One shared element of historical fiction and mystery literature is that the author knows more than the characters do. Or, maybe more accurately, since that’s true in all fiction, we might agree it’s especially pronounced in these genres: The author, living in the present, knows about the potato famine to ensue, the oncoming stock market crash, and who the killer is. The reader is stranded somewhere in the middle, privy to certain details and not others. It is the author’s job, then, to guide the reader from beginning to end.
Baltimore-based novelist Sujata Massey marries these genres with insight and aplomb in her Perveen Mistry mystery series, which follows a woman solicitor (British for non-trial attorney) living in colonial Bombay (today’s Mumbai) in the 1920s. Inspired in part by the real-life lawyer Cornelia Sorabji, Perveen works for her father, having returned home after fleeing her marriage, husband, and in-laws. (The specifics of how and why she must run is one of the two mysteries in the series’ first installment, 2018’s The Widows of Malabar Hill.)
In assembling the Perveen Mistry series, Massey plays her own self-imposed game of multidimensional chess, not only hybridizing mystery and historical fiction, but also balancing the need to plot individual novels alongside the progress of the entire series. Every Perveen Mistry novel intersperses consistent draws (rich details about food, clothing, and Perveen’s intimate friendship with math professor Alice Hobson–Jones) with new adventures and challenges, as is the case in her latest, The Mistress of Bhatia House.
Massey started her first mystery series in 1997, with the publication of The Salaryman’s Wife. Massey’s first amateur detective, Rei Shumura, was born when the author was living as a Navy wife deployed in Japan, though she did not finish the first book until she returned stateside. With this second series, Massey reflected on what she has learned and was determined “not to write herself into a corner” in Perveen’s work and love life. “Readers want that happy ending … they want all of that! But you can’t do that in every book and still have that feeling of a suspenseful series,” she tells City Paper.
She works primarily from outlines and plot summaries—“they’re helpful to publishers, and they give me a little bit of a map when I start writing,” she says—but changes crop up along the way. Trying to defer disclosures for maximum impact and suspense, she adds how much she enjoys how a tiny discovery can send her work in a surprising direction. “The subconscious is great,” she says, happily. “It’s like a little gift, when I get a surprise idea from my subconscious.”
Her ability to balance the planned and the spontaneous has made me, the author of this article, self-conscious: In what order do I want to assemble this profile? Where do I start? With Massey’s beginnings as a reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun (now The Baltimore Sun), where she worked alongside colleagues and fellow novelists Laura Lippman and Dan Fesperman? Or do I begin with her local community of peers, readers, and friends, including Marsha Talley, Louis Bayard, Shawn Reilly Simmons, Cheryl Head, A.X. Ahmad, and E.A. Aymar (who organizes D.C. Noir at the Bar readings across the District)? Or should I start with Massey’s discovery of work from Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, Ruth Rendell, and others—largely in the English language section of Tokyo’s bookstores—that inspired her to write her own stories of women who aren’t cops but can sleuth with the best of them?
I keep coming back to this: Massey, like Perveen Mistry, does her homework. I meditate on this as I read The Mistress of Bhatia House—how, in the wake of an upsetting encounter, Perveen coolly sits down to transcribe what happened, precisely, in detail, as only she remembers it. Massey has been taking notes since she was a child reading Frances Hodgson Burnett (A Little Princess) and other British children’s classics.
“I read a lot of books that were set in the Victorian period and the first half of the 20th century … [But] I didn’t see a reflection of India as I understood it, as an Indian American, in these books,” she says, particularly referring to how such novels perpetuate the stereotype of the subservient Indian servants. In terms of style, Massey’s books bear the imprint of these early reading experiences.
“I try to make observations how someone of that era would make them,” she says. “I use a bit of stuffy language sometimes.” But in their characterization and politics, her books make a grand departure.
To research the city of Bombay during the ’20s, Massey spoke at length with her parents and step-parents (“there are fewer barriers about blending families in India than here,”), who came from Bengali and Gujarati backgrounds.
“My cousin was able to tell me about the lifestyle of a traditional Gujarati merchant household and the expectations put on women in the family,” she says. “And my stepmother’s mother helped fund a maternity hospital for the poor. She’d go out to the hospital every single day and even sent me once, with my young child, to a rough outpatient clinic, where we talked to a very forthright woman doctor.” The experience inspired a significant storyline in The Mistress of Bhatia House, in which Perveen hesitates to aid in the establishment of such a hospital by and for women
In many ways, Perveen Mistry is progressive and forward-thinking, but she is also a product of her time. Massey notes Perveen’s deferential behavior toward her father, who is both the patriarch in the family home and her boss at work. “She doesn’t throw big scenes where she refuses to do things,” Massey explains. “She’ll bend her behavior, but it has to be secretive, not an outright dismissal.”
As the books progress, Perveen is faced with what she has lost with the end of her marriage—love, sex, and freedom—and those rites of passage she may have to miss as a single career woman. Perveen’s father discourages her from bonding with her new niece, believing that a woman cannot both work and have a family; Massey cites the case of Mithan Lam, a real-life Indian solicitor in this period who scaled back her ambition once she married and became a mother.
As limited as women’s choices were in this moment, their understanding was necessarily curtailed by what experts at the time knew. “Psychiatric care was very rudimentary, especially in India,” Massey says. “People didn’t want to send women to the hospital to be treated by a male doctor, so they wouldn’t know anything about postpartum disorder, and wouldn’t have had medication or therapists.”
Many of the developments in The Mistress of Bhatia House feel very close and all too timely. With each of her books, Massey orients the action around a theme or issue, and this one focuses on health care freedom and access. In her work, Perveen tries to protect a woman from the rare charge of self-induced abortion, a term that was used interchangeably with “miscarriage”; in her private life, Perveen witnesses firsthand the pain and isolation of a woman suffering from untreated postpartum depression. “I see having a healthy pregnancy, without postpartum depression, as being linked to having the choice when a baby is born,” Massey says. “I think of it all as linked, and the book points this out.”
What comes next for the independence movement in India, for women’s rights, and marital law in the 1920s and forward, can be retrieved with a Google search or a trip to the library. But what’s in store for Perveen Mistry and those closest to her? Only Sujata Massey can say for sure.
Sujata Massey joins Louis Bayard to discuss The Mistress of Bhatia House at 7 p.m. on July 11 at Politics and Prose in Cleveland Park. politics-prose.com. Free.
