In 1858, the East India Company was replaced in India by the British Raj. Suddenly, India saw an influx of large numbers of Englishmen: civil servants, soldiers, and others who were needed to run the British Empire in India. Few of them were married, and the long voyage from England to India was still daunting enough to deter women who might have been willing to come eastwards. In 1868, however, the Suez Canal opened, and the passage to India became easier. From this point onwards, right up to India’s independence in 1947, droves of Englishwomen began to travel to India, most of them young women in search of husbands. The ‘fishing fleet’, as it was known, came on ships that sailed in the autumn, arriving in India in winter. The memsahibs who came on these ships had only one thing in mind: make a good marriage, and not face the ignominy of going back still unwed to Britain: a ‘returned empty’. The Missing Memsahib, Arjun Raj Gaind, Harper Fiction (an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers), 2026.It is one of these, a young woman named Mary Hartley, who is the eponymous ‘missing memsahib’ of Arjun Raj Gaind’s new novel, the third in his Maharaja Series. Mary is engaged, sight unseen, to a middle-aged teacher in India named Peter Rowan. Rowan was once the tutor to Sikandar Singh, now the Maharaja of the Punjabi principality of Rajpore and a kind of amateur detective – and it is to Sikandar that a distraught Rowan turns for help when Mary, coming to India to marry Rowan, fails to disembark at Bombay. Sikandar, ever attracted to a mystery, travels to Bombay along with his French mistress, Helene, and his faithful servitor, Charan Singh. But in Bombay, as Sikandar tries to discover the truth behind the disappearance of Mary Hartley, he finds that there is an even more tangled web beneath the surface: the women of the fishing fleet are a very varied lot indeed, and Mary may have been quite different from the impression Rowan had got of her through her letters.Sikandar’s investigation takes him through the length and breadth of Bombay, bringing him into contact with a wide range of characters. There are other women – the Miss Bennett with whom Mary Hartley shared a cabin; the Italian Contessa who took Mary under her wing; the indignant wife of a man who developed too deep a fondness for Mary – and there are men. Fellow passengers, ship-workers, people who observed Mary Hartley at close quarters and whose testimony makes Sikandar realise that the woman he is searching for seems to have been a very intriguing character. Two elements stand out in this novel. The first is Gaind’s handling of the central character, the woman for whom Sikandar scours Bombay. The way the layers of her character are peeled back makes for an interesting exploration of human (and especially feminine) emotion and nature. In fact, Gaind’s depiction of a nuanced central character is refreshingly sympathetic and real, an achievement not too many male authors can boast of. The book has several women, and all of them – Helene, the orchid-growing Parsi lady, the madame of a glorified brothel, the Italian Contessa, and others – are well-etched characters, strong-willed and interesting. The second highlight is Gaind’s depiction of Bombay. All cities are illusions, he writes at the beginning of Chapter 19, and none more so than Bombay. By daylight, it seemed staid and imperial, even majestic on occasion, but it was only when the sun set and the gaslights dimmed that the real Bombay emerged, a squalid, sordid place filled with colour, crime and carnality. This seediness and squalor, this colour, is brought through vividly all through the book: Sikandar’s investigation takes him everywhere in the city, from the ‘gaudy edifice’ of Victoria Terminus to the ‘very handsome Gothic building’ of the Royal Bombay Yacht Club; from the Great Western Hotel (‘a blocky jigsaw puzzle’) to Fort, Crawford Market, Malabar Hill, and beyond. Gaind’s ability to build history into his narrative is masterful: each space is described, its history and its place in the colourful mosaic of Bombay, just so. The author’s research is good – with a few gaffes here and there – and he manages to strike a good balance between the plot and the history: the historical detail is enough to please the history buff, but not overwhelming for someone more interested in the mystery. That said, the mystery and its investigation proceed in a somewhat flat and rather too linear way. Sikandar goes from one person to another, searching for answers to his questions, and there is little to relieve the conversations. True, the conversations are revelatory and the characters are interesting, but it becomes a little predictable and monotonous after a while. A little more action that leads to a clue might have worked better. The Missing Memsahib should be read, however, for the characters. The women, and Bombay – which is arguably the most intriguing, colourful, and realistically-depicted character in this book. Madhulika Liddle is a writer.