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...

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...