Death of a Lesser God by Vaseem Khan
Like its predecessors, the latest installment of the Malabar House series bristles with evocative descriptions of India in the early years after independence.
To uncover information that will expose a miscarriage of justice that is about to lead to a hanging, Inspector Persis Wadia travels to Calcutta looking for clues. Monsoon season is beginning and the heat “clings to her like a lovesick octopus.”
After openly questioning a known gangster and a crooked politician, she is taken prisoner and locked away in in the Sundarbans, a mangrove forest (now a UNESCO Heritage site) on the delta of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna Rivers.
India’s first woman police officer has training and experience that will help her to cope with dangerous humans, but The Sundarbans pose a whole new level of threat. Occupied by such species as giant Asian bees, man-eating crocodiles and the white Bengal tiger, these enormous tidal forests are constantly shifting. They are also subject to cyclones, and one brews up while she’s locked in a hut on a watery island.
Learning about faraway places is only one of the many bonuses of reading Khan’s page-turning novels. There’s plenty of history too — seamlessly worked into the story.
I just love ‘Learning History by Reading Mystery,’ to borrow the title of a course I taught for SFU Continuing Studies pre-COVID and reprised by request afterwards. Reading this novel, one of the tidbits I was surprised to learn was that post-independence India had few Jews, as most left for Israel when it formed. Neither had I known that George Washington sent the first American Consul to Calcutta in the 1700s. Unfazed by Britain’s refusal to recognize his authority, Benjamin Joy stayed on as a commercial agent.
I also learned that during WWII, the US stationed 150,000 troops in Bengal alone. Ironically, the 20,000 black troops were segregated. Khan brings the OWI into his story too. When Persis interviews the American consul, he explains that one of the murder victims, an American soldier, worked for the Office of War Information in India, whose job it was to “foster a sympathetic attitude among the natives to the presence of American soldiers on Indian soil.” In 1943, Bengal suffered from a terrible famine that left people dead in the streets. The consul also admits that many of these deaths could have been prevented, except for “decisions to secure the Allied food supply.”
Adding to the satisfaction of learning about other times and places, Khan’s work delights with its playful language. In the Malabar House novels, he often sketches the sexist men Persis Wadia encounters through hilarious descriptions of their facial hair. One fellow’s “pathetic” moustache flows over his upper lip “like algae washed up on a beach.” Another sports a beard that resembles “a Scottish terrier attacking his chin.” A third man wears a “laughable” wig that looks like “a beaver flung casually onto his skull.” The author also ridicules male cologne excesses, like the fragrance “so virulent in could have revived a corpse.” (I confess that when I read these descriptions, I imagine Khan sitting on the Tube doing research. Notebook to hand, he is surreptitiously checking out the more egregious examples of hirsute fashion on his fellow-riders, possibly also pinching his nostrils against overdone cologne.)
I was relieved to see crime lab expert Archie Blackfinch re-appear in this novel. Peris has deep respect and fondness for her colleague Archie, even though in company he can be as awkwardly prominent as “a camel at a dog show.” She is also attracted to him as a man. How she will reconcile this personal dilemma? While the Englishman has by now openly admitted his love for her, they are both aware of the severe social sanctions against “interracial” couples. Being with Archie is likely not only to annoy her family; it might separate both of them from the work they love: solving crimes. While Persis hems and haws, her cousin, a more “suitable boy,” shows an interest, affording the reader the fun of watching the rivalry play out between the two men.
A deeply satisfying read, this novel portrays big themes including justice, violence and fate. Symbolically, the tiger skin on the wall of the wealthy British businessman who stayed on speaks for itself. It is no accident that through the eyes of Persis, we are twice shown a statue of Hypatia of Alexandria in the mouldering fountain of what was once a great mansion of White Town Calcutta. in about 415 CE, this female philosopher, mathematician and astronomer — evidently too knowledgeable and uppity for her male contemporaries to stomach — was killed in a church by a mob of Christian zealots who desecrated her body. May the gods, both lesser and greater, preserve Persis Wadia from a similar fate!
Following Persis through the Malabar House series, I delight in seeing her mature and gain the confidence to talk back when the occasion demands. When the racist and deeply unpleasant father of a condemned prisoner demands she commit herself to proving his son’s innocence, she calmly tells him she can promise only to uncover the truth, adding, ‘If that’s not enough for you, you had better call the commissioner and ask him to sent another lackey to do your bidding.’
Though I learned a great deal from this book, it left me with one unanswered question. What are cobra vendors? Sounds like they snakes on the street. But if so, whatever for?
Persis, too, faces an unanswered question at the end. To find out how she resolves it, we’ll have to await the next book.