The Shadows of Men, by Abir Mukherjee
With this fifth in his historic mystery series about British India, Abir Mukherjee has once more raised the bar. In prior volumes, the story was told through the voice of Captain Sam Wyndham. We learned about Sergeant Bannerjee’s character only through his speech and actions — as when he finally got fed up enough to ask his friend and superior officer to stop using the nickname Surrender-not, inviting him instead to use a short form of his real name — Suren for Surendranath.
This is very much Suren’s story. As it develops, we hear from Sam as well. But for the first time in the series, we enter deeply into Suren’s character and learn much more about the culture and experiences that have formed him.
As he broods on present danger, we witness his observation of a traditional custom: tying a Brahmin thread around his body before getting dressed. Under heavy pressure, he prays to goddesses Maa Durga and Maa Kali with unusual fervour. Later, he outwits his fear by taking comfort in the Hindu idea that his fate has already been decided, up to the moment of his death. Thus, he may as well stop worrying.
Sam is far more cynical than Suren about religions, observing that they all require “dogmatic following of ritual.” For the most part, their liturgies are “set in stone, generally by some priests many centuries after the god or prophet in question had washed his hands of us all and headed back to the heavens.” He considers it an open question how much is “divine inspiration,” and how much “just bureaucratic packaging.”
In his more serious moments, Sam feels exhaustion “or was it self-loathing” at the thought of “being in a state of semi-permanent hypocrisy.” As a British man in India, he’s profoundly weary of “always being on the back foot, always defending the indefensible,” and is well aware that he is not alone in this assessment. There are plenty of “embittered, broken colonial men and women of good conscience, driven to drink and ruin by the irreconcilable absurdity at the heart of it all: the claim that we were here for the betterment of this land, when all the time we merely sucked it dry.”
The subject matter and the history portrayed are deadly serious. We feel profoundly for Suren as he watches Calcutta, the city of his birth and youth, burn with rioting, suffering “each of its flaming districts as wounds” upon his soul. Along with him, we are shocked to the core by learning of corruption and betrayal where he never expected to see it.
Yet as always, Mukherjee periodically lightens the mood. When in answer to the commissioner’s summons, Shiva the chauffeur delivers the two police officers to the residence, he stops for a dog that is sunning itself in the driveway. Sam is well aware that anywhere else, his driver would move the dog by shouting, blowing the horn, or kicking it. The reason he restrains himself is obvious to Sam after a moment’s reflection. After all, he thinks, “this was the commissioner’s dog, and so outranked all three of us in the car.”
Desperate to stop the religious rioting that is rocking Calcutta, Sam extracts a promise from an influential gangster to speak out for calm. Since this requires a quid pro quo — he promises the other man to get his son out of jail. ‘“You have my word,”’ he tells him, ‘“and an Englishman’s word is his bond.”’ Inwardly, he is less delusional. “That was rubbish, of course, but by some act of colonial black magic, we’d managed to convince the natives it was true.” The reader recalls this speech later in the story, when we learn that during the Raj, Indians did not have the right to jury trials.
In a funny scene, exigency requires Sam and Suren to hurriedly borrow someone’s car without permission. The durwan who is supposed to be looking after it is asleep when they take the car but awake when they return it. This confounds the fellow, as “No one had ever stipulated what to do in the event of lost property being returned.” To raise the alarm at this late stage would be “like closing the stable door not only after the horse had bolted, but after it had gone for a run, won the Grand National, and then returned home safe and well.”
Duty makes a variety of demands on the two policemen. In the pursuit of truth and justice, Sam finds himself in the strange position of accepting help from a woman he’s just met. She lends him money, gets him a last-minute invitation to a soiree at the Bombay racetrack, then takes him shopping for suitable party clothing. Once there, he observes that while Calcutta burns and the rest of the country teeters on the brink, “The King’s Own Bombay gin drinkers were carrying on as if it were business as usual,” leaving him “unsure whether to applaud the stiff-upper-lipness of it all or simply lament the ostrich-headed stupidity.” Fortunately for his conversation, he reflects, he has “never found a lack of knowledge an impediment to voicing an opinion on a subject.”
Though Sam judges himself harshly, he also excels at ironic offhand comments about his fellow-countrymen, as when he jokes that “Hell hath no fury like a spymaster scorned.” Unfazed when he runs into a man he has recently questioned, he wonders idly “whether there’s an etiquette for meeting a man at a garden party whom you’d threatened to throw off a cliff the night before.”
Suren, a more serious person, is apt to make thought-provoking philosophical observations, musing, for instance, that wealth is “a vaccine that insulates against many maladies.”
It is said that we teach others how to treat us, and this is never more evident than in a society as rigidly hierarchical as the one Mukherjee portrays. Race, class, clothing, manners and speech can open doors or keep them closed. “Having attended the most minor of minor public schools,” Sam uses what he learned there to commandeer the use of a military telephone by speaking “in the tone that officers learn at prep school and which the lower orders are conditioned not to question.”
In addition to delivering a cracking good story, Mukherjee’s novel is replete with rich geographical and historic details. We see and hear the durwans “patrolling the perimeter of the premises” they’ve been hired to guard. Suren estimates that “Calcutta reverberated with thirty thousand such men tapping their bamboo lathis as they went about their beat, informing any would-be miscreants that their building would not be trifled with.” One of the many historic snippets I found fascinating was the fact that the terrible Dum Dum bullet was named for its place of manufacture, “a military cantonment, a railway junction, and the ordnance factory” that produced it.
As usual, I read this latest Mukherjee in a day. Now I have to wait a year for the next one.