An Interview With Sujata Massey

by Grace Topping

As a long-time fan of Sujata Massey’s Rei Shimura mystery series, I was thrilled to learn that she was coming out with a new series—this one set in India. I had the good fortune to read an advance copy of the first book in the series, The Widows of Malabar Hill, and I knew immediately that it was special. That sense was confirmed when it went on to win the Mary Higgins Clark Award, the Agatha Award for Best Historical Novel, Left Coast Crime’s Bruce Alexander Memorial Award for Best Historical Mystery, and the Macavity’s Sue Feder Memorial Award for Best Historical Mystery. It was also selected for Publisher’s Weekly Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2018 and was an Amazon Best Book of 2018. The second book in the series, The Satapur Moonstone, went on to win additional honors. It was a privilege to be able to talk to Sujata about her main character Perveen Mistry and the third book in her series, The Bombay Prince.

 

Note: Sujata has offered a signed copy of The Bombay Prince to be awarded to one of the readers leaving a comment below within the next seventy-two hours. 

 

Welcome, Sujata, to Writers Who Kill.

 

Your Rei Shimura series set in Japan was quite successful. What prompted you to select India for your new series?

 

India had become more important in my life. My children were in an Indian culture school on the weekends, and as a parent, I found myself also dancing and studying Hindi alongside them. I had the fortunate circumstance of one Indian parent and two Indian stepparents living near me during this period. As we shared stories, I became drawn to the idea of writing about India—especially that of the recent past. It was concerning to me that beautiful old buildings were being supplanted by shopping malls, and I wanted to keep alive the historic neighborhoods I’d wandered during my visits to India. 

 

Why did you select law as a career path for Perveen Mistry?

 

While researching the history of Indian women, I learned that the first woman lawyer in the British Empire, Cornelia Sorabji, started working as a solicitor in the 1890s. Cornelia wrote wonderful memoirs that detail the close calls she had while trying to represent the interests of women clients during this time period. Making Perveen a solicitor gives her a believable chance to be near crime, intrigue, and death at a time that most women in India were not moving freely throughout society.

 

With Perveen Mistry being an attorney, do you consider the books in the series to be legal thrillers?

 

I like to describe them as historical legal mysteries. I’m delighted that the first two books in the series were nominated for the Harper Lee Legal Fiction Award given by the University of Alabama Law School. There is a lot of legal action including courtroom scenes in The Widows of Malabar Hill and The Bombay Prince. The Satapur Moonstone is set in the countryside, and there is the threat of legal trouble, but my storytelling in this book employs law in a different way from a typical legal mystery. 

 

You’ve said that Cornelia Sorabji was the first woman to study law at the University of Oxford and the first female attorney in India. Did your studies of her inspire Perveen Mistry or did you base your story on her experiences?

 

I did not base directly on Cornelia because of some significant differences: she was never married, a Christian, and wanted the British to stay in power. What did inspire me was that, undergoing tremendous personal risk and hardship, Cornelia represented hundreds of women clients, both in private practice and as a government agent. 

 

Also, India’s first woman barrister, Mithan Tata Lam, who was a Bombay Parsi woman educated in law at Oxford, returned from her studies to work in Bombay in the 1920s. Mithan did a tremendous amount of activist work for women’s rights in India, and later became a professor of law and Bombay’s first woman sheriff. She herself is another inspiration for Perveen Mistry.

 

Perveen was born into a family of Parsis. Can you explain what that is? What does that mean for her place in Indian society?

 

“Parsi” is a word meaning “Persian” and Parsis are the Zoroastrian immigrants who left Persia to live in India from 700 AD through about 1900. Zoroastrianism is a monotheistic religion that predates Judaism and Christianity. The values of “good thoughts, good words, good deeds” are the motto for Zoroastrians to live by. As a Parsi, Perveen can only marry someone within her own faith—and it’s also very hard for her to leave a marriage. Religious laws around marriage and divorce differed for Parsis, Muslims, and Hindus. Only after independence from the British did things begin to become more standardized. 

 

You show a different side of India than often portrayed in books or movies (the poverty, etc.). Please tell us about Perveen’s place in a society that is ruled by a class system? 

 

I feel that all countries—including the US—are struggling to overcome unwritten class discrimination. During their time colonizing India, the British felt more favorable toward Parsi people and gave preferential treatment to them for work contracts and political positions. Some affluent Parsis wore Western rather than Indian clothing, or a combination of both styles, as Perveen does with her imported French lace blouses worn underneath Indian-woven saris. Perveen is poised in both British and Indian settings, so that makes her an especially good sleuth. And a significant number of Parsis were leaders in the Indian Independence movement, seeing themselves as Indians first and foremost.

 

You write about the struggles of women in 1920’s India and Perveen’s desire for freedom—for women and for herself. Can you tell us about Perveen’s personal drive for freedom?

 

Perveen comes from an enlightened and loving family who wanted her to become the city’s first woman solicitor. Yet it’s very important to them that she not do anything scandalous that would embarrass her father and ruin the reputation of his small law practice. Therefore, Perveen must be scrupulous in her behavior, the friends she chooses, and how she expresses herself. She walks a particularly fine line around politics. In her heart, she’s for Indian independence; but many of her father’s friends are against it, and the legal hierarchy is headed by the British. Because Perveen is trapped by restrictive laws around divorce, she wants very much to help other women make use of what rights they have.

 

As a modern-day author writing about Perveen’s life and career in the early part of the twentieth century, was it difficult to stay true to the time period? What about including the politics of the time?

 

I feel comfortable writing in this time period. I read books written during the 1920s and earlier, and I also read a lot of historians’ papers and books. Politics of the time are so exciting. Mahatma Gandhi was a practicing lawyer and activist living in Bombay during the time of my novel. Muhammed Ali Jinnah, the first governor-general of Pakistan, was a popular barrister in Bombay in the 1920s. These two influence some events in the Perveen books, though I am careful not to put my own made-up words into their mouths. That could be very confusing and offensive. Historical authors have to be extremely careful when they blend fact with fiction. For instance, Muhammed Ali Jinnah and his wife Ruttie really did go to the Orient Club luncheon. And Mr. Jinnah really was a criminal defense barrister. But was he involved with the fictitious defendant in The Bombay Prince? No.

 

Food plays a big part in family life in India. You’ve said that you can learn a lot about people through the food choices they make. How so?

 

Food choices can show a family’s wealth, poverty, religious observance, and cosmopolitan nature. In The Bombay Prince, the Cuttingmaster family eats very simple food while in mourning and won’t go to restaurants. A very special meat and lentil curry called dhansak is eaten by Parsis emerging from the first mourning period. The British living in India liked some Indian dishes, and also brought their own favorite dishes, like custards and fancy sandwiches, into standard Indian cuisine. The Mistrys specifically have a Goan Christian cook in their household because Goan Indians were often Catholic and could cook any kind of meat (Parsis were meat-eaters) and were reputed to be talented with pastry and puddings. 

 

Was it a challenge doing the research you needed to make your books so authentic, especially during COVID? Were you able to draw on your family’s experiences? 

 

I was fortunate to have visited India in January 2020, when I could enjoy Mumbai in the usual way. I don’t think I drew on family experiences for the Perveen books; however, I did draw on the recollections of historians that I’d either read or heard in conversation. 

 

One of the biggest challenges to writing a book set in another culture is to give it a sense of place. Based on the reception of your books, you’ve done that successfully. What contributed the most to that?

 

Thank you so much for this kind compliment. I think that giving a sense of place is helped by visiting that place many times. The magic that happens when I’m over there is connection—connection to the history of the streets I’m walking, and to the area’s historians and long-time residents. That’s how I grab the intimate, insider details for the Perveen novels. As the pandemic recedes—I hope!—I aim to spend longer time periods in India. 

 

Books set in India have become popular. What do you think accounts for that?

 

Well, it might look like a boom because one sees names like Pandian, Mukherjee, March, Majumdar and Anappara winning awards and receiving great reviews in the mystery community. I think that once a reader’s feet get wet with one good book set in an unfamiliar country, they may want to try more—and this is something publishers pick up on. 

 

When you wrote the first books in the series, The Widows of Malabar Hill, did you envision it becoming a series?

 

Yes, I hoped it would be a new series. I wrote that book in a slightly different style than I usually do, with flashbacks to Perveen’s earlier years. The point was to thoroughly explain her origins and how she came to be such a hardworking lawyer with a difficult past. I also laid out Perveen’s marital status situation in a way that she could work unencumbered by a man in future books. I introduced characters in that first book who would work well in subsequent books. I’m referring to her father, Jamshedji Mistry, her good friend Alice Hobson-Jones, and Mustafa, the butler at Mistry House.

 

What have you enjoyed the most from the terrific reception of your series by readers and reviewers?

 

I’ve really enjoyed what happened when we all learned to use Zoom and other live-streaming platforms for book events. What a joy it’s been to meet virtually with readers in other parts of the world during the pandemic—not just at bookstores but small-town book-clubs and libraries in the United States and India and Australia. I learn so much from these meetings where readers have a voice.

 

What’s next for Perveen Mistry?

 

I’m working on a fourth book in the series that isn’t yet titled. It’s set in Bombay and deals with women’s reproductive health. In the 1920s, most babies born in Bombay did not live past one year of age, and the leading cause of death for women was childbirth. In this book, Perveen gets close to the city’s first female obstetrician and some other Indian women trying to start up a hospital; and she winds up representing an ayah (nanny) accused of attempting abortion. Perveen’s own family becomes entwined in the controversies and challenges. 

 

Thank you, Sujata.

 

 

For additional information about Sujata Massey and her books, visit www.sujatamassey.com

 

An Interview With Sujata Massey

by Grace Topping

On Sunday, November 18, 2018, The Washington Post released its list of Best Books for 2018. Among them was Sujata Massey's audiobook of The Widows of Malabar Hill, narrated by Soneela Nankani of Recorded Books. I had the pleasure of interviewing Sujata when her book was first released. Since then, The Widows of Malabar Hill has garnered all kinds of accolades. It's a pleasure to present the interview again for those who may have missed it last year. 


I first discovered Sujata Massey through her award-winning Rei Shimura mystery series set in Japan. Everyone around me seemed to be reading her books, starting with The Salaryman’s Wife, which won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for the Barry and Macavity Awards for Best First Mystery and the Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original. She went on to win or be nominated for a number of other awards, including the Edgar. When I learned that she was writing a suspenseful historical fiction series set in 1920s India, I was delighted and contacted her to learn more about it.

The Widows of Malabar Hill Jacket Copy

Perveen Mistry, the daughter of a respected Zoroastrian family, has just joined her father’s law firm, becoming one of the first female lawyers in India. Armed with a legal education from Oxford, Perveen also has a tragic personal history that makes women’s legal rights especially important to her.

Mistry Law has been appointed to execute the will of Mr. Omar Farid, a wealthy Muslim mill owner who has left three widows behind. But as Perveen examines the paperwork, she notices something strange: all three of the wives have signed over their full inheritance to a charity. What will they live on? Perveen is suspicious, especially since one of the widows has signed her form with an X—meaning she probably couldn’t even read the document. The Farid widows live in full purdah—in strict seclusion, never leaving the women’s quarters or speaking to any men. Are they being taken advantage of by an unscrupulous guardian? Perveen tries to investigate, and realizes her instincts were correct when tensions escalate to murder. Now it is her responsibility to figure out what really happened on Malabar Hill, and to ensure that no innocent women or children are in further danger.

Amazon.com

Welcome, Sujata, to Writers Who Kill.

The Widows of Malabar Hill is the story of the fictional first woman lawyer in Bombay, Perveen Mistry. What inspired you to write about a woman lawyer, and why in the 1920s?

Sujata Massey

 Actually, the setting was the original driving factor. I wanted to write a mystery set in 1920s India, a period that I fell in love with while writing my 2013 novel, The Sleeping Dictionary. While going through history and memoirs, I learned that in the Edwardian period, a significant number of young Indian women studied at colleges in India and Britain. These students wanted to take on professional jobs in their home cities. I discovered that India’s first two female lawyers worked in the 1890s through the 1920s; both shared a similar religious background, progressive parents, and an Oxford education—as well as hailing from Maharashtra, the western coastal state that was called Bombay Presidency during British rule. I believe a woman lawyer would have more freedom than other females to ask questions of people and become involved in dangerous situations such as theft, kidnapping and murder. Thus, a heroine was born!

Although Perveen Mistry is a lawyer, she is prohibited from appearing in court. With that limitation, how can she practice law? At what point could women lawyers appear in court? 

Perveen Mistry has completed all requirements for a Bachelor of Civil Law degree at Oxford University. In the British system, legal advocates either are barristers (arguing cases in court before a judge) or solicitors (the ones who draft contracts and formulate the arguments for barristers to use in court). Prior to 1922, Oxford allowed women to study there but didn’t grant women academic degrees. The London Bar and Bombay Bar wouldn’t admit women as barristers until Oxford and Cambridge’s prohibition against female degrees was ended.  India had one woman lawyer, Cornelia Sorabji, who worked from the 1890s through the 1920s. She was a solicitor who specialized in offering service to female clients. Cornelia’s clients—typically wealthy or royal Hindu or Muslim ladies living in seclusion--were sometimes exploited by their families or household agents. Her interventions saved women their fortunes—and sometimes, their lives. 

Perveen represents the interests of three widows of a Muslim. Why does she go to such great lengths to protect their interests, especially since they are all willing to sign away rights to their inheritances?

Interestingly, Muslim law protected women in a way that was different from Hindus, Sikhs and Christians. In Islamic law, a man pays dowry to a woman in two parts: the first half given at the marriage, and the second at the woman’s time of being widowed or (unlikely) divorced. Perveen knows a little about Muslim law so she is intrigued when a letter arrives at the law firm, ostensibly signed by three widows of a wealthy businessman named Omar Farid (Muslim men could marry up to three wives). The letter states the Farid widows wished to give up all their dowry. Perveen is suspicious whether all three women could understand the English document. She decides to meet them, to make sure that they really understand what they’re about to give up. And from that point, the adventure begins.

Perveen’s job as a lawyer in India sounded quite complex with different laws for different groups of people. For example, she has to address the issue of Muslim law as it pertains to the rights of inheritance. Also, a Muslim woman could not be ordered to appear in a court of law. Are there still different laws in India? 

When the British began formal rule of India in the mid 1800s, they sat down with leaders of the Hindu, Muslim and Parsi community to draft family law that was consistent with each group’s specific desires. Sikhs, Christians, Jews and others were governed by British common law. Customized laws made the various communities more likely to comply with British rule. The separate religious legal systems have endured to the present days, although many of the laws surrounding divorce have been liberalized. 

The widows of Malabar Hill live in a section of a house called a zenana and lead a purdah life. You wrote that after taking a short tour of a zenana, you felt that the life of an Indian maharani or a Muslim begum living in a zenana seemed like imprisonment. Why?

I toured the Udaipur City Palace in Rajasthan, the seat of the Mewar royal family, where one maharani lived in purdah through the 1970s. Although the rooms were gorgeously decorated and furnished, all the windows were shielded by jali screens. One literally could only see fragments of the outdoor view--and that gave me a very closed-in feeling. Many royal women grew up confined in these environments and socialized exclusively with other women and children. They would only see a father or husband if he came to the zenana quarters. If such ladies traveled, they went in a purdah carriage or car with curtains that kept outsiders from seeing them. It’s true that they were beautifully dressed and did very little work—but that doesn’t seem like a prize given how much else in life they missed.

Life was hard for women during this period. Has much changed for women in India?

Things have changed tremendously! Seclusion is no longer practiced, except in some rural areas. Two-income marriages are the norm, and there are many women with good jobs in STEM fields. There are more love marriages, more divorces, and some women who choose to remain single are adopting children. Women have freedom of dress, drive personal cars and taxis, and pilot planes. Life for an Indian woman is a lot like that of her American sisters.

The Widows of Malabar Hill is not the first book you wrote featuring Perveen. Please tell us about other books you’ve written about her.

I have a novella, Outnumbered at Oxford, which is a prequel novella: a mystery taking place during Perveen’s college years in England. Outnumbered was published within an anthology of my short India fiction called India Gray Historical Fiction.

Perveen’s best friend, Alice, an English woman newly arrived in Bombay, appears on the surface to have more freedoms than Perveen, but also faces many restrictions. What will life in India be like for her?

Alice Hobson-Jones is Perveen’s best friend from Oxford. Alice is typical of the British women whose fathers had prestigious careers in the British Indian government. M.M. Kaye, who wrote The Far Pavilions and other novels set in British colonial India, wrote a series of memoirs about her life as the daughter of a top Indian Civil Service officer in the early 20^th century. Mary Margaret Kaye always had a grand house to live in but was expected to represent her family in a very proper manner. There was a scarcity of European women in India, so she was widely courted by young Englishmen working for the government. After marrying, Englishwomen could do charity work in India—but little else. It wasn’t seemly for an Englishwoman to work for an Indian, because Indians were supposed to be underneath the British. However, British females sometimes worked for Indian nobility as governesses, or in the employ of religious groups as missionaries and doctors or nurses. Alice is of their ilk—seeing Indians as fellow human beings with a lot to teach her, rather than as servants.

Will we see more of Alice in future books?

She will reappear in Book 3, I hope!

This book was so rich in detail. Did you travel to India to do research?

It’s always a challenge to decide how much of what I’ve learned can be included without distracting from the story line. I started my research for the book using the memoirs of India’s first woman lawyer, Cornelia Sorabji. After I had half of the book written, I traveled to Mumbai (as Bombay is now called) to fill in details on setting and also meet with Parsi and Muslim women to learn more about their traditions. I plan to visit India frequently as I continue working on this series. It’s a real pleasure for me, because I have friends and family in several cities.

I enjoyed your Rei Shimura series immensely—along with everyone I worked with. With parents from India and Germany, what inspired you to write a series about a Japanese-American living in Japan? Have you lived in Japan?

I wrote the Rei Shimura books because I had the great luck to live in Japan for the two years that my husband worked as a medical officer for the U.S. Navy. We were stationed in Yokosuka, about an hour south of Tokyo. I wanted to write a mystery set in Japan that explored the cultural arts I adored studying: flower arranging, food and antiques. I also worked as an English teacher, which is a pretty common job for foreign women in Japan, and that influenced Rei’s character.

There are more references to India and Germany in my Indian novels than the Rei Shimura series. This is because a long cultural interchange between Germany and India runs all the way from a German passion for movies made in India in the early 1900s, to Indian freedom fighters going to Germany for help during World War II.

You’ve won the Agatha and Macavity awards and been a finalist for the Edgar, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark prizes. Does having earned such acclaim put more pressure on you with each book you write?

Awards are such a surprising and delightful gift. I don’t see them as negatives for the writing process in any way. Awards ebb and flow—they shouldn’t define success for a writer. In the end, what counts is having loyal readers who stick and the ability to bring new readers to your work. 

What’s next for Perveen Mistry? I hope we’ll be seeing more of her.

I don’t yet have a title for Book 2, but I’ll tell you a little about it. Only forty percent of the Indian subcontinent was under British rule—the other sixty percent was a patchwork of hundreds of princely kingdoms that agreed to pay the British with crops in order to retain their right to self-rule.

In this next mystery, the British government asks Perveen to travel to a princely kingdom near Bombay to investigate the welfare of the Yuvraj, an eleven-year-old boy who’s supposed to inherit the throne at eighteen. The Yuvraj’s father, the last maharaja, is dead, a twist allowing the British government to consider the Yuvraj their ward. While interviewing the Yuvraj’s family and servants at the palace, Perveen gets the sense his life might be in danger. At the same time, she has to deal with an attraction that is completely out of bounds. And because this is a story set in the jungle, monkeys, dogs and tigers also have character roles!

Thank you, Sujata.

To learn more about Sujata Massey and her books, visit http://sujatamassey.com.