Determined Perveen Mistry is on the case
The Widows of Malabar Hill Sujata Massey Soho Crime: 400 pp., $26.95
Unless you’re a member of England’s Lincoln’s Inn or an avid Google Doodles follower, odds are you’ve probably never heard of Cornelia Sorabji or Mithan Tata Lam. Sorabji was the first woman to graduate from the University of Bombay, the first woman to read law at Oxford and India’s first female solicitor, while Lam also studied at Oxford and was the first Indian female barrister admitted to the Bombay High Court in 1923.
Sujata Massey, author of 11 mysteries featuring Rei Shimura, a mixed-race Japanese American sleuth, discovered their stories while researching “The Sleeping Dictionary,” a historical novel set in Calcutta. Unable to let go of these fascinating historical figures, Massey transformed them into one Perveen Mistry, who first appeared in a 2015 novella and now in “The Widows of Malabar Hill.”
Perveen studied law at Oxford and by 1921 is back in Bombay, practicing at the firm led by her father, the esteemed Parsi barrister Jamshedji Mistry. Despite Perveen’s family wealth and influence , her legal training and fluency in several languages, as a woman, she’s not allowed admittance to the bar, which relegates Perveen to the offices of Mistry Law, reviewing and translating contracts, preparing legal briefs, doing the accounting and advising on strategies for her father in the High Court.
While he is out arguing a case, Perveen reviews a letter from Faisal Mukri, the household agent of Omar Farid, the wealthy, recently deceased owner of a Bombay textile mill. Mukri has forwarded a document to Mistry Law, the estate’s executors, signed by the deceased’s three widows, with instructions to relinquish their portions of their husband’s assets to the family’s wakf, an irrevocable trust that under Islamic law must be used for specific charitable purposes and that would pay only a small dividend to the women.
Perveen questions the authenticity of the signatures and is suspicious that the women, who live in seclusion as purdanashins, might not understand the consequences of giving away their assets. Her father, because of the women’s isolation from society and resulting lack of contact with men, has never spoken with the trio, despite being the estate’s executor. She resolves to speak directly with the widows at their Malabar Hill estate.
Perveen’s drive to protect the widows’ interests springs not just from her commitment to adhering to Islamic law or sense of social justice but also her own disastrous courtship and marriage to Cyrus Sodawalla, whom she had met some five years before when she sat in on law classes at the University of Bombay’s Elphinstone College. Flashbacks relate the harassment Perveen endured at the hands of her all-male classmates and the welcome respite — and passion — presented by the dashing, curly haired young man searching for a suitable teenage bride.
In opposition to his family’s wishes, Cyrus becomes enchanted with the intelligent, twentysomething Perveen. She too is smitten — with Cyrus’ good looks and stylish clothes, with how he talks to her as an equal, with his bold advances when they defy convention to be alone at Bandra Beach. “While reading a novel, she’d once come across the phrase ‘wanton woman.’ It had sounded awful. She had traveled to Bandra fearful that Cyrus might take liberties. Now she reveled in them. She was taking her own liberties with him. Wasn’t this liberation?”
Massey does an excellent job intercutting the tale of Perveen’s romantic courtship, ill-fated marriage and escape from Cyrus and his parents’ strict Zoroastrian household in Calcutta with her quest for fair treatment of the three devout Muslim widows.
The novel makes the complex religious and legal diversity of India understandable while illustrating the divisions within religious groups, whose members struggle between devotion to old ways and the modernizing world. Blending these issues with vivid descriptions of the sights, sounds and smells of Bombay and Calcutta, it is easy to forget that this sensoryrich novel is a mystery until the tensio in the Farid household erupts and someone is killed, with suspicion falling on the widows, their children, servants and employees of the textile mill, all of whom have designs on the fortune.
Perveen’s unique position as a woman, a member of the small and influential Parsi community and a British-educated solicitor means she can serve as the linchpin among various facets of Bombay culture and society that have a stake in solving the homicide — the all-male police force, which fears religious backlash if it is discovered that it violated the Hanafi Muslim women’s religious beliefs and modesty; the English, who have a stake in maintaining British rule of law in a region that simmers with desire for Indian self-rule; and the widows themselves, whose seclusion and naïveté make them susceptible to abuse from all sides.
Perveen is aided by the freethinking Alice Hobson-Jones, and her investigations aim to reveal not only the identity of the killer but also the indignities suffered by women of all faiths in a world where the odds are stacked against them.
Perveen’s dogged pursuit of justice is reminiscent of Anne Perry’s Charlotte Ellison Pitt and Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs. But Pervenn’s multicultural, multifaith milieu both illuminates a bygone era and offers a thoughtful perspective relevant to today’s focus on women’s rights and equality. When this singular heroine and her friend Alice raise their glasses at the end of this rousing novel and toast to “the power of women!,” one suspects readers will agree.