City of Destruction

Book 0: The Malabar House Series

by Vaseem Khan

Genres: Historical Mysteries; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

'Vaseem Khan writes with charm and wit, and an eye for detail that transports the reader entirely. I couldn't love this series more' CHRIS WHITAKER
'Historical fiction at its finest' MAIL ON SUNDAY

From the award-winning author of MIDNIGHT AT MALABAR HOUSE and THE LOST MAN OF BOMBAY comes a brilliant new mystery featuring the inimitable Persis Wadia.

Bombay, 1950.

A political rally ends in tragedy when Persis kills a lone gunman as he attempts to assassinate India's divisive Home Minister, a man calling for war with neighbouring Pakistan.

With the Malabar House team tasked to hunt down his co-conspirators, Persis is given a second case when the burned body of an unidentified white man is found on a Bombay beach. Meanwhile, Scotland Yard criminalist Archie Blackfinch, lies in a hospital fighting for his life, as all around him the country tears itself apart as a prelude to war...

Release date: November 28, 2024

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 352

Sample

Author’s Note

Although this is a work of fiction, many of the ingredients have been culled from fact:

 

– The idea that Britain actively and covertly supported Partition and the creation of Pakistan with the hope that Pakistan would become a physical barrier to the advancement of the USSR’s communist ideology into India has been around for a long time and is explored in such texts as The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition by Narendra Singh Sarila.

– Britain was also afraid that Stalin would seek control over the important Persian Gulf oilfields – Pakistan provided a potential base for military operations in such an eventuality, with India having largely shut Britain out, militarily speaking, after independence. This rivalry between Britain and Russia in Asia was termed the ‘Great Game’, popularised by Rudyard Kipling in his novel Kim.

– Following independence, the British intelligence services were indeed invited to station security liaisons in India, working with the Indian intelligence services, particularly the Delhi Intelligence Bureau. These liaisons worked for Britain’s MI5. (In this book, I have them working for MI6, purely for aesthetic reasons. I’m a big James Bond fan!) A mention of these SLOs (security liaison officers) can be found in Christopher Andrew’s book The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5.

– By 1950, India had already fought one war with Pakistan (in 1947–8) and the situation between the two nations was fractious, to say the least.

– Following that war, hotheads continued to call for military action – on both sides – particularly over the flashpoint of Kashmir. On the Indian side, the idea that India could bring Pakistani territory back into the fold gained currency, albeit in minority circles. But Indian Prime Minister Nehru himself remained relatively against the idea of all-out war. Indeed, in November 1949 Nehru invited Pakistan to join India in a no-war pact. Letters were exchanged between Nehru and his counterpart in Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, to this effect, but negotiations ended inconclusively. The sabre rattling continued and a second war ensued in 1965. Two further wars would follow, in 1971 and 1999. Minor skirmishes continue to occur at regular intervals, predominantly on the Kashmir border and the so-called Line of Control.

– The debates between Hussain Akbar Madani and Muhammed Iqbal took place as I have described. Their opposing worldviews, determined, in part, how Muslims reacted to Partition, by either leaving India for Pakistan, or staying put and becoming citizens of the newly independent India.

– The passage taken from Silas Marner by George Eliot is exactly as shown.

– The character of Jozef Dabrowski is based on the real-life Adolf Burger who, following the war, detailed his captivity and work on the Nazis’ Operation Bernhard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The counterfeiting operation was carried out as I have described. I have taken the liberty of using Burger’s actual prisoner number: 64401.

– The following was reported in a 2016 article by Richard Sandomir in the New York Times: “I always said I was a dead man on holiday,” Mr. Burger told the historian Roger Morrison. “We never believed we would get out of there.”

– Burger and others from Operation Bernhard were indeed rehoused by the British intelligence services following their liberation – though I am not aware of any of them being settled in India.

– The story of a man who held a toilet hostage on an Indian cross-country train is true.

Chapter 1

Bombay, 1950

City of dreams.

She had often wondered which fool had given Bombay that particular moniker. The Bombay she knew, had always known, was one where dreams were routinely ambushed by nightmares, where the have-nots outnumbered the haves ten to one, where the reality of India’s glamour capital wrongfooted those drawn to the city in the manner of a man falling into an open sewer.

Perhaps she was being unfair.

In the span of four short centuries Bombay had risen from a marshy archipelago that Ptolemy had christened Heptanesia – seven islands – to India’s centre of commerce and culture, a beacon that drew in thousands daily, lemming-like, from across the country’s vast expanse. The bedazzled and the bedraggled.

And so what, if most discovered that Bombay’s streets were paved not with gold but with a patina of excrement? So what, if the city had a tendency to welcome newcomers by dragging them into a dark alley, clubbing them over the head, and leaving them sprawled naked in a gutter? That was all part of the attraction, wasn’t it?

The barbarians were not only inside the gates, but had stuck their feet up on the kitchen table and made themselves at home.

And yet, somehow, the city worked. Powered by its own terrible momentum, an overheated engine constantly on the verge of imploding, Bombay held its own allure, a radiance generated, like exotic particles inside an accelerator, by the collision of rich and poor, credulous and faithful, sane and deranged. The romance of a city by the sea, a meeting point of east and west, as loud and licentious as a frontier saloon.

Yes, there was beauty in the city of dreams.

But there were times when it was hard to see.

Take a day like today.

As Persis hacked her way through the press of sweaty bodies, deafened by the raucous bellows of her fellow citizens, she couldn’t help but feel that her decision not to resign from the police force had been an ill-judged one.

In the end, it had been Roshan Seth, her commanding officer, who had convinced her otherwise. Seth had taken one look at the envelope she’d set before him, knocked back the whisky glass permanently glued to his hand, and risen from his chair to usher her out. ‘Ask not what you can do for your country,’ he’d muttered. ‘But whether your country actually gives a damn.’

Seth had framed her dilemma with admirable perspicacity.

What was the point of quitting if no one noticed?

She had expended so much of herself in qualifying as the country’s first female detective, battling her way to prominence in the national psyche – for good or ill – all while taking the sort of heavy bombardment that had levelled cities during the recent fuss over in Europe, that the idea of simply walking away felt like the surrender of everything she’d fought for.

Her father, Sam, had been equally forthright. ‘Quitting means they win. If you can live with that, quit. If not, stop whining and get back to work.’

So here she was.

The new defence minister was in town.

Rafi Azad had inflamed passions up and down the country.

A divisive figure, Azad’s bombastic rhetoric in the wake of the communal violence of Partition three years earlier had gained him a vast and vocal following, sweeping him into Nehru’s fledgling cabinet. Some suggested the prime minister had only given Azad the job because he wanted to keep him close. The alternative had been to let the volatile Calcuttan traipse around the country, loudhailer pressed to lips, stirring up trouble like an Italian with indigestion.

And so Azad had been invited into Nehru’s inner circle. And had promptly set about rearranging the metaphorical furniture, leaving dirty spoons in the sugar bowl, and generally making a nuisance of himself. Some said Azad’s presence explained Nehru’s pinched expression, as if his in-laws had come to stay. Permanently.

‘I must say, it’s quite the spectacle.’

Persis glanced sourly at her colleague, Archie Blackfinch, as he swept the crowd.

Blackfinch, a tall, narrow-waisted Englishman, was dressed, as ever, in a woollen suit. The temperature, just after the monsoon, was horrendous. It was a wonder Blackfinch didn’t simply melt into a puddle. But he seemed oblivious, face flushed, blinking behind his wire-framed spectacles, mop of combed-back dark hair now plastered to his handsome forehead.

In the time he had spent in India, Blackfinch seemed to have acclimatised better than many of his predecessors. Bombay’s cemeteries were filled with Englishmen who had come to the subcontinent woefully unprepared for its rigours. She’d heard people talk about mad dogs and Englishmen; but even the maddest of dogs took to the shade when occasion demanded, panting bemusedly at the country’s pink-faced conquerors as they stumbled around in a sola-topied daze, nailing up signs banning Indians – and their dogs – from entering Whites-only establishments.

That’s what too much sun did. Addled the brain.

She noted Blackfinch’s soppy grin. There was still something of the tourist about the Englishman. More than a year in and he continued to blunder around the city as if walking at right angles to everyone else. A criminalist with the Metropolitan Police Service in England, Blackfinch had arrived to help the Bombay force set up its own forensic science lab, an endeavour that had kept him gainfully occupied, even as India sidled up and riffled through his pockets.

They had worked several cases together, cases that had propelled her into the national spotlight. If it wasn’t bad enough being set on a pedestal – one that some found inspiring and others intimidating – she had also had to navigate the delicate tango of working with a card-carrying member of the country’s erstwhile overseers. That she and Blackfinch had fallen into what might best be described as an on-again, off-again affaire de coeur had only muddied the waters. A liaison that could not have been more unsuitable had Blackfinch been a one-armed orangutan. The notion that she could ever have any sort of open relationship with an Englishman . . . At best, it would be career suicide; at worst—

She shut down the thought. Why dwell on the impossible? Not that she could explain that to the man. Blackfinch had that peculiar blindness she’d observed in many Britishers, a complete unwillingness to accept the facts at hand, born of a belief that anyone could be brought round to their way of thinking, either by an appeal to reason or, failing that, a navy and several armed battalions.

She could hear Azad warming to his theme: war with Pakistan. The Bombay junta had come out in force to hear him speak. Whatever else you might say about the man, the defence minister knew how to whip up a crowd.

To be fair, Azad wasn’t the only one to wax bellicose on the topic of late.

There were others in Nehru’s cabinet – and around the country – who were keen to see India give the new neighbours a damned good thrashing. Six of the best, trousers down.

A revanchist mood had settled in since independence. The idea that a good chunk of the country’s landmass had been spirited away lingered like a tapeworm in the bellies of many Indians. Gandhi had tried his best to forestall Partition, almost hunger-striking himself to death in protest.

But Jinnah had been adamant. Afraid that his co-religionists – vastly in the minority – might not receive a fair shake in post-independence India, he had pushed for his own country: Pak-i-stan – Land of the Pure. The new nation had officially been born a day after India’s birth. An odd bird, split as it was into East and West Pakistan, on opposite sides of the Indian landmass. Two wings without a body.

Now, almost three years later, the two countries had already fought one war – over the state of Kashmir – bloodying each other’s noses, and generally behaving like a pair of hateful stepsisters whenever they met at international gatherings, hurling insults, shaking fists, and threatening all manner of retribution.

Azad had been building up a head of steam for months now, demanding that India mobilise her forces and sort out the matter once and for all. His rallying cry was a simple one: bring the lost territories back into the fold. Diplomacy had failed. It was time for force. That India would win such a fight was a foregone conclusion. After all, every Indian soldier was worth a dozen of those Pak mutineers.

The rhetoric from across the border was equally muscular. The medal-encrusted generals of Pakistan had no doubt that a war with India would bring glorious victory. Victory had been pre-ordained by God, and when was God ever wrong?

The newspapers adored Azad. He was the voice of the age, a ringmaster hurling sardines at applauding seals.

Nehru had attempted to distance himself from his defence minister’s ardour. The PM had enough to contend with at home without launching into another armed conflict with the noisy neighbours. Not that his reticence had any impact on Azad’s appeal.

The crowd boiled around her.

The rally had packed out the Oval Maidan, a dusty open space in Bombay’s southern reaches, usually the site of impromptu cricket matches in the daytime and lovers’ rendezvous in the evening. Sometimes such assignations were the kind that involved cash changing hands; sometimes they ended in a knife between the ribs. Sometimes – rarely by mutual consent – both.

The maidan was often pressed into service for political purposes: it was from here that Nehru’s ‘tryst with destiny’ speech had been broadcast back in ’47 at the precise moment India gained her independence. Persis remembered it well. She had been one of those in the crowd, shiny-eyed, ready and willing to embrace the prime minister’s dream.

But dreams soured.

The India of today was a turbulent place, riven by communal tension, feudal agitation, and a crisis of identity. Nehru’s attempts to move the nation towards the left had met with resistance from those who didn’t quite believe in his egalitarian ideals. What was the point of having wealth and power if you had to share it? The poor wouldn’t miss what they had never had.

She first noticed the boy because of what he was not doing.

Cheering.

While others around him leaped up and down as if being repeatedly jabbed in the behind by pitchforks, this boy remained perfectly still.

Boy? No. He was a little older than that. Twenty, twenty-one, perhaps?

Fair-complexioned, with a smooth-skinned face – aside from a wispy moustache that looked as if a few stray hairs had accidentally landed on his upper lip – the youth wore khaki trousers, heavy brown sandals, and a plain white shirt. The shirt was soaked through; sweat glistened on his forehead and shimmered along his neck.

An attractive young man.

But something about him, the fact that he was as rigid as a soldier at arms, his attention focused on Azad, the fact that he was not bellowing at the top of his lungs like those around him, made her pay closer attention.

She knew that not everyone at the rally was a fan of the defence minister. Several anti-war protestors had made a half-hearted attempt to be heard, only to find themselves bullied into submission by Azad’s fanatical supporters. One bemused elder had found himself beaten roundly about the head, his skull a drum in a band with a thousand drummers. She had witnessed the fury drip from the blazing sun above into the eyes of his attackers, the same slavering beast that had claimed so many during the Partition years.

Persis had been forced to wade in. Even then, had it not been for Blackfinch, her efforts might have been in vain. The sight of the white man had instantly set the mob on its heels. That and the revolver the size of a cannon the Englishman pulled from his jacket.

Having dragged the old man out of harm’s way, Persis handed him off, still protesting, to a constable, then turned to Blackfinch. ‘Where did you get that?’

‘This?’ He held up the gun, practically grunting with the effort. ‘I thought I needed something with a little more heft.’

‘I thought you didn’t believe in guns?’

‘As a rule, yes. But, in case you hadn’t noticed, things appear to be getting rather boisterous of late.’

In that he was right. Crime was on the rise in the city of dreams. Drugs. Gambling. Prostitution. And murder. With independence out of the way, the temporary national solidarity that had suppressed her countrymen’s baser instincts had melted away. Old enmities had returned; vices had reasserted themselves.

Attacks on foreigners, too, had once again become commonplace.

There were still many who found forgiving and forgetting a bridge too far. The Raj might have been history, but its many crimes lingered in the memory. Blackfinch had been in the country well over a year but still stuck out like a sore thumb, one just begging to be hammered. His success at setting up the forensic science lab had since led to his services being called upon by other cities – Calcutta, Delhi, Madras.

But his time was finite.

Sooner or later, he would return to the Old Country.

She turned away.

The crowd was a cross-section of Bombay. Mainly young men, but there were women here too. A mix of young and old. Azad had the cobra’s ability to hypnotise the masses.

Besides, this was Bombay; any public gathering with more than two people qualified as street theatre. And if there was any chance of violence, you could practically sell tickets.

On the stage Azad was thumping the podium, hair flying. Each time he whacked the stand, his body was propelled several inches off the floor. The crowd responded with bursts of lusty applause.

As she patrolled the crowd, Persis listened to Azad’s words with half an ear, noting that the defence minister had taken great pains not to use the world Muslim when talking about Pakistan. Azad’s platform – at least, on the face of it – was not a religious one. His was a wholesome appeal to war based on returning a fractured nation to its full sovereign identity.

A shrewd gambit.

After all, even after the Partition-enforced migrations into Pakistan, there were still thirty million Muslims in the country, Azad being one of them.

And in the new India everyone was equal under the law.

But people were people and human nature was human nature.

Or, as her father, Sam, had put it, people were idiots. And you couldn’t legislate for idiots. The ghosts of Partition hung above the nation, whispering in the ears of men like Azad. Persis suspected it would be a long time before those ghosts would be allowed to find peace.

She found herself moving towards the boy in the white shirt. It wouldn’t hurt to ask him a question or tw—

A man stepped in front of her, almost causing her to collide into him.

‘Inspector, how delightful to see you here.’

Aalam Channa grinned down at her.

Channa. Star reporter for the Indian Chronicle, a man who had undermined the very idea of women on the force – and Persis in particular – since the day she had passed her Indian Police Service exams. A rakish fop, he was the sort of muck-raking journalist whose ethical standards would send cockroaches scurrying for cover and leave rats wanting to take a shower. Dressed in his trademark shimmering white jacket, with a lustrous head of brilliantined hair and a pencil moustache, he looked as if he were attending a wedding rather than a rally.

Persis’s gaze burned a hole through him.

‘Doesn’t it make you proud to be Indian?’ Channa grinned. ‘Care to give me a quote? A few words from our famous female inspector, in support of the defence minister’s patriotic call for war? Perhaps your sentiments might bring Nehru around? The PM does enjoy lending an ear to an attractive woman. Just look how dear Edwina had him wrapped around her finger.’

Her nostrils flared. The Chronicle had gone to town on the alleged affair between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten, though neither party had admitted to it. Not that something as irrelevant as actual facts had ever stopped Channa.

‘No.’

‘ “No” that you don’t wish to be quoted or “no” that you don’t support Azad’s call for war?’ Channa’s grin was so wide the top of his head was in danger of falling off.

‘Get out of my way.’ She pushed past the journalist, left him smiling in her wake.

The boy had vanished.

She looked around at the tidal sloshing of bodies but couldn’t see him.

‘What was that about?’

Blackfinch had caught up with her.

‘What?’

‘That was Channa, right? The hack from the Chronicle? What did he want?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Are you alright?’ He peered at her with concern.

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ she snapped.

His mouth flapped open, and then closed again. He looked vaguely embarrassed.

The situation between them was untenable, growing more so by the day. The fact that they had to work together on a regular basis, rubbing along despite her best efforts to convince Blackfinch that they could be no more than friends, only made it worse.

She turned away. The boy continued to trouble her, a shadow at the back of her mind, like a bat hanging in a darkened cave.

She decided to head for the stage, beating a path through the crowd until she hit the rope, then ducking under it. She saw Azad’s minders, a pair of burly carthorses in safari suits, stir at the base of the stage. Further along, her sub-inspectors from Malabar House, Birla and Haq, watched the crowd. Birla held a twist of newspaper in his hands. A small man, with the general demeanour of a depressed weasel, he seemed ill at ease, flicking peanuts into his mouth distractedly as he scanned the throng. Haq, as usual, looked like a collapsed building, towering over his colleague.

She ran her eyes back down the rope . . . There.

The boy had made his way to the front, hemmed in between two other young men, both dancing animatedly on the spot.

Yet the boy remained stationary, gaze focused on Azad, face glowing with sweat . . . and something else.

She saw his lips move. A murmur. What was he saying? A prayer?

Intuition kicked a door down somewhere deep in her gut.

She was moving even before she saw the youth duck under the rope, step quickly up to the stage, and raise a revolver.

Her own weapon was in her hand, though she had no memory of drawing it. A beat pulsed in her head. Her blood flew wild.

She heard her own voice, cutting through the madness.

‘Stop!’

Everything slowed down.

The boy spun around instinctively, eyes widening, firing as he turned.

She felt the bullet whistle past her ear, and then her finger had applied pressure to the trigger of her own weapon, the gun bucking in her hand.

The boy went down.

Silence enclosed her in its fist. For a moment, the world stood still.

And then all hell broke loose.

She saw Azad’s minders scramble on to the stage and bundle the defence minister away.

The crowd was frozen in an instant of shock, then turned as one, trampling over each other in their bid to get away, beating each other aside in their panicked haste, like rich people told there had been a run on the banks.

Sound returned.

The tornado of shouts, screams, and curses rose to a crescendo as she approached the boy.

Spread-eagled on the dusty earth, his eyes sightlessly tracked the vault of sky above.

The revolver lay by his right hand.

She kicked it away, then knelt beside him, examined the flower of blood just below his sternum.

His breath hitched in his throat. Sweat glistened on his handsome face.

Why?

She wanted to rattle him until his teeth shook.

Why did you make me do this?

His depthless gaze focused on her. A hand twitched, and he reached up, pulled at an amulet strung around his throat. The thread snapped and then he was pressing it into her hand. His lips trembled, forming words. Something in his eyes, a dying hunger, made her lean in.

His voice rasped in her ear.

The words said, he lay back, eyes closed.

Within moments, his body went slack.

Her lungs turned to concrete. She felt drained of blood, hollowed out.

The boy’s voice echoed inside her mind.

City of destruction.

What had he meant?

And then Birla’s voice was drilling into her ear.

What was the sub-inspector saying? An urgency in his tone that she rarely associated with the laconic policeman.

She twisted her head around, saw Birla kneeling on the ground beside a sprawled body, a long, lean form, with scuffed shoes turned skywards.

Haq stood over the pair, looking down mournfully as if he had just discovered that the world was not flat.

Birla was cradling the man’s head in his lap; blood obscured the face.

But there was no hiding that cheap suit, that badly knotted tie, the shock of dark hair.

And the sun beat down on her shoulders, beat down on the blood-soaked earth, beat inside her head, until all that remained was the sound of a howl, rising steadily in her ears and up towards that dispassionate, impossibly distant orb.

Chapter 10

In many nations, hospitals served as beacons of light, cathedrals of healing where the sick and injured might throw themselves upon the tender mercies of the medical profession.

In India, the relief available to those forced to attend these whitewashed bastions was often p. . .