SUJATA MASSEY The Satapur Moonstone. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Sujata Massey’s 1920s crime series featuring lawyer Perveen Mistry continues in the absorbingly tangled mystery of The Satapur Moonstone.
India 1922: The Crown Prince of Satapur, Jiva Rao, is only 10 years old. His father and his elder brother have died, so he has inherited the throne of this small, remote Indian kingdom. Now, his widowed mother and his grandmother, the dowager maharani, are in bitter dispute over how best to continue his education.
Having solved the mystery of a murder at Malabar Hill (related in Sujata Massey’s last book, reviewed here), and demonstrated her usefulness in dealing with women who observe purdah, Perveen Mistry, the first woman lawyer in Bombay, has been commissioned by the British administrators of the district to investigate the reasons for this dispute.
Perveen resents the continuance of British rule and administration in India, and she has to hide her nationalist beliefs and her admiration for Gandhi when she is persuaded to accept this commission from the British for her father’s law firm. Her feminist leanings, too, are clear. When offering her the job, Sir David Hobson-Jones, one of the Bombay Governor’s chief advisers, mentions that the British Agent in Satapur was responsible for the well-being of the royal children:
‘What children? You only mentioned Prince Jiva Rao.’
‘He has a little sister, but I do not know her name.’
Perveen didn’t like the way he had almost forgotten about the princess, nor that he had labelled the young maharaja’s mother a widow, when she should have been called a queen. Pointedly, she asked, ‘What is the maharani’s name?’
She is also concerned when she discovers, on arrival at the bungalow of Satapur’s British Agent, Colin Sandringham, that he is a bachelor. This is where she must stay during her investigation, but:
Now her name was written in the guest book. There was a chance this evidence of her staying under a single-man’s roof could spread all around Poona and Bombay. It could ruin her name.
Perveen’s first visit to the palace does not go well. After a frightening, stormy and accident-filled journey through the jungle by palanquin, she arrives wet and dishevelled and is turned away at the palace gate. She gains admittance by sending in one of the gifts she has brought for the royal women: a moonstone pendant.
This leads to a very strange meeting with the prince’s elderly and autocratic grandmother:
‘How did you get my pendant?’ the rajmata asked again….
‘It is from France,’ Perveen added. She hoped she wouldn’t be forced to admit another person had purchased it and passed it on to her because she hadn’t thought ahead about gifts.
‘From France?’ she said raising eyebrows that were thick and surprisingly brown given her white hair. ‘My son always said it was the country he most wished to visit. But this is no French stone. It’s my very own moonstone given by my favourite aunt as one of my wedding present… I know this is my pendant, the very one that has been lost for sixteen years.’
The moonstone pendant and its origins are just one of the keys to explaining the mysteries of the Satapur palace.
Perveen has already seen the letters the royal women have written to Colin Sandringham asking for help in resolving their dispute. The prince’s mother, Maharani Mirabai, has stated in her letter that she is concerned for the physical safety of her young son. And when Perveen meets the royal women, the prince and his younger sister, their elderly tutor and their powerful uncle, it is soon clear that there is more than just a power play between the two women going on.
She discovers that there are serious questions about the death of the prince’s 13-year-old elder brother. He is said to have gone missing on a tiger hunt led by their uncle, Prince Swaroop, and was found dead the next day, seemingly mauled by a leopard or tiger. And there are questions, too, about the death of the princes’ father, which had been attributed to cholera.
Strange things begin to happen. At the palace, a beloved pet monkey is poisoned and Perveen narrowly avoids the same fate. When she returns to the British Agent’s house after her first palace visit, her bedroom is invaded while she sleeps and her camera is stolen. Then the crown prince suddenly vanishes and Perveen is accused of kidnapping him. She returns to the palace to help in the search and becomes trapped there. And when she manages to escape, things get very dangerous for her. The rough jungle which surrounds the palace, and her doubts about who is trustworthy and who is not, add to the suspense.
Sujata Massey brings the many people in this book to life, and manages deftly to indicate Perveen’s strengths and her weaknesses She also provides plenty of unusual characters whose actions rouse suspicion, including Prince Swaroop, who would inherit the throne should his nephew die; the palace fool, Aditya, who holds a strange place in the affections of the dowager maharani; the wealthy, internationally travelled, mixed-marriage couple, Yazad and Vandana Mehta – especially Vandana, who once lived at the palace, and provided Perveen with the gifts she took for the royal women; and a surly and secretive British-employed engineer, Roderick Ames, who looks Indian but speaks with a Welsh accent.
Meeting the Mehtas and Roderick Ames for the first time at the British Agent’s bungalow:
Perveen thought this was like a masquerade party. She had met a woman with a short, Western hairstyle and an Indian background; a Parsi man who was married to a Hindu; and a man with an English name who had Indian bone structure and colouring. And bringing them together was a casual young man who called everyone by their first names.
This casual man is Colin Sandringham. He too is an unusual character. He dresses ‘more like an explorer than a diplomat’, he has a false leg, and he learns yoga from his Brahmin servant, Rama. He also recognises Perveen as the young woman who, with her English friend Alice, once played a hand of bridge with him in a mixed party when they were all studying at Oxford University. Perveen does not remember him, but he becomes her friend and confidant, and by the end of the book their friendship looks very likely to be continued. Perveen, however, does not know if the violent husband she fled from years before is still alive in Calcutta. And she has to tell Colin that Parsi law does not allow her to get a divorce:
The abuse he gave me was not severe enough… A Parsi woman can only get a divorce if the damage is quite severe – loss of an eye, or a limb.
Nevertheless, seeing them together on the railway platform, when the mysteries are solved and Perveen is about to board the train back to Bombay, Maharani Mirabai notes their body-language and observes:
They were having trouble saying goodbye to each other. He was English, she was Indian, and of course they could not be together; but in some way, they had bridged that impassable river.
This second Perveen Mistry novel is as tangled, mysterious, fascinating and absorbing as Sujata Massey’s very successful A Murder at Malabar Hill. Perveen is certainly finding that being a female lawyer in India can be a dangerous profession, but I hope that this is not the last we have heard of ‘PJ Mistry Esquire’.
Sujata Massey The Satapur Moonstone Allen & Unwin 2020 PB 384pp $29.99
Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (//ann.skea.com/) are archived by the British Library.
You can buy The Satapur Moonstone from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
