With his new book, Swipe Right To Kill, Anirban Bhattacharyya who wears many hats — television producer, actor, stand-up comedian and author — completes his true-crime trilogy. The two other books in the series were The Deadly Dozen: India’s Most Notorious Serial Killers and India’s Money Heist: The Chelembra Bank Robbery (all Penguin). In the new read, he picks up a real story, the Jaipur Tinder murder case that made bold headlines with its modus operandi. A tete-a-tete with Bhattacharya who talks about the book, plans for an audiobook and more.
What made you choose this particular crime/case to write a book about?
This case fascinated me when it broke the air in 2018. A meritorious student who masterminds a modus operandi to con a thousand men using social media and dating apps. And then ends up orchestrating a kidnapping that ends with the victim stuffed inside a suitcase! It was shocking, it was visceral. It was a honeytrap-laced cybercrime. The fascinating quotient for me was not the crime but the criminals behind it, especially Priya Seth and her journey from being a top student to becoming a grifter to a con woman, and then a remorseless killer!
It is a story of our times. We spend at least three hours online every day and we are susceptible to being attacked by criminals who seem to be conspiring ingenious ways to cheat us, every day. And in this story, everybody wears masks and leads duplicitous lives, including the victim and that is how he ends up in a suitcase. So this is a cautionary tale for all.
Wasn’t it a challenge to stick to the original story but use your creativity and tell the story in the written format?
The story is all true, researched, corroborated. So everything you read is true, from interviews that I conducted with the police team, statements and confessions from the court papers, and from a video interview conducted by a journalist. The only creativity used is to enhance the emotions, the moments and of course to comprehend what was inside the criminal minds. Anurag Kashyap had said at the launch of my first book that ‘truth is often stranger than fiction’ and this applies to this story as well. You will sit back, shell-shocked.
Give us a peek into the story and your process of sketching the characters.
The story is told through five points of view. On hand you have the ensemble killers — the mastermind Priya Seth, her opportunistic boyfriend Dikshant Kamra, his freebie-loving friend Lakshya Walia. Then there is the victim Dushyant Sharma and the fake persona he puts on for his online avatar. And finally there is SHO Gur Bhoopendra Singh who cracks the case within 48 hours. This book is inside all of their heads and minds. So it is shocking, visceral and the reader is right there in the room when the crime takes place, or sitting beside the criminals as they plan… it is an inside view of the criminal mind and modus operandi.
The book has been featured on a true-crime podcast in the US. How was the experience and response?
So the team of bestselling true-crime writer and documentary filmmaker Kate Winkler Dawson who hosts the brilliant true-crime podcast called Wicked Words, reached out to me. For a true-crime author from India to get a call from a mainstream and successful podcast series was a huge surprise. They had read my book The Deadly Dozen, which is the only definitive book about Indian serial killers and they wanted to do an interview. I think, the concept of serial killers is deemed to be a western one and of course the West has no clue about the plethora of serial killers that we have in India. And so once they read my book, they were super excited about diving into the lives of Indian serial killers. When they heard about my latest book, Swipe Right To Kill, and read about the case, they decided to do a podcast interview about it.
Any plans of having the audio version for India? Or translating the book to any Indian language?
I hope Penguin Ebury does an audio version like my first book. And we are working on getting Swipe Right To Kill translated into Hindi. India’s Money Heist’s Malayalam version Chelembra Bank Kavarcha is doing very well. And I think true crime is a huge market pan-India. Everybody loves a good crime story.
What’s next?
My horror anthology Enter At Your Own Risk has just been published. It has six stories set in the real haunted places of India. It is a first-of-its-kind book that comes with background music. You scan the QR code to access the background music for that particular ‘scene’ and the music accompanies your reading to give you a movie-like immersive experience! 2025 will hopefully see a celebrity biography and a crime fiction! And a movie or two.
