This book is a strange and happy mystery-within-a-mystery, where the actual plot and story of vengeance and crime almost doesn’t matter. What stands out, on the other hand, is a riveting introduction by Gyan Prakash, professor of history at Princeton University, who found the manuscript across two continents and then pieced it together and edited it into its current form.
It was while researching a book on Mumbai in the British Library that Prakash chanced upon the Tower of Silence amidst the Oriental and India Office Collection. It was a typed manuscript of a novel written by a Bombay Parsi in 1927, and sent by its ambitious author to London. The author was one Phiroshaw Jamsetjee Chevalier, that final surname being a rendition of the actual family name of Chaiwala.
Chaiwala was obviously an educated Parsi and Indian of his time, an Anglophile and a man schooled in the Western ways, with pretensions of being a person of letters. He was also completely unknown in history books and not part of the Parsi elite that had thrown up acclaimed businessmen, intellectuals and civil servants. This made it harder for Gyan Prakash to trace him or his complete narrative — for the copy in the British Library “ended abruptly on page 169”.
The Princeton historian realised or, perhaps, just hoped that Chevalier/Chaiwala had sent a twin manuscript to a publisher or library in India as well — or that somebody from Mumbai’s small but fairly well-documented Parsi community could help him trace the man or survivors and descendants of the Chaiwala family.
The search for Chaiwala in Mumbai was long and largely fruitless. It took Prakash to old haunts of the once-thriving but now dying community. He met elderly Parsis, throwbacks to another age and anachronisms, in their manners, their demeanour, their Westernised sensibility and their very dignity, in the new India and in the teeming madness of 21st-century Mumbai. Alas, he found nobody who knew Chaiwala or even knew of him. The old libraries of Mumbai, the sort that may have kept a copy of an obscure, seemingly unpublished pulp novel from the inter-war period, became his haunts. It was all to no avail. There was no trace of Chaiwala and no copy of the half-complete London manuscript.
The miracle happened when Prakash had all but given up and on the day before he was to fly out of Mumbai. In the dusty Secretariat Library, he found a collection of poems — indifferent poems as it turned out — written by the same P.J. Chevalier. After an inspired and pertinacious search by the peon — who seemed to remember something from the recesses and crevices of the mind — Prakash was left with his prize: a bound copy of the complete manuscript of the Tower of Silence.
After this sort of an opening story, the novel itself is always going to be an anti-climax. Politely speaking it is not the world’s best mystery or crime thriller. Nevertheless it is educative and in its own way a page-turner. It is rooted in a real-life incident and a fascination that contemporary British society had for the Parsi custom of feeding the dead to vultures.
In 1923, four years before the novel was written, a British weekly had published an article on the theme and also a photograph taken from a low-flying plane that had travelled over the Tower of Silence in Poona (now Pune) and captured the image of a body in the well of the Tower.
This episode forms the opening pages of Chaiwala’s novel and an incensed Parsi vigilante travels to London to seek revenge. The criminal and his motives are not a secret and in that sense there is no revelation in the final pages of the book. Even so, Chaiwala offers a delight to a student of history or merely to the curious reader. The Parsis were the most Anglicised of India’s communities, Near Easterners as opposed to natives and seen as among the most loyal to the Raj. Yet, as the book establishes, they were also the exotic “Other” — their millennia-old traditions and religious rites becoming something of an obsession for the equivalent of London tabloids of the early 20th century.
Chevalier thrives on this sense of exotica and in fact exploits it himself in trying to tell a riveting tale. Sample this extract from chapter 19:
“Putao district is situated on the Burma-Assam border, roughly some 2,000 miles from Bombay, a journey that takes three nights and two days by train. It is a very backward district where slavery still exists, though the British government is doing everything it can to suppress it.
The Naga Hills of Putao district …(have) grown notorious for the human sacrifice. Those sacrificed are chiefly Nagas purchased from the neighbouring head-hunting villages.”
Understandably somewhat politically incorrect, the book is a breezy journey through the Parsi geography of the 1920s, including such familiar locations in south Mumbai as the Taj Mahal Hotel as well as the streets of London, a city that was always “home” to Anglophiles like Chaiwala. It’s certainly worth a read, as a tribute to the original author and the determined historian who made him famous 85 years after his magnum opus.

Ashok Malik can be
contacted at malikashok@gmail.com