In the latest in the Malabar House series, Vaseem Khan gives us a brilliant insight into Europeans’ involvement in post-partition India, as well as a cracking good mystery, Alis Hawkins writes.
On one level, The Lost Man of Bombay can be seen as a straightforward serial killer story; on another it’s a glimpse into a tumultuous time and place: post-partition India. Crime fiction is a great genre through which to examine the effects of great political upheavals on everyday life. And death.
The book begins with two mountaineers on an expedition in the Himalayas’ remote Tsangchokla Pass. In the midst of a blizzard, they discover a body in a cave. The dead man’s effects include a book published in Bombay and that is enough to see his body shipped to the city.
‘The Ice Man’, as the corpse is swiftly dubbed, is trouble. Because he’s a European and because he was murdered. The powers that be swiftly pass the problematic investigation down the chain of influence to the team of misfits and out-of-favour police officers at Malabar House where the senior officer passes it, in his turn, to India’s first female police inspector, Persis Wadia.
Investigations have barely begun when Persis and fellow-inspector Oberoi are despatched to investigate another brutal murder, that of a wealthy Italian/Indian couple. Oberoi, whom Persis despises for numerous good reasons, attempts to close the case quickly in order to avoid being caught in the political fall-out of the murder of the Italian industrialist who had been a long-standing thorn in the government’s side.
But fortunately for the hapless security-guard who is Oberoi’s chosen culprit, he is saved both by Persis’s dogged refusal to see justice perverted and the fact that another European – this time a German priest – is murdered in exactly the same way as the Italian and the Ice Man.
Who is murdering Europeans in Bombay and, if these killings are related to the Ice Man’s death as seems likely, why are they happening almost ten years after his body was abandoned in the Tsangchokla cave?
Persis’s investigations take her back to World War II and an internment camp in the Himalayas. And here, without a word of exposition or deviating from the central narrative, Vaseem Khan deftly offers his readers an insight into India’s role in WWII. As part of the British Empire, India was co-opted to the Allied war effort and, as a result, men of German, Austrian or Italian extraction who found themselves in the country when war was declared were interned.
The camp described in the book — Dehra Dun – is not a figment of Vaseem Khan’s imagination but actually existed, high in the northern state of Uttarakhand. Similarly, the internees’ escape, during which the Ice Man is murdered, is based on a real and celebrated escape which took place during the war.
Persis Wadia’s pursuit of the triple murderer, a pursuit which hinges on a gnomic phrase – ‘Caesar’s triumph holds the key’ – found amongst the Ice Man’s effects, is very compelling. Persis is the perfect officer to investigate these murders.
She appears immune to political affiliations – though that doesn’t stop her being something of a snob, as we see in her reaction to being asked to participate in the ‘Bombay Slum Rehabilitation Programme’. She is determined to prove her worth to the nay-sayers and misogynists (not to mention her aunt), and is dogged in pursuit of justice.
Added to this, the fact that the victims are all Europeans allows Vaseem Khan to paint a nuanced picture of post-partition India. Against the reader’s expectations, not all Europeans had left during the period of colossal internecine bloodshed in 1948. Many Europeans, as well as those of mixed European and Indian heritage, continued to live in Bombay; partly because it had more to offer than the narrow lives, uncertainty and – in the case of Anglo-Indians – discrimination they would face in the country of their ancestors.
But in The Lost Man of Bombay as in life, politics is played out in personal relationships and some of the tensions of a post-colonial reality find their way into Persis Wadia’s private life in the form of the the will-they-won’t-they relationship which has developed between Persis and British forensic scientist Archie Blackfinch. Persis is drawn to Archie but is dubious about the wisdom of a romantic liaison with ‘the old enemy.’
As well as her romantic life, Persis, like the rest of the Indian population, has to deal with the realities of daily life in the newly-independent country. Realities which with “corruption, sectarian violence, and the tumult of a thousand factions pulling in a thousand different directions had put the lie to Gandhi’s vision of a post-colonial utopia.”
It’s Vaseem Khan’s ability to show his characters making their way in this vibrant but far-from-idealised new country that won the first in this series the coveted CWA Historical Dagger. And, in this novel too, not only are readers kept guessing by the central mystery of the Ice Man but we feel that we have visited 1950s India and experienced some of the tensions and compromises of a new democracy grafted onto an ancient civilisation.
Highly recommended.
The Lost Man of Bombay by Vaseem Khan was published on 18 August, 2022.
Vaseem is the author of two award-winning crime series set in India. His debut, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, was picked for the Sunday Times 40 best crime novels published 2015–2020.
If you’d like to know more, read his Historia feature about the background to The Lost Man of Bombay, Partition, politics, and a prime minister’s passion.
For more on the history of India, you may also like:
1920s Bangalore, a city of diversities by Harini Nagendra
It’s time to remember Ganga Singh: maharaja, reformer, statesman by Alec Marsh
Re-examining the history of Empire in fact and fiction by Tom Williams
Finding empathy – the complexities of writing Robert Clive by Diana Preston
Alis Hawkins is the author of the Teifi Valley Coroner historical crime series and of medieval mysteries. Not One Of Us, the latest Teifi Valley Coroner book, was published on 9 September, 2021. It was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger Award in 2022.
A Bitter Remedy, the first in a new historical crime series set in Oxford in 1881, is released on 23 March, 2023.
Read Historia’s interview with Alis, in which she talks about writing fiction set in two centuries and two places: England in the 14th century and West Wales in the 19th. What draws her to such contrasting settings?
Images:
- The Gateway of India at Bombay harbour, 1951: Nathan Hughes Hamilton for Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
- Heinrich Harrer in the 1930s: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- Lord Mountbatten swears in Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru as the first Prime Minister of independent India on August 15, 1947: photodivision.gov.in via Wikimedia (public domain)
