got deeper into that, I started to realise that this is the experience that I’ve always wanted to have so that I can write my own book. And now I’m having it. So, it became a structured thought in my head that I was ready. And I started taking notes accordingly.

I read something in an interview by this wonderful Japanese crime fiction novelist called Hideo Yokoyama, who’s a big influence on me. He said that he was a reporter before he started writing crime fiction. And at some point, he realised that for all the things that he sees and experienced writing reportage was not enough to express that reality. So, he had to turn to fiction to express that reality. And that’s something I felt as well, that reportage has obviously strict restrictions about what you can and cannot write about and how you can approach something. And I wanted to get rid of those shackles to kind of express everything that I experienced and as well as my own feelings about things and how to work that into a character, which is exciting for me to be able to break free of the chains of non-fiction writing and to get into fiction to kind of convey to the reader the world as I was experiencing it. So that’s why.

The detail in police procedure and legal procedure is incredible in the book. How did you go about doing that? Did you spend time with cops?

Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. I spent a lot of time with police officers as well as other arms of the law. And again, these all came through my work as a reporter. So I was doing reportage for a newspaper while I was exploring these things. And my first contact with all these people and places was through assignments that I had for the newspaper. And I would go and meet them, and I would start talking to them. And eventually, when I knew a person well enough, I would start telling them that I am also going to write a novel based on these experiences. It’s going to be a crime fiction novel set in Delhi, based on your experiences. And I would like to record everything that you do with the assurance that I am not going to publish anything that puts you in trouble. And by that time, I had already finished reporting for the story, so I did not have to have that hanging over me. And so some of these very kind people allowed me back into their lives and said, ‘Sure, come and hang with us. And if you hang with us and you’re not a reporter, we have nothing to fear. You get to do what you want.’

So, I was with one police officer in the crime branch, and my inspector is based very much on this police officer that I spent a lot of time with in the crime branch, as well as DCPs [Deputy Commissioner of Police], senior-level officers who were very kind, who understood what I was doing. Some people even got excited about the fact that I was going to do this, and they allowed me to record in detail everything that they were doing. And I would hang out with no aim in life. So I would just end up in the office where they landed up and spend the rest of the day with them doing whatever they were doing, whether that was going on a raid to catch gangsters, or just eating lunch, or just sitting in the car staking out a place. I even got to see things like autopsies being conducted. So, I was allowed a lot of deep access.

And obviously, I spoke to them about various things that I did not understand or know about and how guns worked, or boring things like how they got reimbursed for fuel, for example. A lot of these people were using their private cars, and they often did not have official police cars. I wondered why that happened. They told me that if I need an official police car for a raid, I’d have to send in a requisition. That requisition takes about 48 hours before it goes through the signatures and comes back to you. And we only know that we need the car when it’s like an hour or two hours from wherever we are going to date. So that makes no sense to us. So we take our own car. And so little things like that, which all made their way into my book. That’s how I got all the details.

Cover of The Beast Within by Rudraneil Sengupta | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

Most of the bureaucratic hurdles and red tape—you can see the frustration in many of the characters, like they’re just waiting to get their guns before a raid. How much of the story, how much fact and history, is there in the story itself without giving anything away?

This is quite funny that almost everything in the book is true, especially the professional stuff that happens. I go into the personal lives of the officers as well, which comes from my imagination and experiences. But the professional stuff that they’re doing, the cases that they’re fighting, are all real incidents that I have either experienced myself, read about in case files, or have been told to me by the officers. And the only thing that I’ve done is that everything is completely decontextualised. So things happen differently from how they really happened, but the core of it is true.

So, for example, in my book, there is a case of a child being kidnapped that happens midway through the book. This actually comes from a real case about a constable called Seema Dhaka, who went into the police force. And when she reported to work after a few days, she realised that her thana had over 200 cases of missing children in the last six or seven months and none of them had been solved. And when she started looking at the files, she realised that the IO [investigative officer] kept changing for each case, sometimes within two weeks, sometimes within three weeks. Nobody made any headway in some of these cases, even though a photograph of the missing child had not been collected.

And so she went in her personal capacity to her reporting officer and told him, look, I want to follow these cases. Nothing has been done about these missing children. And since she was a complete rookie, I suppose the officer said, fine, go ahead, do it in your own time. And so this woman went completely mad. She became obsessed with solving these cases. She spent days and nights at the police thana and slowly, over a period of one month, two months, she started to make leads. And she, in fact, found out who was doing this. Then she made a fake profile of herself on Instagram or one of these places and then started to follow this man’s profile, contacted him, set up a kind of trap for him, and eventually rescued 79 children in just two months, which was a remarkable story that I encountered while I was doing my research. And so I knew that had to be there in my book. So everything in my book is things that fascinated me and that I actually encountered in real life.

The characters—Inspector Kumar and so many others—they are so real, so unforgettable. How did Kumar’s character come about?

The creation of the characters was amazing. It was probably the most enjoyable part of writing the book. And that’s because I come from a nonfiction background. So I never get to create characters in nonfiction. You have to be very squarely within the boundaries of what is being said to you by whoever you’re interviewing. And so here again I had complete freedom, which was a lot of fun.

And so what I did was—and I believe in the tenet that you write about what you know. So obviously all these people are people I have characteristics that I already know from people around me, whether it’s family or friends or enemies, people I dislike actively, but I have had to encounter in my life regularly. And so it was a lot of fun. So I could make my villain—I’d give him a lot of characteristics of, for example, a former boss I did not like, the kind of car he drove or the mannerisms and things like that. So I’m like, yes, let’s heap all of that into my villain.

Similarly with my cop, he has a lot of similarities in personality and the way he talks to the cop I was following. But at the same time, I took his physical characteristics from another person whom I met during my reporting days. So, this all mixed and matched people of various people I know creates one character. SI [Sub-Inspector] Meera, for example, is my favourite character in my own book because she’s a former wrestler. And of course, you know where that comes from because my previous book was about wrestling. So I knew many women like her. And of course, she’s specifically based on a mix of really three different women that I know of. And I drew from all the experiences of having spent all these days in akharas and wrestling training centres and in dangals and going on these dangal tours with the wrestlers. So, all of that experience comes into SI Meera’s character. So that’s how I did it. And it was a lot of fun.

Indian police personnel in May 2025. The novel treats crime not as spectacle but as a diagnostic tool, revealing the moral priorities and administrative failures that shape everyday policing in Delhi. (Representative image) | Photo Credit: Amarjeet Kumar Singh/Anadolu via Getty Images

The characters—Meera, Kumar, and Das—are the kind of characters that, as a reader, I’d like to see again. Are we going to see more of them?

You’re definitely going to see more of them, though I’ve been told not to talk about that. They live in my head, and that’s the best thing to kind of happen to you as a writer of fiction, when your characters actually start to inhabit you. It may sound a little weird or mad to people who don’t write fiction, but I know from talking to other authors that this is—because when it first happened to me, I was a little concerned about my own sanity, that I would wake up with all these voices talking inside of me and characters revealing their motivations or what they would like to do. I then realised that it’s a gift. It’s great that this is happening inside of me— internalising my characters in a way that I wanted to. And then after that, when I spoke to other authors, they said that it’s a wonderful thing when that happens.

And so they inhabit my head, and they talk. They have things that they are—that is happening in their lives that they’re doing. I take notes copiously. I’m constantly taking notes, whether I don’t have a notebook, I’ll just open my phone and take notes on an app. And eventually, I use all of these things in my next book.

Crime fiction is quite a new genre for you as a writer. How well acquainted are you with contemporary crime fiction, both from India and abroad? Who are your favourites?

It’s new for me as a writer, of course, but it’s not new for me as a reader. I don’t really approach things in timelines; I don’t know who’s contemporary and who isn’t. I will read whatever comes my way. And I have a lot of writers I love. And the thing that the genre means to me, crime fiction, is that it’s less about police work and it’s less about crime and it’s more about society. I mean, the great crime novels are actually—it lays bare society as a social structure of a place, of a time, in great detail. Because a crime is basically a disruption in the moral structure. And the crime fiction’s job is to kind of restore that order. And in doing that, it reveals to you what is important for that society and what their priorities are and how they interact with each other as people, what is in their culture. All these things become a part of that journey, and the city itself becomes a huge part of the journey as well.

So you can read Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series set in the 1990s in Edinburgh. And Edinburgh really comes alive. The music of the time, the streets, the people, and the places. And Keigo Higashino does that with Tokyo. Hideo Yokoyama does that with Tokyo as well as Japanese society. I mean, his book Six Four, which is a huge favourite of mine, is like a biblically sized book. And it really deeply—what it does more than anything else is it explores Japanese culture and society much more than it does anything to do with crime.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, I don’t know if you know of them, are a 60s couple in Sweden who began the Scandinavian crime wave. They were both reporters themselves, though not the way we know reporters, because they were also helping give weapons training to armed guerrillas in South America and Africa, etc. They were left-leaning, very hardcore Swedish journalists. And they were partners. And they would write in a very funny way, where one of them would write a chapter at night after work, and the next chapter would be written by the other one the next night, following up from the previous chapter. So they have a series of 10 books, Martin Beck, and you read those 10 books, and you know everything about Stockholm in the 1960s, everything that’s happening, all the new things that are coming into that city. And again, how the city is developing, what people are thinking and not thinking.

And I wanted to do the same with The Beast Within with Delhi, and I wanted to bring in through the different characters, you get a sense of some people who lived in Delhi at a time when Delhi was very different. You have these older police officers, you have younger police officers who’ve come from the hinterland, from Haryana. And you have SI Das, who’s originally from Kolkata, then went to Banaras and now is in Delhi and always feels like an outsider in this north Indian world, as Bengalis tend to do. And it gives you that insight into the social structures of a place and how a place really is. So, Keigo Higashino and Ian Rankin are absolutely amazing.

 Then there’s [Andrea] Camilleri with his—his place doesn’t really exist, Vigàta.

 It doesn’t exist. But Italian food and culture do exist. There’s so much food there.

 Exactly.

 So you can go any which way with crime fiction, really. I mean, I think I’ll have a lot of food in my next book as well because I am interested in food. Different officers from different places and different backgrounds, so everybody can bring in their own food experiences into the book.