BOMBAY ICE
By Leslie Forbes
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 418 pages, $24
Despite enjoying a huge and fanatical popularity in its native land, the cinema of India, unlike that of Hong Kong, has gone largely unappreciated in the U.S. My one experience in viewing an Indian epic came several years ago in a crowded showing on the North Side, and the images of that evening have stayed with me. Despite a serious language barrier (there were no subtitles), I was able to follow the plot–a straightforward tale pitting a handsome hero and an equally handsome but ludicrously mustachioed villain against each other for the charms of a virtuous young woman. What lingers, however, are the dazzling colors, sweat-drenched closeups and sudden outbursts of song in the middle of elaborately choreographed fight scenes, as if the director had decided to combine the gaiety of a ’50s musical with the hard-bitten violence of film noir. The center of Indian filmmaking is Bombay, known affectionately as Bollywood, and it is also the setting for this literary thriller by Leslie Forbes.
Like many debut novelists, Forbes, a Canadian writer and the author of several food and travel books, has decided to stuff her novel with as many characters and plot twists as possible. Poisons, meteorology, Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Indian filmmaking, dysfunctional families, cultural differences and murder are the ingredients for this stew. Whether readers are pleased by it will depend on whether they prefer exotic atmosphere and fine detail over a coherent plot.
The protagonist for this tale is Rosalind “Roz” Bengal, the daughter of a Scottish mother and Indian father, who freelances for the BBC as a crime reporter. As the book opens, she has traveled to Bombay to help her pregnant half-sister, Miranda, who has written Roz a cryptic note saying she is being followed by eunuchs and lepers. As if that weren’t enough to make her nervous, Miranda is also married to a prominent but creepy Indian film director named Prosper Sharma, who may have been responsible for the murder of his first wife, Maya, a fading Indian starlet.
In Bombay, Roz begins a rather clumsy investigation into the affairs of Sharma and gradually discovers that he has serious financial problems and is involved with some vicious Indian gangsters. Sharma may also be responsible for the murders of several hijras, or eunuchs, who were transvestites, and it is with these killings that Roz begins unfolding the truth. With the help of a Shakespeare-quoting taxi driver, she bounces around Bombay learning about the city’s corruption and keeping a vigilant watch for the coming monsoon. Roz’s exotic background–her mother was an expert on poisons, her father knowledgeable about the science of storms–gives her plenty of opportunity to draw analogies between toxins and turbulence and the forces that appear to be threatening her sister.
But the author gives Roz too much room for her meditations. “Bombay Ice” frequently feels like a reference book on arcane subjects to which a plot has been imperfectly attached. This is not to say that the novel doesn’t provide some exotic and complicated pleasures; only that, like Frankenstein’s monster, it is put together of parts that sometimes fit awkwardly. But there are moments of minor perfection, like the catalog of images Roz records while traveling in the city:
“There were tea shops selling chemical soft drinks that left you thirstier after drinking them, recyclers of waste, tyre retreaders for the legions of cyclists, typing booths where men transcribed job applications to computer firms on archaic metal typewriters, astrologers to recommend auspicious wedding dates for young futures traders, fortune-tellers who would forecast a rosy future for hopeful stockbrokers, vendors of chocolate bars so high in wax that they never melted, even in the summer heat: stick a wick through them and you could use them for candles.”
While there are many such passages where “Bombay Ice” sings with imagery, there are nearly as many–and this is particularly true in the second half of the story–in which the book bogs down in verbiage. Literary thrillers, almost by definition, provide more cerebral pleasures than their down-and-dirty counterparts, but Forbes has tipped the scales too far with her meditations on weather and chaos. “You are always trying to turn one thing into another that it is not,” complains a character to Roz toward the end of the story. The same might be said of the author, who exhibits a potent but imperfect ability to transform a wide array of exotic facts into a convincing piece of fiction.
