A thriller born of research and a feverish imagination

As Nazi Berlin is gearing up for its Final Solution, a German Jew named Ernst Steiger finds himself caught up in the murder of a young tribal in the Bombay of 1964 — that’s the Bombay Swastika for you. Author Braham Singh’s debut novel “is a work of fiction built around true events”.

He illustrates his point: “There was this Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who ended up in Bombay. True story. I took it and blew it out of proportion, the narrative shifting between 1935 Berlin and 1964 Bombay. In Berlin, the story revolves around the Jewish Hospital in Wedding, a Berlin suburb. There, in what simply has to be one of the strangest facts about World War II, a whole community of Jews were left alive by the Nazis in the hospital compound, even as millions of Jews were being killed across Europe.”

To write a book that has a “multi-layered plot across different geographies and time periods”, as well as characters (there is a Jew, then a Muslim, and a Sindhi), the 52-year-old dedicated himself to research. “I love research. That, plus a feverish imagination... Just coming to grips with the Jewish Hospital and weaving it into the plot took months. One had to be dead accurate about locations in 1935 Berlin, 1948 Karachi and 1965 Bombay,” he says.

The novel also “tackles the Indian nuclear programme and why Dr Homi Bhabha’s plutonium reprocessing plant never took off. Then there’s tantric Krishna bhakti, because in my story, by 1964, the German Jew had gone Hindu and become an acolyte of the tantric Sahajiya sect of Bengal. Studying this Vaishnavite group was an experience”, says the US-based telecom professional, who has a “penchant for history, travel and action”, like some of his favourite writers: Khushwant Singh, Gore Vidal, Paul Theroux, and Martin Cruz Smith.

Published by Om Books International, the thriller is already a bestseller, but Singh has busied himself with his next, without making much of this success. “I’ve been waiting to write a novel all my life. Now that Bombay Swastika is done, four more are eating away at me,” he says. “And once I work my way through them, there will probably be four more. I am doomed to write.”

Author Braham Singh’s debut novel, Bombay Swastika, is ‘a work of fiction built around true events’