ACP Bhawani Singh is back in Anuja Chauhan’s latest whodunit-romance, The Fast and the Dead (Harper Collins). There was serendipity in his return, the 53-year-old author says. “When I wrote Club You To Death, I was working with an idea of this pudgy, gentle oldie who radiates so much sympathy that people can’t help talking to him.”
Bhawani, Anuja says, was a vibe, not a face. All that changed with Murder Mubarak, based on Club You to Death, that is dropping on Netflix this March. Directed by Homi Adajania, the film features an ensemble cast including Sara Ali Khan, Vijay Varma, Dimple Kapadia, Karisma Kapoor, Sanjay Kapoor, Tisca Chopra, Suhail Nayyar and Pankaj Tripathi as Bhawani.
“I kept picturing him (Tripathi) in my head, as I wrote,” says Anuja. “That was a little hard to break out of. Luckily, he’s quite a dream casting, in fact a lot of my readers are saying when they read the book, they were imagining Pankaj as Bhavani…”
