A long-forgotten childhood encounter with a half-eaten corpse of a woman lying in the Hooghly led Indian-born writer and arts aficionado Glen Peters to create an Anglo-Indian female detective living in the 1960s.
Sixty-three-year-old Peters was brought up in an Anglo-Indian railway community in independent India. “I was born in Allahabad, only because my aunt was a matron in a hospital there. My family are from Lucknow, but I grew up in a railway colony in Liliauh, outside Calcutta,” says Peters, who introduced Joan D’Silva in Mrs D’Silva’s Detective Instincts & the Shaitan of Calcutta. The second book in the series, Lucknow Ransom, is out this month.
The urge to write came to Peters on a sailing holiday in the Mediterranean six years ago. On a quiet starry night, he recalled a childhood memory, long forgotten, of stumbling upon a corpse of a woman lying in the River Hooghly as a 10-year-old boy on a school picnic.
“My world as a child was confined to school (he studied at Don Bosco) and growing up in this railway colony and going on very long extended family holidays to Lucknow, which was also another railway colony where my uncle was posted,” recalls Peters, who moved to London with his parents when he was 17 in 1967.
“It was strange to suddenly recall this memory and thinking about the corpse I had seen led me to write the book,” reveals Peters, who loved chemistry and physics and describes his father Irwin as a great weaver of tales.
He created Joan D’Silva, a schoolteacher at Don Bosco School, as the main character. A widow with a 10-year-old son Errol, Joan is in the mould of Scottish writer Alexander McCall Smith’s Precious Ramstowe, the first female detective in Botswana, in a series of acclaimed books.
Joan D’Silva’s character is inspired by Peters’ wife and mother. “I have two very strong women in my life — one my wife Brenda and my mother Rena. I wanted to write a book with a very strong significant female character and the character of Joan is a bit of amalgam, a bit of a mish-mash.
His mother, who is suffering with early stages of dementia, still lives with him and his wife at their London home. “My mother was very strong minded and highly resilient as she was orphaned at the age of eight. My wife’s father is the most ethical person I have ever seen and she has acquired some of that. So I created a female character who is very strong and who is also very very sure of what is wrong and what is right.”
Peters says that his mother’s drive has shaped his life. “I was studying naval architecture at IIT Kharagpur and at the time my mother decided that our family would move to London, who was I to argue? I came to London with O levels and my mother was adamant that I go to the university, for which I needed A levels and I worked in a laboratory in Kent while studying part-time before joining university.”
The father of two sons worked for some 26 years with Pricewaterhouse Coopers and set up Menter Rhosygilwen, a Pembrokeshire-based rural arts venture, in west Wales after restoring the house with his wife.
Peters has based his books in the now lost world of Anglo-Indians in India as he says his life in India before migrating to the UK was “actually a very closeted one, all I knew was the small confines of the school I attended in Calcutta, the railway colony I stayed in and the holidays I spent in Lucknow.”
Peters again reconnected with India after his marriage. “I had lived a sheltered life in India — had no girlfriends and had almost no interaction with opposite sex — and the life in London and the freedom here was different. I was so busy with my new life that I did not think of India at all for the next 10-12 years. When I got married, my wife, an Anglo-Irish, wanted to visit India. We didn’t have much money so we flew on Afghan Airways in 1980 from London to New Delhi via some five other cities. I remember the air hostesses cooking in the plane on primus stoves,” he says and describes his relationship with two cousins, including Elton D’Souza, who recently retired as the principal of La Martiniere in Lucknow, as the ties which bind him to India.
The tight-knit world of Anglo-Indians, living in newly-independent India, has now disappeared, feels Peters. “There is much more assimilation now, but it is quite natural,” he says
Peters, who had a strong family connection with Indian Railways, is a train fanatic and is pleased that he has passed on the love of trains to one of his sons.
“I have got trains in my blood really and it’s surprising that one of my sons has picked up this train bug. In fact, his wife told me last week — they have just had a baby — ‘I expect your grandson is also going to get infect by this bug,’” he laughs.