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...

All political careers end in failure.” -         -   Anon Politics is a tricky business with far too many variables, far too many divergent agendas, far too many disparate interests for any one person to successfully prevail in perpetuity. The need for consensus and compromise mean that whatever achievements or victories gained are at best, limited, and often, short-lived. There’s also the fact that the particular political environment and circumstances that nurtures a politician’s career can change with frightening speed. Yesterday’s success can become outmoded very quickly… An example of the above would be the late Baroness Margaret Thatcher who was generally portrayed as an unbending dominatrix who always met with success in getting her way. This was summed up by the famous quote – “the lady’s not for turning”. Moderate Tories in her party were accused of equivocation and derided as “wets”. In practice, as Prime Minister, Lady T...

The Exam Scam “India has a very well-organized examination system. It is not very clear if it has an educational system.” -          -  Attributed to a former advisor to the Government of India. Gaming examinations through diverse methods is a popular activity worldwide. This has the power of often magically transforming a “D” grade into a seeming “A” grade. In India, much of such activity is generally considered cheating. For many, this is justified as ingenious creativity in beating a flawed system that puts desperate students under crushing pressure. To educationists, it’s a very unethical practice that invalidates the very purpose of examinations. That is, of accurately assessing the actual academic status of individual students. In a system that greatly values degrees, certificates, grades and scores as a gateway to lucrative positions and careers, the temptation to cut corners and manipulate results and outcomes is underst...

THE HIT A man waited in an attic room in Srinagar . The room’s only door opened onto a narrow cast-iron spiral staircase to the shop below. The attic was dark with shadows in a dingy half-light. Dust motes danced in the dank air. The room was filled to overflowing with stacks of cartons and boxes. A nest of hosiery and ready-to-wear garments in transparent wrappings had been carefully arranged on an overturned display case. The man lay almost full-length in the nest, cradling a Kalashnikov AK-74 rifle. A length of twine was taped taut from the edge of the display case to a large gap in the broken slats of the shutters on the front window. An irregular patch of light, striped with bars of shadow, crept down the wall beneath the window and down on to the grimy floor. The gunman in the back of the room was invisible to any watchers out in the street. He wore a dark gray woolen balaclava mask that revealed only a narrow crescent-shaped area around the eyes, zip-up navy-b...

BULLSTRUCK Travelling in a crowded DTC bus, I happened to notice a slogan painted on the curve where the roof meets the side. “Untouchability is a crime against Man and God” it read. Whoever had put up that slogan needn’t have worried; I couldn’t have practiced untouchability even if I’d wanted to. An angular bony gentleman was “touching” my midriff with his elbow and a rather corpulent lady was “touching” my left big toe with sole of her Kohlapuri chappal . Though national solidarity is a desirable goal, I wished I wasn’t so “touchable” or in such intimate physical contact with my fellow citizens. I was luckier than most, having acquired standing room inside the bus, many of my fellow commuters were doing a Spiderman imitation in the doorways. The aforementioned gaunt gent livened up the journey and not just with his funny bone applied strategically against my solar plexus. He was dressed in an Edwardian toff’s outfit from the waist up and below that a diaphanous dho...

“Why don’t you be a good boy and just die?”           -  Sean Bean as Alec Trevelyan 006, in Goldeneye (1995) The disintegration of the modern Indian union of states has oft been predicted, but somehow hasn’t happened yet. Mo st recently, in his award-winning novel River Of Gods the British science fiction author Ian McDonald posited an India in 2047 broken up into 12 semi-independent states!      Perhaps among the first to start the ball rolling was Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck , the last British Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army. This worthy intoned that the 1947 partition of India was a harbinger of further future divisions of the sub-continent. Or words to that effect...      This was rightly seen at the time as a case of sour grapes (See, you won’t be able to hold yourself together without the paternalistic guiding hand of the British Raj!)  on the part of a retreating colonialist towards ...

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...

In The Valley Of Shadows Abhay Narayan Sapru Chlorophyll Books 2017                                             170 Pages The long guerrilla war waged against the British state by the IRA in Northern Ireland spawned a new literary sub-genre, “the troubles thriller” as practiced by authors such as Chris Petit ( The Psalm Killer ), Stephen Leather ( The Chinaman , The Bombmaker )  and Gerald Seymour ( Harry’s Game , Field Of Blood ) . The current conflict in Kashmir, with Pakistan-sponsored terrorist proxies attempting to wrest the state away from India, seems all set to follow suit .  Some of the growing tribe of authors in this nascent sub-genre have backgrounds in journalism covering the valley or have actually served in the Indian Army there. ...