Rasdhar

 Earlier this year I read Mary Roberts Rinehart's Miss Pinkerton, which is about a nurse named Hilda Adams. Perceptive, organised, and efficient, she occasionally assisted the police with delicate inquiries, enabled by her work providing at-home care, usually to the very rich. Her usual partner in these efforts was Inspector Fuller, a policeman who vociferously defended her talents to all doubters, insisting she was as effective as any of his policemen. Fuller affectionately calls her ???Miss Pinkerton??? for her detection skills.

The Haunted Lady is the fourth, and last of Rinehart's Hilda Adams novels. She did have a small run of short stories to follow, but the series ended here. It really is a shame that we got so few of these, because they are quite charming, and on the whole manage to avoid the common pitfalls of mid-century mystery novels such as overt anti-Semitism, classism, sexism, and racism. I say “on the whole” because these books are, after all, a product of a certain time and era and it's a bit hopeless to expect them to reflect our sentiments today. But problems, as there are, are less obvious than those I encountered in books by Ngaio Marsh or Agatha Christie, for example. Really the only jarring note in this book is when Inspector Fuller says he'd like to take Hilda over his knee after she does something that puts herself at risk - the kind of thing that might happen in I Love Lucy. I know it's meant playfully and is supposed to show how he's concerned about her and also, that it doesn't actually happen (she'd kick his ass) , but I still didn't like it, even as a joke. What I did like most about these books is Hilda's inner conflict: she's constantly torn between feeling revulsed at poking around the private lives of people she's meant to care for, and at the same time, her strong commitment to seeing justice done in the face of crime. It lends the books a nice depth and tension that a boilerplate mystery might lack.

In The Haunted Lady, an elderly, wealthy woman named Mrs. Eliza Fairbanks is perturbed by a series of occurrences in her house. She hears odd noises, finds rats and snakes released in her chamber, and finds her belongings disturbed despite locking her door. Given her age, most people assume that she???s approaching senility, or is paranoid. Mrs Fairbanks, though, is strong-willed, decisive, and firm, and insists she isn???t imagining things. When the sugar for her strawberries is found to be laced with arsenic, she is finally taken seriously. Inspector Fuller of Scotland Yard calls up Miss Hilda Adams, the efficient, observant nurse, and asks her if she will stay at the Fairbanks residence and keep an eye on the old lady, while they try to find out what is happening. 

At the Fairbanks House, Hilda finds a whole cast of suspects. There???s Marian, Eliza???s daughter, who divorced her unfaithful husband, resulting in scandal and ire from Eliza. There???s Frank, Marian???s husband, now married to their former governess, Eileen, who is broke and still paying alimony. There???s Jan, their daughter, seemingly the only guardian of Eliza???s welfare, but Jan is in love with Eliza???s doctor, and they both need money to get started in life. Of course, there???s the doctor too. And then there???s Eliza???s son and daughter-in-law, weak-willed, impoverished Carlton, and Susie, his gauche, ill-mannered wife, who need money as well. When Eliza Fairbanks, who holds the purse strings, is stabbed inside her locked room, Inspector Fuller and Miss Hilda Adams have to figure out who it was that killed her ??? and how? 

The mystery is of the ???had I but known??? variety, combined with a standard locked-room setup, with plenty of clues sprinkled in to aid the reader, but still a satisfying twist at the end. It???s actually Hilda who does most of the detecting, putting herself at risk sometimes, and amassing a series of clues. When she explains it at the end to Inspector Fuller, he is mixed with frustration and admiration and perhaps something more. ???Oh, subtle little Miss Pinkerton!??? he tells her. ???Lovable and clever and entirely terrible Miss Pinkerton! What I am to do about you? I???m afraid to take you and I can???t leave you alone.??? The reader may well agree. I really enjoyed it. 

This is a book about the Sri Lankan civil war, but it is not just a book about the Sri Lankan civil war. It is really a book about justice, indifference, and courage, amidst unspeakable violence. Early in the book, Ganeshananthan narrates how Sinhalese men went down the street, seeking out Tamil homes and businesses to burn, Tamil people to slaughter, in the middle of riots. They used electoral rolls to find and identify these people and places. In 1992, when Mumbai, India was gripped by riots, the Shiv Sena party did the exact same thing - using electoral rolls to find Muslim houses, drag out the men and beat them, drag out the women for worse. I know, because I was there, and because I belonged to a family that had Hindus, and Muslims, Christians and Jews, we had our front door marked in the middle of night by rioters who left posters identifiying us that said 'Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain' ('Say with pride we are Hindus'), and we had friends and families who tried to help us by printing signs to cover up these posters, which said 'Prem se kaho hum insaan hain' ('Say with love we are human'). In her late dementia, my grandmother, gripped with memories of those days, would wake up at night, saying 'They're coming, they're coming'. So, I didn't live through the civil war in Sri Lanka, and I can't speak for this experience, but my own lived experience is caught so acutely in her finely-crafted expression of this kind of violence that I wept, and so I cannot be objective about this book; only to say that I was gripped by it.

We could not believe it - to begin to believe all this, we had to write it down. You must understand: I have to tell myself again, because even though I was there it seems impossible.

I can, however, tell you what it is about: in Jaffna, 1981, Sashikala Kulenthiren, known as 'Sashi', grows up in a Tamil family that prizes education above all. Her four brothers are dedicated to their education: Niranjan, the eldest and gentlest, is almost qualified as a doctor; her next two brothers, Dayalan and Seelan are studying to be engineers, her youngest brother, Aran, is still in schoo, like her, and Sashi and her neighbour, a boy she calls K., are both hoping to get into medical college. As the Sri Lankan civil war begins, and signs of ethnic violence emerge, Sashi loses her brothers one by one: to violent death, to those that join in groups for reasons just and unjust, and ultimately, to those that escape the conflict altogether. The book follows Sashi's life; through medical school, through her family's travails, through until she is in New York, in 2009, making a futile bed to have the U.N. intervene in a bloody conflict that world ignored. Although this is a fictional account, it was built on two decades of research, Sashi's mentor in the books, Anjali Premachandran, is based on the real life doctor, human rights activist, Rajani Thiranagama, who was assassinated after publishing a book documenting the violence, torture, and rapes committed by both, the Indian Peacekeeping Forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Sashi's story may be fictional, but the extraordinary courage that she showed, in her profession as a doctor and her work, is based on the works of dozens of real people who put their lives on the line to document horrors that the world ignored. Ganeshananthan handles this complex, difficult, subject matter with a touch so deft that it never feels overwrought or exploited for sensational effect. There is emotion, but not melodrama.

Early in the book, the local library where Sashi and her brothers study is burned down by Sinhalese policemen. As a young teenager, she insists on going to see the damage despite the risks; her brothers take her. As she says:

They had torched the elegant palace of white rooms where Seelan and K and I had studied, its clean and well-lit shelves, the rare book section with the beautifully lettered palm leaf manuscripts. Dayalan had shown some to me when had first begun working there. Ninety thousand volumes gone, some of them original and single copies. Our past, but also - oh, the beautiful wooden tables where I had turned the pages of my textbooks and my brothers' textbooks! - the future. Imagine the places you grew up, the places you studied, places that belonged to your people, burned. But I should stop pretending that I know you. Perhaps you do not have to imagine. Perhaps your library, too, went up in smoke.

Towards the end of the book, as Sashi is without any of her brothers, without her friend K, without her mentor, without her family, she says, "I want you to understand: it does not matter if you cannot imagine the future. Still, relentless, it comes." This is how the book is written, directly addressed to the reader. It is a difficult approach to sustain, but Ganeshananthan does it, so that you turn page after page with Sashi, following her fight through her fear and loss and grief until it has honed her into a woman who is walking into a future she can't imagine, but with her spine held straight, no matter the cost. I can't even tell if you I liked this book or I hated it: only that I wept through it. If that's not a testimony to the skill of the writer, I don't know what is.

Magadela Zyzak is a Polish-born writer, now living in the US, and this novel was written in English. Set in the imaginary Slavic country of Scalvusia, in the 1930s, the book follows Barnabas Pierkiel, a young swineherd, very enamoured with his own beauty, and bent upon seducing Roosha, the mistress of another man. It's difficult to describe what this book is like: I've seen it called a picaresque, a folk tale, a satire, and an adventure. The truth is it is all of these at once and none of them. It's written in this mocking, absurdist style that will either annoy you or thoroughly entertain you (I found it funny in a slightly dark, terrifying way, but I can see how some might not). The book is often ribald, rife with references to Scalvusia's imaginary history, customs, and practices, and full of remarkable small asides that merit close and careful attention. Reading this book was like enjoying a really unusual meal, to me - I ate it slowly and found each bite interesting. Like very successful writers who write in their second-language, Zyzak takes the rules of English and twists them to produce something completely new.

Barnabas Pierkiel believes himself to be very beautiful: the first chapter is titled, "In which the hero self-admires". Indeed, you could spend a fair bit of time on the index alone, which has chapter titles like little gems: "In which Barnabas discovers an arboreal abomination"; "In which too much transpires to be summed up," and "In which Barnabas encounters Satan". Living in a small village called Odolechka, Barnabas tends his pigs, admires his own jawline reflected in a pan full of water, and clumsily tries to woo Roosha, a beautiful Romani (the author says 'gypsy') woman who is the mistress of a local wealthy businessman, his rival, von Grushka. Among the cast of this absurd set up are Barnabas' grim grandmother ("endowed with negligible imagination and no tolerance for daydreaming"), a priest, Kumashko, tormented by his own desires and driven insane by pondering on a fig tree, Apollonia, the athletic and miserable wife of the ineffective local police chief, Barnabas' murderous cousin, escaped from a local asylum, and Duchess Dorotka, Barnabas' prize pig. To win Roosha, the naive Barnabas performs a series of increasingly absurd quests: in the background, the slow infiltration of Nazis into their village turns the comedic tone to something darker, as Barnabas bumbles through.

Zyzak is leaning heavily on stereotypes of rural people, whom she describes as unintelligent, violent, and narrow-minded, but her portrayal is not without sympathy. The broader picture she's trying to draw is of the effect that the Soviet regime has had on the lives of these people, and of the looming threat of Nazism to come, as well as the social discrimination directed towards the Roma people. The plot is minimal, and I think the focus really should be not on what happens, so much as how it unfolds - slowly at first, and then with stunning rapidity. This was a very unusual book, and I'm still not sure if I really liked it or if I was just fascinated by how bizarre it is. I'll leave you with a little quote, to taste (it is both, violent and ribald, so be warned):

"One harvest afternoon, his mother (who, sadly, not long after that harvest, had perished, it was said, of acute incomprehension after being shown into the private back room of the tavern to identify the corpse of Barnabas' father, who had stripped nude with his drinking buddies to play what later were reported as "men's games," which, harmlessly enough began with Olek the carpenter drinking a liter of vodka from Boleswav Pierkiel's boot, but then escalated into Kazhimiezh the shepherd cutting off his big toe with Olek's hand-cranked spinning saw. At this point, the archived police report maintains, Boleswav, not to be bested, grabbed the still-spinning saw and shouting, "Watch this, then!" swung it at himself, to the detriment of the connection between head and neck. "It's funny," says the testimony of Kazhimiezh in the report, "when he was young, he once put on his sister's underclothes. But he died like a man.") had left the cottage door ajar, and Barnabas had crawled into the field." (p.9)

Do you see what I mean? It's very strange, and very dark. Zyzak is better known now as a film director, and this is her first novel. She will have a second book out this year, and I'm likely to read it too (and hopefully, I shan't 'perish of acute incomprehension'). I am very interested in seeing how she follows this up.

Anthony Berkeley originally published this as a serialised story titled Cicely Disappears in the Daily Mail, under his pseudonym, A Monmouth Platts. It remained out of print for years, until it was reissued in 2021 by the Collins Crime Club. A classic, country house mystery, that typifies the Golden Age of Crime Writing in English, it nonetheless raises some uncomfortable questions for the reader about class and wealth, antisemitism, and other forms of implicit prejudices.

In The Wintringham Mystery, we begin with our protagonist, Stephen Munro, who, having returned from military service, squanders his fortune and consequently finds himself impoverished. The opening scene consists of Munro relating to Bridger, his valet (and former orderly, in the military) that he has to let him go as he can no longer afford to pay his salary. Instead, Munro has - horror of horrors - found himself a job, as a footman, in the house of Lady Susan Carey, an elderly, wealthy woman with a country estate. In a deeply uncomfortable scene that was clearly written to be funny, Munro repeatedly mocks Bridger for failing to react with adequate shock and astonishment to this fall in his employer's status; today, we know that Bridger's lack of response may not only be due to the emotional deficits that Munro attributes to him, but also to the fact that he is employed by Munro, and bound by conventions of class that will become more apparent as we go on. If I'm to be uncharitable, I could also say that Bridger isn't particularly shocked by the concept of working for a living, more generally. In a touching display of devotion (or lack of self esteem), Bridger refuses to take Munro's recommendation letter and find himself another valet position, and instead accompanies him to Lady Susan's house, where he takes, I imagine, a substantial paycut to work as under-gardener.

At Lady Susan's, Munro has difficulty adjusting to being a footman, after having been a gentleman of leisure. The hours are long, the butler, Mr. Martin, does not take a shine to him, and Lady Susan informs him that his name is now William ("We always call the footman 'William'). Lady Susan's upcoming weekend party entails a lot of work, and Munro is clearly unaccustomed to work. When the butler, Martin, lists out his duties, Munro marvels, "It seems to me that the footman's life is not an idle one." Oh, I wanted to smack him! His life is further complicated by the arrival of two people he knew from his former life: Freddie Venables, Lady Susan's nephew and Munro's former classmate from school, and Pauline Mainwaring, his former fiance. In response to Munro's fall from status, they respond differently. Freddie continues to awkwardly treat Munro as an old friend even as Munro serves him drinks, valeting, carries his luggage, getting in his way and drawing Lady Susan's ire, and Pauline Mainwaring cuts him dead. It turns out she is engaged again, this time to a wealthy financier, who is naturally, Sir Julius Hammerstein, and in accordance with Golden Age Mystery writers' tendencies towards anti-semitism, described unkindly and with reference to all the usual stereotypes. At the garden party are a cast of characters with all sorts of motives and intentions. It doesn't take long before Freddie Venables blurts out to the others that Stephen is one of them, albeit in footman's livery. Pauline unbends and chats with him normally. The others refuse to be valeted by one of their own class, unpacking their own clothes.

The plot get started with two key developments. The first, is that Cicely, Lady Susan's beloved niece, vanishes. Evidently distraught, she initially skips the party to go sailing with friends, but then changes her mind and returns. During an attempted seance (rich people goofing around), the lights are turned off, and when they come back on, she's gone. Meanwhile, the butler, increasingly resentful at the way Munro is treated with casual friendliness, unlike all the other servants complains to Lady Susan about him, as does Sir Julius Hammerstein, who doesn't like Pauline and Stephen resuming a friendship. Lady Susan decides to solve both problems with one stone: she fires Munro as a footman and rehires him as a detective. Munro moves out of servants quarters into a bedroom in the same house and proceeds to spend the rest of the book ineptly investigating Cicely's disappearance, and trying to decide how he can have his Pauline back, when he's unable to support her in the lifestyle within which she (and he) were raised. The resolution of the mystery is sufficiently twisty: when first published, the Mail offered prizes for anyone who could solve it before the last chapter was out, and among the unsuccessful applicants was Agatha Christie. While entertaining enough, it is difficult for the modern reader to get around the deep-rooted classism, resting on an implicit, unstated assumption about the intellectual and moral superiority of the rich (in case you were wondering, yes, (spoiler for the ending) a servant committed the various crimes in the book . When Pauline tells Munro that she won't mind being a poor man's wife, and cooking and cleaning, he disputes it, telling her that her enthusiasm will eventually wear off, and she'll grow to resent him and the domestic labor. I'd imagine the very stoic Bridger might have had something to say about that, atleast internally, but instead, he is her "servant for life," because she once greeted him politely and shook his hand. To sum up, the mystery is a nice puzzle, the rest of the book is just out of sync with today's times.

 Ambedkar is one of India's most significant legal and political scholars, and an icon of social transformation. A member of the historically oppressed Dalit castes, at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, he surmounted incredible challenges to achieve education, then higher education, and then political power. He is best known for the vital role he played in drafting India's Constitution (as a qualified lawyer, and also a well-regarded economist). Many know of Gandhi; not as many know of Ambedkar outside in India, and particularly of Ambedkar's criticism of Gandhi for his failure to tackle caste discrimination coherently. To many belonging to the oppressed castes, he is known affectionately as ‘Baba Sahib' - a term of respect and endearment. Columbia University in the US has a significant Ambedkar archive, because he studied there, and was a student of John Dewey, who influenced him greatly. His work in the US, therefore, is comparatively better documented, including his correspondence with civil rights activists there, and their common understanding of the situation of oppressed castes and Black people across nations. But, he also studied in London, at the London School of Economics, later joining the Bar, and building support for his activism. This book fills a vital gap in the Ambedkar canon by examining his time in London, his work as a lawyer, and the society he lived in. It's an edited volume, consisting of chapters by various scholars. 

The last few years have seen a resurgence of Ambedkar scholarship. I made a list of ten books recently released that I wanted to read, and this is the first one. I think it's a great collection. The first three chapters study his time at LSE: the curriculum he covered, his contemporaries and friends, and his legal education at Gray's Inn. The next two cover his involvement in political efforts towards independence in the 1920s, engaging in the round table debates that brought India partial franchise at this time, under colonial rule and his particular advocacy for representation for the Dalits. Jaffrelot's chapter in particular, is really good: he examines how Ambedkar went from seeking reform in the Hindu religion to rejecting it altogether on the basis of caste. Ambedkar later converted to Buddhism, and even today it is not uncommon for Dalits to engage in conversion en masse, in response to ongoing caste violence. The second half of the book is really new material, documenting his engagement with international activists.