The Lost Man of Bombay by Vaseem Khan
After reading Midnight at Malabar House and The Dying Day, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the next installment in the series. It’s 1950, and Inspector Persis Wadia is still the lone woman of her rank in the Bombay police. In this book, her relationship with for Archie Blackfinch, her British criminalist colleague, get more complicated than ever. Persis is a great detective, but has trouble with trust. Added to her tendency to be rash and judgmental, that’s a recipe for romantic trouble.
Persis still has trouble facing her feelings for Archie. On one occasion they part with formality, “walking stiffly off in opposite directions like duellists.”
Archie, on the other hand, has “a tendency to charge straight through emotional barriers like an elephant with toothache.” On one occasion, she fondly observes his “expression of mild bewilderment” and reflects that he has become “such a fixture in her life” that the possibility of his absence seems “altogether implausible.”
While tending to a wound Persis sustains in carrying out her duty, he manages to perform “a passable imitation of Florence Nightingale.”
While Persis may be a bit rash and judgmental, and somewhat lacking in tact, she is courageous, thoughtful and intelligent. Interviewing the mother of a murder victim, she observes that while we have words for widow, widower, and orphan, there is no word for a mother who has lost her child — perhaps because this is “so abhorrent to nature.”
The life of a policewoman is hard. When she sends the peon out for a simple glass of lime water, it is scummy and disgusting. Drinking the foul concoction resembles “being clubbed around the head with a polo mallet.“ but at least Persis has Archie. And her boss, Roshan Seth may be bitter about being sidelined himself, but he respects and appreciates Inspector Persis Wadia, and supports her as best he can. He’s prone to “occasional philosophical outbursts,” but that’s more a virtue than a vice.
As usual, Khan delivers a fast paced story even as he grounds us in a post-independence Bombay we can see, hear, feel and smell. The characters are interesting and believable. Add a few sly cultural references, some historic detail, and a couple of philosophical questions, and presto — an unputdownable book .
The author’s verbal calisthenics range from the sublime to the ridiculous. In the opening scene, Peter, who stayed on, cynically broods over independent India. While he struggles through a Himalayan blizzard, he thinks about “the pompous new breed of civil servant” — “the opportunists settling into the vacuum left by the departing British.” While in the Raj era Bombay was a “city of forts and mendicants,” he sees the new lot as a “bastion of political cutthroats and blowhards” with the morality of “rutting goats.” The paperwork is “enough to make a man blow his brains out.”
Inaugurated by Nehru “in an ecstasy of sanctimony,” the new nation has already “put the lie to Gandhi’s vision of a post-colonial utopia. Persis was born a Parsee but doesn’t consider herself religious. In her view, Nehru is “remaking the country in his own image, penning a national fairy tale to rival the myth-making of the Hindu pantheon.” She sees Sinha as one of those post-independence “unscrupulous politicians…the kind that would sell their grandmothers for an electoral seat, and throw in a couple of aunts for good measure.” Later, while visiting the man who ran the camps where enemy aliens were incarcerated during WWII, she reflects that Gandhi’s great achievement “was to demonstrate to the world that you couldn’t claim to be arbiters of fair play while cheating your fellow man at every turn.”
Khan takes a potshot at Bombay, likening it to “an aging courtesan with rattling teeth and a bad case of halitosis.” Then he goes on to provide a potted history of the city. The first foreigners to arrive, the Portuguese left a “legacy of crumbling churches” and “virulent” Catholicism. Muslim invaders followed, building mosques and minarets and adding “the lilt of muezzins’ calls to the general cacophony that bludgeoned new arrivals like cannon fire.” Then, expressing its “piratical sense of enterprise,” the East India Co. added railways, Law Courts, and impressive Gothic edifices, which “soon wilted between the twin onslaughts of sun and monsoon.” The growing population means smaller Victorian homes are being bulldozed for apartment towers, “high-rise prisons where the burgeoning middle class can hover above the teeming masses.”
The new India is not a good place for Anglo-Indians, who are “not white enough to be classed as British, and not Indian enough to be given the accolade of patriot. Those who seek better conditions in the Old Country are doomed to disappointment. In England, “a pukka accent and a sterling education” mean little when compared to skin colour.
The author delights readers with sly references to all kinds of ingrained cultural attitudes, most of them deeply flawed. When Peter wants to quit hiking because of the bad weather, he stops himself largely due to “the fear of ridicule in the eyes of a Frenchman” — his fellow hiker. Haj-returned pilgrims display their piety by “dying their hair orange, which makes them look like “Scotsmen left out in the sun too long.” In contrast to the more responsible paper The Times of India, The Indian Chronicle makes its money reporting on “low deeds in high places.”
When her investigations take Persis into the headquarters of a communist MP, we glimpse first the building, located in the wealthy downtown Fort District, where only the rich can afford to live. Behind the ornate gates and beyond the stern Sikh sentry, she follows her man up the stairs to his office where “a battery of typists” flailing away at Remingtons and Godrej Primas, backdropped by “a large red banner” depicting a hammer and sickle. The social structure remains, thinks Persis — only during the Raj one heard God Save the King, while now the wealthy play Tagore’s anthem “to evince their patriotic bona fides.”
When she visits the Secretariat, “the Bombay arm of that monolith bureaucracy once known as the Imperial Civil Service,” she observes “the inheritors of empire, glancing importantly at watches and swinging leather satchels like miniature wrecking balls.” In this building, she reflects how it was the civil service that brought India’s millions to heel under a few thousand British rulers. Here in this building, where the Italian marble counter “could have doubled as a runway for light aircraft, under the British, forms were “required in triplicate for something as simple as recording the death of a water buffalo.” The bureaucrat she speaks to is likened to “a child perched in a high chair.”
In seeking the identity of a person of interest to the investigation, she learns that he married one of the “fishing fleet,” the Indian name for British women who came to India to seek ICS husbands, who had good salaries and good pensions. Later, she learns from his widow that her husband felt slighted by his colleagues. Making fun of him for not having gone to Oxbridge, they ridiculed his accent and passed him over for promotion because he was deemed not to be a gentleman. His bitter response was to develop a chip on his shoulder “the size of Wales.” A former colleague comments on the Raj, wondering “what we might have built had the British treated us as equals instead of inferiors, as a nation to be developed, rather than merely plundered.”
Visiting a famous temple, she has a moment of sympathy for the religious, and can understand “the need for men to shoot arrows into the darkness of their own incomprehension.”
Some of the action takes place in Dehra Dun, where “immaculate whitewashed bungalows in the English style” strain for grandeur, “with one eye on the lost horizons of the past.” This is the place where thousands of enemy aliens from a number of countries were incarcerated during WWII.
In a lighter vein, Khan carries on with his over-the-top moustache descriptions, begun in previous books. This time, we are shown a moustache “as shaggy and full of life as a Scottish terrier.” Another man’s moustache is “unfeasibly large,” while that of a third man is described as “aggressive.”
I learned some intriguing historic details; for example, I had been unaware that Nero obliged Seneca to commit suicide. It was also interesting to learn how the British used the princely states to bolster the Raj, meanwhile providing them “the illusion of a voice in their own government, and the even greater illusion of national unity among the noble classes.”
This wonderful book left me hungry for more. I’m rooting for Persis and Archie all the way, and I’d love to see them get together.