Book Review (Fiction) : A Murder On Malabar Hill

A Murder On Malabar Hill

Perveen Mistry Investigates

Sujata Massey

Penguin Books 2018                                               426 Pages

There are some “whodunnits” that greatly benefit from a strong sense of place such as Sherlock Holmes’ fog-shrouded Victorian London of 1897 and the 1930s-1940s California of Raymond Chandler’s private eye Philip Marlowe. 

Sujata Massey’s excellent A Murder On Malabar Hill set in 1920s colonial Bombay (now Mumbai) is just such a work. The sights, smells and sounds of this period are so richly evoked that this novel has the heft and feel of an epic, rather than just a simple mystery. The teeming city - with its evocative architecture and cuisine, its social interactions, complex ethnic politics, multi-faceted religious, caste and gender dynamics - is as much an actor as Ms. Massey’s varied cast of finely drawn characters.  

Chief among these is Perveen Mistry, the only practicing woman solicitor in this fictional Bombay of 1921. Oxford-educated Perveen works in the reputed law firm of her esteemed father, the eminent Parsi barrister Jamshedji Mistry. Despite her well-connected family’s wealth and prestige, feisty independent-minded Perveen is not allowed to appear professionally in court, then an all-male domain. This causes her legal training and fluency in several languages in being solely applied to casework within the confines of the offices of Mistry Law.

All that changes when Perveen receives a letter from the agent of a recently deceased wealthy Muslim textile mill owner. The letter bears the signature of the late Omar Farid’s three widows and appears to sign away their bequests to the family wakf; a trust under Islamic law to be used for specific charitable purposes – but one that would leave them destitute. Perveen’s keen eye for legal specifics and talent for sniffing out potential domestic abuse make her suspicious that these ladies - who live in the strict seclusion of purdah -might have been manipulated without knowing their rights under Islamic law.

Despite being legal executor of the estate, her father never met the widows due to their being isolated from men. As a woman, Perveen labors under no such constraints and decides to meet the ladies in person. The submerged tensions she senses in the seemingly placid tradition-bound household then rapidly spirals into the murder of the late Mr Farid’s agent, Faisal Mukri. As the true complexity of the case is revealed, suspicion is directed equally at the widows and their children, their servants and the employees of the textile mill; all of whom have their own motives and designs on the Farid fortune.

The character of Perveen Mistry is based on two real-life ladies from history; Cornelia Sorabji and Mithan Tata Lam. In her researches for an earlier historical fiction set in Bengal, Ms Massey came across the true story of Sorabji, the first woman to graduate from the University of Bombay, the first woman to read law at Oxford and India’s first female solicitor. Lam also studied at Oxford and was the first Indian woman barrister to be admitted to the Bombay High Court in 1923. The impressive research behind A Murder On Malabar Hill is derived from the author’s consultations with experts on everything from the role of Parsis in India’s legal history to Parsi cuisine – and is unobtrusively worked into the narrative.

Born in Sussex, England, of mixed Indo-German parentage, brought up in St Paul, Minnesota, USA,  and with a stint as an English teacher in Japan, Ms Massey is clearly comfortable with fluid cultural boundaries – as is evident in her affectionate portrait of Raj-era cosmopolitan Bombay in A Murder On Malabar Hill.