‘It was an altogether strange mystery.’
This Bombay Mystery is Anuradha Kumar’s second foray into this ‘Urbs Prima in Indis’, as the nineteenth century is drawing to a close amidst the fear and panic of the bubonic plague that comes hidden in the holds of the ships that dock with profitable regularity on her shores. For those of us who read and thoroughly enjoyed Kumar’s first Bombay Mystery, the eagerly anticipated return of the detective Maya Barton and her ‘partner’ Henry Baker is welcome, and we look forward to travelling through the times and unravelling its mysteries with them. This armchair travel whirrs happily along on the bicycles that Henry as American Trade Consul has recently imported into India and gifted to Maya for the various diurnal, and sometimes nocturnal, perambulations on the quests and missions she enthusiastically embarks on, in the city she has made her home. The bicycle soon takes on additional meaning as it is one of the vital spokes of the mysteries that give this book its generic identity.
The meticulous historical research done by Anuradha Kumar not only makes this crime fiction of the most engaging kind, but it also invites the reader to locate everything that happens—which forms the backdrop and raison d’être for the events that are at the heart of this complex clue puzzle—in the cultural, socio-economic and political context. While the primary location is south Bombay and its environs, the focal points stretch across its seven islands, now connected with manmade causeways and reclamation. The vivid descriptions of the streets with their teeming life—human, avian, bovine, equine, canine and botanical—with ‘the constant rolling of the sea’ forming a ‘pleasant backdrop’, confer on the setting a verisimilitude that gives this book its special appeal. With the first glimpse of the stunning red and purple cover rich with details and clues, we are warned that the Bombay we are about to enter is a place where anything can happen without warning, and negotiating its challenges is not for the faint-hearted.
The first mystery that Maya chances upon is a portfolio of skillfully done sketches of birds, many of which are not native to India or even Asia, along with notations in a language she does not recognize. Maya knows that she had stumbled upon something unique which needs deciphering; a story that needs to be told. This story is inextricably linked to the personal mystery of her own origins—the disappearance of her mother when she was seven, her relationship with the Reverend Charles Barton with whom she grew up and in whose house she developed her love for travel and her eclectic knowledge of subjects, which women of her generation would not have had access to in the normal course of events. Maya regularly attends meetings of the Natural History Society and the Geographical Society where she (and in the process, the reader) gets to meet and converse with eminent thinkers and scientists of the time. These meetings and deliberations are a fascinating insight into the debates raging at the time in not only the political field, but in the cultural and social arenas as well. In addition to her detection, Maya works as a freelance reporter for the Bombay Gazette, and her reportage trains her to carefully observe and critically analyse all that she sees and hears and encounters, so that her deductions are rational in the best Holmesian tradition. Being a passionate feminist, Maya also teaches at the Native Girls’ School. It is with her young students that she will set up an ingenious ‘messaging service’ which will save the day in more ways than one. Having experienced the freedom and mobility that her bicycle allows for, she also plans to start a bicycle club for her students—a plan that is doomed by conservative disapproval—but bicycles become a trope that runs through the book with creative flair.
Being a woman of wide-ranging tastes and enthusiastic curiosity: ‘I like finding out things about the world’—Maya also delves into the mysteries of Theosophy after she hears a lecture by Annie Besant and is entranced. A charming riff to Holmes and his Baker Street Irregulars appears subtly but effectively with the Colaba Causeway Irregulars who, along with Abdul, are Maya’s faithful companions and guardians on the mean streets of Bombay. She needs all the help that she can get as she takes on the police and the Native Society, who send threatening notes and even attack anyone who they think threatens the ‘religion and customs’ which they assiduously guard. The notes begin appearing in all kinds of places including the hospital and the house where Maya lives, initially written on a distinct kind of paper and not taken seriously because of the malapropisms, or rather ‘Satarkarisms’ in them. But when an eminent doctor is attacked and a venomous cobra is left in the home of another supporter of the measures being taken to deal with the impending epidemic, the ‘worming’ in the notes has to be taken ‘serusly’, and the mystery of their origin dominates a major section of the book.
This mystery is outclassed though, when Maya’s bicycle is confiscated and then disappears, only to reappear mysteriously in the by lanes of Bombay, ridden in the dead of night by a masked cyclist. The battleground is the plague that the British administration and the Indian doctors are trying to combat, containing measures of sanitation, isolation and surveillance which are frightening for the common person who is susceptible to the political colour that their native leaders give to these measures. Another brilliant creative stroke by the author is to make the impact of the plague on the common person resonate with all readers whose memories of the COVID-19 pandemic would still be distressingly fresh. On the national front, issues that add fuel to the fire of the plague are the multiple arenas of struggle for political freedom, as well as the debates between the reformers and the conservatives on issues like the education of women, the age of consent, as well as the trending discussions on widow remarriage—all of which Kumar weaves with flair into the tapestry of her Bombay Mystery.
The avian leitmotif is among my favourite parts of the book and the murmuration of the pink starlings is one of the spellbinding features of the natural landscape that Anuradha Kumar crafts with enviable legerdemain; the sky is always alive with signs that enrich the mood of the moment. Another mood lifter is the love story that the title promises, which becomes one of Maya’s safe havens. The novel concludes happily, as all mysteries do, with the satisfying denouement of all the inscrutabilities being resolved, and with Maya reassured that finally, ‘she was part of a different reality, one she could trust. For now, and always.’
If you like puzzles awash with clues and red herrings; if you are curious about the minutiae of life and would like to delve into the checkered past of the maximum city; and most importantly, if you enjoy a well-crafted mystery, do read this book. Travel with Maya and Henry to the past which in many ways is always present, and wait like I will for them to return for a third Bombay Mystery.
Anjana Neira Dev is Professor at the Department of English, Gargi College, University of Delhi, Delhi.