Words From Vaish

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 epidem...

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 politic...

The Dog Defenders “The dogs have gone to their kin, the sons of dogs,” growled the Pathan scornfully. He had reasons for his displeasure. The prowling pack of pi-dogs that patrolled the main portal of the fort ranged in colour from a dirty jaundice-yellow to the dull khaki of the native regiment that manned it. These animals made surprise attacks and incursions difficult. A long time ago, a kindly cook from a bygone regiment had set out boiled leftover scraps from the cookhouse in a large terracotta plate for the dogs. This individual act of charity had since become a tradition set in stone. In the customary way of the Indian Army, cooks from the regiments that followed had continued the practice. They had even extended it, by adding a crude trough that was periodically filled with the dishwater left after cleaning utensils used in the mess. The dogs, while not allowed within the precincts of the fort, were very grateful for this particular amenity. Especially during ...

ROUND-THE-WORLD ROBYN “What goes out, comes around in the end.  It happened to my Mum and me, it really did. My Mum was born in New Zealand in 1899. She was the only daughter of a Welsh ship’s engineer and an Anglo-Irish seamstress, one Kathleen Ann Bailey. Sadly, Granddad Lloyd was drowned in a ferry disaster in 1909. He’d provided as well as he could for his family with his savings and an insurance policy, but it simply wasn’t enough. So, that year, Grandma Lloyd moved herself and Mum to India . She had relatives there in the British Raj, who promised to help her s et up a small tailoring business in Bengal Presidency, as it was called then. You could live quite well on a little there, in those days. Grandma and Mum set up shop in a small town upriver from Calcutta on the Hoogly. It was hard going initially because the native tailors were pretty good, and much cheaper too. But Grandma could do the European fashions for ladies and kids that they couldn’t. Both sh...

THE INDIAN SPY Mihir Bose Aleph Books 2017                                                                                                       350 Pages In the course of their clandestine activities, the attitude of spies towards their ostensible masters can evolve towards antagonism. However, the late Bhagat Ram Talwar code-named Silver, the protagonist of The Indian Spy, started off working AGAINST British interests before working for them.   But then, the only quintuple secr...