AN UNDERHAND AFFAIR

The novel opens in the 1930s in India, and is about Dalits and Castes and the uneasy Hindu Muslim divide. The narration recounts the humiliating rape of a young Hindu Dalit girl Nirmala, by Muslim ruffians in a Muslim neigbourhood near Faridabad not far from Delhi, leading to her depression. Nirmala aborts, and is cared for by Christian nuns. Events lead her to join the 1942 ‘Quit India Movement’, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and suffers incarceration in Delhi’s Tihar Jail with 12 other women where the British head of Jails is a kind man. The blood soaked Partition of India and Pakistan follows in 1947 when one million souls perished in the largest known migration. Stories highlight the cultural challenges faced by three of those women that future generations need to be reminded of in story form. The novel threads the expansion of the Royal Indian Navy during the Second World War and the unsung role of the Navy in the 1946 Naval mutiny that alarmed the British to hasten India’s Independence. With his fluency in Malayalam and English, Naval telegraphist Unni Nair from Cochin is the ring leader, and on discharge he sails the seas in passenger liners. By happenstance he lands a job in the Indian High Commission in Aldwych, London when MI-6 recruits him while residing as a boarder with the widow of a deceased Royal Navy officer (who had served in India). She enjoys a relationship with Unni, and on her death, wills her house at Narrow Street on the Thames estuary in Lime House to him. Unni meets Nirmala, now a 50 year old head nurse in Lady Hardinge Hospital for Women in Delhi. She is asked to show Unni around; they fall in love, and marry Shakuntala-style at Surajkund, and happily experience the Kama Sutra of life even as an aging couple, and savour the beauty of India in their many travels meeting the simple rural folk and spending every New Year’s eve at Surajkund.