The Perfect Murder

A semi-historical novel uses Holmesian forensics to solve the mystery of the Bombay plague of 1896

Ratfall. In the cultural memory of epidemic disease can there be a word marked with a greater sense of foreboding?

‘Men woke up at all hours uneasily aware of a stirring that had nothing to do with desire. It was usually a dying rat burrowing frantically into bedclothes. Toddlers chased after rodents that staggered drunkenly about. Children devised cruel and interesting games of torment.’ After an interlude of about ten days, bubonic plague would break out in the neighbourhood. On 18 September 1896, Dr Accacio Gabriel Viegas diagnosed the index case of bubonic plague in Vor Gaddi, Pydhonie, Bombay. By January 1900, more than 2.9 million had died of the plague in Bombay Province. Officially, the total number of cases in this period was about 3.8 million.

It’s hard to imagine that Kalpish Ratna’s semi-historical novel on Bombay’s forgotten epidemic can be surpassed in texture and acuity. Room 000 contains indelible narratives of the Bombay plague that have been recreated with painstaking detail, to deliver a sort of social geography of the epidemic.

Kalpish Ratna’s fealty here is not in the first instance an epidemiological one. It is owed more to the literary form of the novel of deduction, transplanted onto the mise en scène of late Victorian Bombay, empurpled by the most gloriously interiorised passages on 19th century colonial medicine and policing. The only plague measures known to the state at the time were isolation, segregation and quarantine, and, ‘The more they cleaned and disinfected and detained and segregated, the more virulent and vagile the plague grew.’ In Bombay, the commonplace became a Mantoesque tableau: plague-riddled corpses piled up in the streets; parents would run and hide to save their offspring, arm themselves with sticks and kitchen knives against search parties that threatened to take them away. The cultural response to the epidemic was to flee the city, and thus the disease spread centrifugally. Rumours sounded the flight of the halalkhors and the biggharies, the sanitary workforce of the city, raising the spectre of drains choking on dead vermin and effluents of the sick.

Into this matrix are recruited an assortment of miscellaneous characters, fully developed, to administer the pleasures of hard-boiled mystery fiction: Dr Nusserwanji Surveyor, pioneering Indian bacteriologist, who isolates the plague bacillus from Viegas’ index patient in Room 000, the one room laboratory in the corridor outside the Framji Dinshaw Petit Laboratory of Grant Medical College; EH Hankin, the in-house gora bacteriologist and renaissance man of sorts; Dr Ismail Jan Mohammad, Private Medical Practioner, with a large following among the Khoja community of Bombay; Professor OV Muller, amateur ratcatcher and Professor of Philosophy, Elphinstone College, Bombay; Alexandre-Emile-Jean Yersin, esteemed Swiss bacteriologist-physician, who turns up in Bombay to try out his freshly minted serum on the plague-afflicted (the bacillus that causes bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis, is named after him); Waldemar Haffkine, a Jewish, Odessa-born bacteriologist known for the success of his anti-cholera vaccine, invited by the Imperial government to develop the plague prophylactic fluid); Khan Bahadur Dr Sir Nusserwanji Choksy, physician in charge of Arthur Road Hospital (he has the largest clinical experience of the disease, having documented more than 4,000 cases in his care, and can diagnose plague by the dicrotic crest of the patient’s pulse); Paul-Louis Simond, from the Pasteur Institute, sent to India to replace Yersin and continue his work on the antiserum, and many others. Imperishable sleuth Tatya Lakshman, inspector with the Bombay Police, is chief among the non-medical stars, as well as his sidekick Asghar Ali.

The plot at the pith, if I could vulgarise it, is the lifecycle of the plague bacillus. Nobody (in 1896) has the feeblest idea about how bubonic plague is transmitted. No disease of higher malevolence has ever been witnessed. It is for them the equivalent of the insoluble crime, the perfect murder, the locked-room puzzle. Over and over again. And it’s unstoppable. Did it come from Hong Kong, where the epidemic had been festering since 1894, or was it brought by the itinerant sadhus of Garhwal, where plague is endemic? The reader is invited to solve the mystery empirically, with the very basics of Holmesian forensics.

Kalpish Ratna is the collective takhallus of Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed, surgeons both, historians of epidemics, and historians of Bombay. Any proportionate view of the Bombay plague should refer not just to the annals of Subaltern Studies and portentous tracts in peer-reviewed journals but also to this quivering mass of narratives in Room 000. Splendid.

booksKalpish RatnaliteratureRoom 000: Narratives of the Bombay Plague