Vermont College of Fine Arts

Title: Love and Crime in the Time of Plague: A Bombay Mystery

Author: Anuradha Kumar

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Maya is Discomfited

What shall we talk about?’ Maya asked in her irrepressible way, a lilt in her voice. That afternoon she was out cycling with Henry when the rain came down, turning heavy in moments. It was August and the middle of the monsoon season.

‘Tell me more about what you found. More about those…mysterious sketches. You have two minutes,’ Henry rolled his eyes playfully as he pulled out his watch.

Dark, thick clouds loomed over the sea and gathered by the palm trees and rocks lining the shore. Leaving their bicycles against the tall, old Ashoka tree, they had run, like many times before, toward the old Prong’s lighthouse to their right. Its white walls were damp-streaked and moss-stained, and the grey rocks huddled by it were dotted by foamy flecks. The sea swirled in noisily with an insistent rhythm.

They stood on the low stoop, looking out at the gravestones across the road. The door behind, blue paint flaking in places, creaked in the wind. The room in the old lighthouse always smelt musty. It was sparsely furnished with wooden chairs, a table, and a cupboard. Faded red curtains fluttered on the windows. A part of the roof near the fireplace leaked, and rainwater often dripped down into a large wooden tub. Soon, Henry always joked, it would fill up with fish. The keeper, an old Eurasian, waved to them from an upstairs window, his beard flailing through its rusting iron bars.

They were right at the tip of the city on the island of Colaba, and the new bicycles—shipped to Henry only that summer—were safe to ride on, with their evenly spaced wheels, pneumatic tyres, and a chain system. Henry was pleased with these new ‘Rover’ cycles, made by a company in Chicago, Henry’s home town. The wind left a mist on their faces, the gulls were noisy on the rafters, and they waited for the rain to ease.

The Causeway, its white stones grey in the wan light, stretched to the mainland. Built some fifty years ago, it now connected what had been the separate islands of Colaba, and the Old Woman’s Island to the bigger island of Bombay. If they craned their necks and looked to the left, through the palm trees, the stone walls of the old fort were clearly visible.

Henry took his cap off, twirled it with his fingers then placed it back on his head. Maya scraped the soles of her muddy boots against the stoop, and leaned against the door. They heard a sharp clear call, two eagles were majestically scouring the skies, their wings spotted white, and lighting up when the sun momentarily breathed through the clouds.

‘You’ve been thinking about the sketches, haven’t you?’

Maya nodded, her eyes the colours of the stormy sea. The eagles, she was thinking, maybe they were the White-bellied Sea Eagles familiar to these parts.

‘Tell me about it,’ Henry encouraged, stealing a look upstairs, and noting the open window. The keeper was probably all ears. They were always the subject of gossip, and Henry ruefully accepted this, always with a turmoil in his heart. He enjoyed Maya’s company and tried not to think too much of the future; most times he failed. Sometimes he thought Maya felt the same way.

Maya had found the sketches only a fortnight ago. In a room, dark, mysterious and unused, at the very back of the grey-stone ‘doctors’ house’ where Maya lived. She had wanted to use the room as a study. The doctors’ house stood on a narrow lane leading off the Colaba Causeway, on the sliver of land where Bombay stretched into the sea in a crab-like way. One walked through the house’s main hallway, and the study appeared after a series of small steps. Next to the study was the covered courtyard and on the left, its lone window faced the garden, with its wooden latticed fence, the bougainvillea and oleander creepers, and tall palm trees. Farther beyond, closer to the sea, lay the asylum and a part of the lighthouse, always visible from the upper floor windows of the doctors’ house. Sounds of the horse-drawn tramcars, the bells of the Afghan Church, the train coming in every morning and in the late afternoon, and the constant rolling of the sea, shaped a pleasing backdrop to everyday life in the house.

Once owned by Hormuzji Dorabji, a merchant whose business interests spread across Bombay, Surat, East Africa and Natal, the doctor Edith Pechey had first rented it when she came to Bombay to manage the city’s first women’s hospital. Soon there were two of them, when Charlotte Ellaby responded to Edith’s invitation, and that was how the bungalow got its name. Then about two years ago, though Maya felt it was much longer, the doctors’ house had a new resident when Maya joined them, a few weeks after reaching Bombay as part of a travelling theatre troupe from Lahore. The troupe soon moved on to another city, but Maya had stayed back. For a while only, she had thought at first, but months had flown by and the ‘doctors’ house’ was her home now. Edith had moved out when she married Herbert Phipson, an American businessman with offices in Bombay, and Maya still stayed on with Charlotte. Finding her feet in a city, warm and lively. Finding her heart too, but with that Maya wanted to take more time.

For Maya, the string-bound folder with the sketches was an unexpected find. It lay in the old wooden almirah, lost among dusty old account ledgers, old books, in old Pali and Persian, and crinkled maps brown with age.

‘They look so old, and so skilfully done.’ Henry still remembered the awed expression on Maya’s face the afternoon she told Charlotte and him about it. They had shared Maya’s delight, looking at the sketches—lifelike depictions of birds, drawn mainly in black ink, with distinct colours on some.

(Excerpted from Love and Crime in the Time of Plague: A Bombay Mystery by Anuradha Kumar. Published by Speaking Tiger Books, 2025)

ABOUT THE BOOK

It is 1896. A ship docks in Bombay Harbour, and as the workers rush to unload the cargo, a scream rings out. A large black rat, frothing at the mouth, has bitten one of the men.

Within weeks, a miasma of fear engulfs the city as ship-borne rats overrun its nooks and crannies, and more and more of its inhabitants fall sick—and die. Dr Acacio Viegas is the first to ring the alarm—it is the plague. The only way to control it is to sanitize the city’s slums, clean its drains, report any fever, and stay at home. The British Administration embarks on these measures on a war footing—until warning notes begin to turn up at Doctors’ House, where Maya Barton lives with Dr Charlotte Ellaby, and at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital—notes that threaten those who are ‘interfering’ with people’s religion and customs with dire consequences—all signed by the ‘Native Society’.

Maya and her friend Henry Baker, the American trade counsel, are soon hot on the trail of the Society, which leads them to the formidable Rangnekar Bhau, the Society’s founder, and its Secretary, the treacherous Satarkar, who hates everything new and ‘modern’, whether the British and the brown sahibs, and their so-called anti-plague drive, or women like Maya, who think too much of themselves.

As Maya and Henry unravel the mystery, they draw closer to each other and to what could be a future together. And Maya learns more about Reverend Barton, who could have been her father, and the Kashmiri woman who might have been her mother.

Anuradha Kumar once again uses her talent for recreating a period setting and engaging characters to brilliant effect in this sequel to the acclaimed The Kidnapping of Mark Twain, her first Bombay Mystery.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anuradha Kumar has worked for the Economic & Political Weekly. She has an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA). Her stories have won awards from the Commonwealth Foundation, UK, and The Little Magazine, India. She writes regularly for Scroll.in. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications like Fiftytwo.in, The India Forum, The Missouri Review, among others. Two of her essays received notable mention in ‘Best American Essays’ editions of 2023 and 2024. Her essay collection, The Sound of Lost Memories, was recently a finalist for the Gournay Prize (University of Iowa) and will be published (2027) by Cornerstone Press (University of Wisconsin, Stevens-Point).

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

The Kidnapping of Mark Twain

Title: The Kidnapping of Mark Twain: A Bombay Mystery

Author: Anuradha Kumar

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

An hour passed as Henry, back in his rooms at the Byculla Club, waited for Abdul to return from the doctors’ bungalow. He had taken a message from Henry to Maya. He would not be back to have dinner with the Clemenses that evening. ‘Don’t give Maya memsahib the message in front of them,’ Henry warned, and Abdul gave him his usual long-suffering look. He really wasn’t an idiot, Henry thought to himself ruefully. ‘And if she asks more, tell her some urgent business came up.’ Henry’s face darkened, for he wouldn’t tell her about his intentions of tailing Bancroft, even accosting him. ‘And come back fast, we need to…’

Abdul looked at him expectantly, but Henry paused, pursed his lips. ‘I will tell you when you are back.’

He looked toward his desk, where his prized Colt Bisley lay in the locked second drawer. A brand-new model, with its five-inch barrel, that he had bought in London. Henry didn’t want to use it, especially on Bancroft and he hoped the other man wouldn’t make it difficult for him. Freddie Bancroft had quite a reputation, one that preceded him. He had first trained as a dentist and then worked as an insurance agent in Philadelphia before he had set out to make a magician of himself. It was an ambitious hope, and Bancroft could be impatient. The time when the

New York papers had reported unfavourably about his show, when his illusions had not worked, and his card tricks had bored much of the audience, Bancroft had thrown a tantrum, throwing his magician’s props on the seated audience. He had then burst into the offices of the New York Journal. He had accosted the editor on the late evening shift, accusing him, and the paper, of favouring the other magician Alexander Hermann, and insisted that the next day the office itself would vanish into thin air.

A portion of the office was indeed found ablaze early the next morning, but Bancroft had an alibi. There were many people who had seen him on the return train to Philadelphia. And the culprits were found to be two workers who were part of the union of newspaper workers. But Bancroft later bragged about it, that he could indeed hypnotize people to do his bidding.

He had made sure people in Bombay knew about this too, and he was determined to stage his own show at the Rippon Theatre on Grant Road. Bancroft had dropped flyers all over, had demanded advertising space for himself in the Gazette, and was also soliciting funds from the likes of Albert Sassoon, Shapoorji Bengalee, and the others, to build those elaborate sets he so wanted. But, of course, Henry, his fellow countryman, hadn’t been of much help, nor had he pulled his weight with the customs people.

Henry sighed. He was letting his jealousy get to his head. Bancroft must have added to his skills in the months he was in Bombay. For he had impressed Maya, and in a far shorter period of time, Mark Twain too, it would appear. And perhaps, Henry thought, Bancroft wanted Twain to write about him, an entire piece in the American papers about the magician’s immense popularity in the East. And now, it would appear that Bancroft may have been the last person to actually see Mark Twain, for he must have peered into his room, as he had Boehme’s, and it was likely, he did know a thing or two.

Henry looked at his notes on the table, and realized with some consternation that he had forgotten a meeting. With a man he disliked as much as he did Bancroft, but when business mattered, Henry knew he had to be quite the professional. Arthur Pease, the tireless campaigner against opium, the vices of drinking, and prostitution, had expressed an interest in the electric fans. They were needed, Pease had said, for the big meetings and assemblies he called every once in a while, in the Parsi meeting halls, and the town hall, and especially at the Reformatory Institute that was a particular favourite of his, for he always found a willing and suppliant audience here.

An hour later, Henry felt there was little point waiting for Abdul in his study. The longer he was on his own, the more he would fret over Twain and think sullenly about Bancroft. So Henry resolutely set off first for the police headquarters, and then to meet with Arthur Pease in Khetwadi, that lay a bit after Crawford Market. This was where Pease lived in a small bungalow, part of which doubled up as a healing centre for addicts.

Henry left a note for Abdul by the table near the hat stand, next to the silver embossed tray that usually held the keys, messages, and letters. Come to…, and he wrote the address. House next to Daji clinic. Crawford Market. Come as soon as you see this.

He called for a carriage, from the many standing aimlessly by the club. The coachman, a Pathan judging from his build and turban, saluted smartly as he jumped down from his seat to hold the door open. ‘The police station first,’ Henry said in a low voice, ‘and then someplace else. I will tell you later. You do have the time, I hope?’

‘Good, sahib, very good,’ the coachman said, nodding to his helper who would ride with him. The boy resting at the foot of the statue that everyone called the Standing Parsi, came running up, and the carriage shook momentarily as he jumped up behind. ‘Go fast, all right?’ Henry said, looking through the window.

The man nodded, gently tapping the pony, a young, spirited brown animal, with his whip, and then, looking over his shoulder said, ‘They are sending a lot of the police toward Sewree and Parel, the workers are angry. They really anticipate trouble, and they are stopping us from going there.’

(Extracted from The Kidnapping of Mark Twain: A Bombay Mystery by Anuradha Kumar. Published by Speaking Tiger Books, 2023)

About the Book: In 1896, Mark Twain arrives at the docks of Bombay, wife and daughter in tow, and, after attending a party in his honour, vanishes from his room at the iconic Watson’s Hotel in the dead of night.

Desperate to find the legendary writer and avoid an international incident between his country and Britain, the American Trade Consul, Henry Baker, teams up with Abdul, his trusted aide, and Maya Barton, a free-spirited Anglo- Indian with surprisingly intuitive detective skills. But they have their task cut out for them: Mark Twain’s disappearance appears to be entangled with a thriving opium trade; an intimidating, self-righteous preacher; an anxious magician who walks on stilts; a professional thief on the run; and a powerful labour leader, Tuka, whose young wife is found strangled in her bed.

Full of fascinating period detail and delightful cameos—and awash with suspense—The Kidnapping of Mark Twain is a thrilling page-turner.

About the Author: Anuradha Kumar was born in Odisha. She studied history at Delhi University and management (specializing in human resource management) at the XLRI School of Business, Jamshedpur. She has worked for the Economic and Political Weekly. She has an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA). Her stories have won awards from the Commonwealth Foundation, UK, and The Little Magazine, India. She writes regularly for Scroll.in. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications like Fiftytwo.in, The India Forum, The Missouri Review, among others. She has written for younger readers as well. This present work is her 11th novel.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL