Book Review (Fiction): Smoke And Ashes

Smoke And Ashes

Abir Mukherjee

Harvill Secker 2018                                                                                       
333 Pages

Calcutta, 1921.

Captain Sam Wyndham of the British Imperial Police stumbles on the mutilated corpse of a Chinaman near an opium den in the midst of a police raid.

However, Captain Wyndham has a serious problem; he’s not there in any official capacity but as an opium addict seeking his next “fix”. And discovery of his hitherto imperfectly concealed addiction could write finis to his career if his brother officers in the police force catch him at it…

A psychologically damaged veteran of Military Intelligence in World War 1 whose late, sorely missed wife was a victim of the postwar influenza epidemic, Wyndham has moved to India for a fresh start - and to put his skills as a former homicide investigator with Scotland Yard to use in the service of the British Raj.

However, Calcutta proves an infuriatingly Byzantine city that effectively eludes both comprehension and control of circumstances there. As a latecomer to the Raj and essentially an outsider to the British colonial establishment, Captain Wyndham is painfully aware how really tenuous is their command of an empire slowly slipping into political twilight.  As he puts it,”The Raj was a sick man at death's door and all we were doing was delaying the inevitable. The only question was how long it would take us to realize that and call it a day.”

And the Indian national movement – represented here by real-life figures such as “Deshbandhu” Chittaranjan Das and an upcoming young political firebrand called Subhash Chandra Bose -  is beginning to gather steam, defying British attempts to contain it…

The real hero of Smoke And Ashes is Wyndham’s subordinate Detective Sergeant Surendranath “Surrender-Not” Banerjee. Quick-witted, resourceful and more sensitive to political and social nuances than his intermittently addled superior, Sergeant Banerjee is in the uncomfortably awkward position of serving an alien colonial administration while his relatives are on the other side of the political divide, opposing British rule.

A Goanese nurse at the military hospital in Barrackpore is murdered and mutilated in the same fashion as the first victim in Calcutta. With Section H of Military Intelligence breathing ominously down their necks, Wyndham and Surrender-Not are saddled with an unenviable case with leads to British experiments in poison gas and early biochemical weapons research during World War 1. And then there’s the similar homicide of a scientist working on the project, whose guilt-ridden staunchly Catholic widow seems to know much more than she’s telling…

While the author has made some minor errors in the geography of Calcutta and its environs, Smoke And Ashes does capture the feel of a particular moment in time – that of an empire in twilight and a city imperceptibly sinking into economic decline. And all this against the backdrop of the real life Prince of Wales' (later Edward VIII) historic visit to the city against a backdrop of riots, protests, black flags and calls for boycott of the royal presence.