Malabar Hill
In the past I have confessed my love of detective novels, both classic and contemporary. I’ve probably admitted they account for more than two-thirds of the books I borrow from my local library. That’s probably not good! Some of my blogs have explored some of the better-known authors and their novels. All that is background to say that it is about time I gave some space to writers less familiar to many readers. As usual, serendipity plays a part in this, and I have just finished murder mystery by Sujata Massey.
How did I come across Sujata Massey? Wikipedia reveals she is an American writer, born in the UK, her father Indian and her mother German. Her family left for the USA when she was five years old, and when she was eighteen years old, she moved to Baltimore, graduating from Johns Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree, taking courses in the Writing Seminars. Her writing career began with preparing features for the Baltimore Evening Sun newspaper before becoming a novelist. What else have I learnt? Her debut novel, The Salaryman’s Wife, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel in 1997, and since then she has won other Agatha and Macavity awards.
All of that tells me she has a track record as a writer, but it was a background about which I knew nothing when I picked up The Widows of Malabar Hill, back in 2021. It was in my local library, and, on the back, I read it had won “the Mary Higgins Clark Award, the Left Coast Crime Convention’s Bruce Alexander Memorial Award for Best Historical Mystery, the Macavity’s Sue Feder Memorial Award for Best Historical Mystery, and the Agatha Award for Best Historical Novel. It was selected for Publishers Weekly Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2018.” Perhaps not so important but it was also an Amazon Best Book of 2018. That all sounded great, and then I read it was set in Bombay in the 1920s. I almost returned it to the shelf, but I took it out.
Massey’s ‘legal mystery series’ began with The Widows of Malabar Hill, and, as I quickly discovered, it is focussed on the activities of Perveen Mistry, a Parsi woman. I think we’d better take a detour here. A Parsi? A Parsi, also spelled Parsee, is a member of an Indian religious group, the followers of Zoroaster. Their name means ‘Persians’, and they are descended from Persian Zoroastrians who emigrated to India to avoid religious persecution by the Muslims back in the seventh century. Today most live in Mumbai and surrounding areas, but there are a few groups in Karachi and Chennai, a sizeable population in Bangalore and a few families in Kolkata and Hyderabad. Since they sit outside the Hindu world, they are not a caste, but they form a well-defined community.
It’s possible, like me, you’ve heard of Zoroastrians. As Zoroastrianism is practiced by the Parsi community, there are a number of distinctive practices, resting on the concepts of purity and pollution (nasu), initiation (navjot), daily prayers, worship at Fire Temples, marriage, funerals, and general worship. Some of their beliefs seem ripe for a ‘Levi-Straussian’ analysis. For example (quoting from Wikipedia), “The balance between good and evil is correlated to the idea of purity and pollution. Purity is held to be of the very essence of godliness. Pollution’s very point is to destroy purity through the death of a human. In order to adhere to purity it is the duty of Parsis to continue to preserve purity within their body as God created them.”
A child doesn’t become a Zoroastrian by some form of baptism. Rather a youngster will recite a selection of required prayers at the time of the Navjote ceremony, which comprises a cleansing prayer and ritual bath, prayers, and being given the sacred items that define adherents. These include a sacred shirt and cord, the ‘sudre’, a special undergarment worn together with the sacred thread known as the ‘kushti’. The kushti is highly symbolic. It is worn wound three times around the waist, tied twice in a double knot in the front and back, the ends hanging on the back. It is made of 72 fine, white and woollen threads, representing the 72 chapters of the Yasna, one their key texts, with 3 tassels, each with 24 threads, at each end, again representing another sacred text,
Perhaps most relevant to Massey’s books and Perveen Mistry, marriage is very important in the Parsi community, with its traditional belief that the expansion of God’s kingdom must come from having (preferably significant numbers of) children. Incidentally I read that up until the mid-19th century child marriages were common even though child marriage was not and is not part of their religious doctrine. Today, marriage practices are facing a new problem as more and more women in the Parsi community are becoming well educated and are either delaying marriage or remaining single. This trend was just beginning to emerge back in the 1920s, the time of Massey’s novels.
The Parsi community is very small. At the time of the 2011 Indian Census there were 57,264 Parsis in India. The Indian Government has observed. there are a “variety of causes that are responsible for this steady decline in the population of the community”, of which the most significant they mentioned were childlessness and migration. Demographic projections estimated that by 2020 the community would number only 23,000. Part of the decrease is the result of Parsis going overseas, and there are small communities in the UK, Australia, Canada and the US. However, the major factor is a declining birth rate: as of 2001, Parsis over the age of 60 make up for 31% of the community, and only 4.7% are under 6 years of age. I was unable to track down more recent figures.
For a tiny group, they have made a considerable contribution. Well-known Parsis include the Tata brothers, and especially the son Rata Tata, often described as the “Father of Indian Industry”. Many are connected to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Indira Ghandi’s husband was a Parsi. However, the most well-known might be in the arts community, including Freddie Mercury, the pop singer, Zubin Mehta, the conductor, along with several writers and some Bollywood stars!
However, I discovered that another Parsi, Mithan Jamshed Lam was a suffragist, the first female barrister admitted to practice law at the Bombay High Court, and who served as a Sheriff of Bombay, together with Soli Sorabjee, a former Attorney General of India. All that takes us back to Perveen Mistry, a character Sujata Massey tells us was partially inspired these two trailblazing women who had been Parsi lawyers, as a one-time solicitor in the case of Cornelia Soli Sorabjee and as a former barrister for Mithan Jamshed Lam, both on their way to key roles in the Indian legal hierarchy, as mentioned above.
To be clear, Perveen Mistry’s Parsi character is largely kept in the background. We notice there are rules about who might be a boyfriend, and we see there are times when being a Parsi is mentioned as a relevant factor, or even turns out to be an obstacle. However, there are many more problems that arise as the result of being a policewoman, and these play a much larger role in her activities. Women in India in the 1920s were clearly subordinated, except for ‘white’ women from overseas, and we know these issues are still present in contemporary times. If Parveen battles against discrimination, it is sex discrimination that is most often the issue. Her father is a leading barrister and runs his business with Parveen as part of the practice, but he, like she, has to battle against various rules and prejudices that assume women play no part in the judicial process.
Sujata Massey’s Indian novels are set in Bombay. In the Widows of Malabar Hill, Perveen Mistry has returned from the UK, where she studied law at university (but was unable to proceed to a degree). In her first case (at least as far as we know), she finds herself investigating a suspicious will on behalf of three Muslim widows living in full purdah. As she examines the paperwork, she notices something strange: all three of the wives have signed over their full inheritance to a charity. What will they live on?
Perveen is suspicious, especially since one of the widows has signed her form with an X—meaning she probably couldn’t even read the document. given they are living in strict seclusion, never leaving the women’s quarters or speaking to any men, she begins to consider the likelihood that an unscrupulous guardian might have tricked them. Perveen soon realizes her instincts were correct when tensions escalate to murder. Now she feels it is her responsibility to figure out what really happened on Malabar Hill, and to ensure that no innocent women or children are in further danger.
Enough of the book summary. There are many, many murder mysteries sitting on my local library shelves, so the obvious question is as to why this one deserved my attention – and had me intrigued. Unusual settings help, and a mystery involving women in purdah is certainly distinctive. However, both having a Parsi detective and with Purdah as a complicating offer promise, but enough? No, what makes this, and the following three books (so far) work is the character of Parveen Mistry herself. Rather like Lacey Flint, about whom I wrote recently, Parveen sometimes acts precipitously, doesn’t always follow the rules, jumps to conclusions, and does an excellent job of upsetting other people, especially men!
Parveen joins that group of detectives who are uncertain about themselves, as able as anyone else to misunderstand, and with a stubborn streak that makes them likeable. There is no doubt that the setting and her background conspire to make this even more satisfying. Bombay in 1920 sounds like Bombay today, big and confusing, with massive poverty, suffering from prejudice and misogyny. However, it has the advantage of distance in time, so we can accept some of the terrible features of society at the time as being ‘the way it was back then’.
Based on reading the news, I think I also like to tell myself that religious tensions have worsened in more recent decades, even if women are more able to take their place in society. What do I know? I know that Bombay in 1920 was nicely complex, and there plenty of deep prejudices and prohibitions, all of which make for an idea setting.
However much Bombay helps the story, it is Parveen Mistry herself who makes Massey’s novels so engrossing. She wants the world to be different, and pushes against some restrictions, even if the accepts the authority of her father and the expectations of her mother, well, at least most of the time. Rather like so many of the best police investigators in fiction, she breaks the rules some of the time, makes mistakes, gets herself into tricky situations, some of which have nothing to do with her investigations. She is delightfully likeable and attractively uncomfortable. Perhaps what I am trying to say is that she is ‘real’.
All of this fascinating character becomes even more absorbing when Parveen is sent out from Bombay, under the auspices of the British Raj, to deal with a dispute over a maharaja’s estate. In Sujata Massey’s second book in this series, The Satapur Moonstone, she’s sent because she is a woman and therefore able to meet and talk to the two maharanis in purdah. Such were the rules at the time, she shouldn’t have travelled in the country alone, but once there it becomes clear that she is in a trap: she is to be used as a pawn in the complex palace politics. Oh, and just to add to the fun, the kingdom of Satapur is being administered by an agent of the British raj, ‘on behalf of’ the two maharanis.
There’s a welcome surprise – for the reader if not for Parveen Mistry – in the third book, The Bombay Prince, when the Parsi group takes centre stage. It’s November 1921, and Edward VIII, Prince of Wales and future ruler of India, is arriving in Bombay to begin a four-month tour. The Indian subcontinent is already antagonistic to British rule, and there’s no surprise when local unrest over the Prince’s arrival spirals into riots. But when Freny Cuttingmaster, an eighteen-year-old female Parsi student, falls from a second-floor gallery and dies just as the prince’s grand procession is passing by her college, Parveen is on the case.
Freny had seen her for a legal consultation just days before her death, and what she told Perveen raises suspicion that this wasn’t an accident. Perhaps partly feeling guilty that she hadn’t helped Freny in life, Perveen steps forward to assist in dealing with the coroner’s inquest. It’s not a good time to be challenging authority figures: Bombay is erupting. As armed British secret service march the streets, rioters attack anyone with perceived British connections and desperate shopkeepers destroy their own wares so they will not be targets of racial violence. Great setting for a murder mystery, and it gets more involved and more compelling as events unfold.
I’ve already admitted I read murder mysteries and detective stories on a regular basis. Much of the time, they are simply enjoyable, making me exercise those little ‘grey cells’ as Hercule Poirot fondly refers to them. Last year I read novels by Stig Abell, Mark Billingham, Michel Bussi, Anne Cleeves, Candice Fox, Elly Griffiths, Mick Herron, Cara Hunter, Donna Leon, Fiona McIntosh, Håkan Nesser, Nita Prose, Stephen Spotswood, and several others. It’s a long list, and it is a passion.
However, in addition I have read three novels by Vaseem Khan, the first of which, Midnight at Malabar House, he introduced by saying: “my new book is a historical crime novel set in 1950 in India. It’s called Midnight At Malabar House and introduces Inspector Persis Wadia of the Bombay Police, India’s first female police detective. The period is incredibly intriguing. It’s just after Indian Independence, the horrors of Partition and the assassination of Gandhi. Social and political turmoil is rife in the country. Yet Bombay remains cosmopolitan, with thousands of foreigners still in the city.” It’s as if Parveen Mistry lives on thirty years later, mysterious changed into Persis Wadia!
It turns out Vaseem Khan is another expatriate Indian, but this time living in the UK. From his website I discovered “he is the author of two award-winning crime series set in India, the Baby Ganesh Agency series set in modern Mumbai, and the Malabar House historical crime novels set in 1950s Bombay. …In 2021, Midnight at Malabar House won the Crime Writers Association Historical Dagger, the world’s premier award for historical crime fiction. When he isn’t writing, he works at the Department of Security and Crime Science at University College London. Vaseem was born in England but spent a decade working in India. He also co-hosts the popular crime fiction podcast, The Red Hot Chilli Writers”. Does this all mean that my future murder mystery books will all be about Bombay? What happened to events close to 221B Baker Street, London?
