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Read a sneak peek from 6 Days in Bombay by Alka Joshi

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Henna Artist, this sweeping novel of identity and self-discovery takes readers from 1937 Bombay to Istanbul, Prague, Florence, Paris and London to uncover the mystery behind a famous painter’s death. When renowned painter Mira Novak arrives at Wadia hospital in Bombay after a miscarriage, she’s expected to make a quick recovery, and her nurse, Sona, is excited to learn more about the vivacious artist who shares her half-Indian identity. Sona, yearning for a larger life, finds herself carried away by Mira’s stories of her travels and exploits and is shocked by accounts of the many lovers the painter has left scattered throughout Europe. When Mira dies quite suddenly and mysteriously, Sona falls under suspicion, and her quiet life is upended. The key to proving Sona’s innocence may lie in a cryptic note and four paintings Mira left in her care, sending the young woman on a mission to visit the painter’s former friends and lovers across a tumultuous Europe teetering toward war. On the precipice of discovering her own identity, Sona learns that the painter’s charming facade hid a far more complicated, troubled soul. In her first stand-alone novel since her bestselling debut, The Henna Artist, Alka Joshi uses the life of painter Amrita Sher-Gil, the ‘Frida Kahlo of India’, as inspiration for the story’s beginning to explore how far we’ll travel to determine where we truly belong. Mira winced as a spasm of pain shot through her. I put my palm on her forehead. Her skin was burning, like a jalebi fresh from a pot of boiling oil. I grabbed a cotton towel from a stack by her bedside, wet it in her water glass and pressed it to her forehead. Her brow relaxed. She let out a sigh. “What about the baby?” she asked, her speech slurred. I opened my mouth to tell her, then thought better of it. “Let me get the doctor for you, ma’am.” Her eyes shot open, as if she realized what I was going to say. “Oh, no!” Her eyes filled. “We must tell Paolo.” I blinked. According to her chart, her husband’s name was Filip. Was it the morphine speaking? “Paolo?” I asked cautiously. “My love. Taught me how to paint portraits. Until I met him, I could only paint landscapes. After that, it was as if people were the only things I could paint.” She spoke breathlessly, as if she were trying to catch the words before they floated away. “And now, Whit-ney has him copying the masters, which is a pity. What a waste of his talent! People like hanging the fakes on their walls, hoping their guests won’t know the difference. Most people wouldn’t.” She gripped my hand. “I’ll have Filip bring my paintings.” Her mouth twisted. “Of course, I only have the four left.” Her English was inflected with something other than the speech of the Burra Sahib or the lilting way we Anglo- Indians spoke. It was softer, the hard sounds squashed down. She groaned, loudly this time, squeezing my hand so hard it hurt. The morphine was wearing off. I glanced at the wall clock. Two more hours before her next dose. I eased my hand out of hers, removed the compress from her forehead, now warmed from her skin, and immersed it in the water glass. When I replaced it on her brow, she seemed to relax a little. “You have a lovely smile.” A blush crept up my neck. Once, one of my teachers in third form had said the same thing to me within my mother’s hearing. My mother had spat on the ground to ward off evil spirits who didn’t approve of vanity. Ever since, I’d been wary of compliments, worried they might cause my mother to fall on her knees and pray to Krishna for my safety. “Talk to me. Please,” the painter pleaded as she clasped my hand once more, wanting me to keep her pain company. I looked at our joined hands, a study in opposites: hers blue-veined and pale, nails bitten to the quick, remnants of paint embedded in the fingerprint swirls, and mine the color of sand, scrubbed clean, slightly chapped at the fingertips. The warmth of her skin, slightly moist from the fever, was strangely comforting, the way my mother’s touch was. Mira Novak seemed to crave intimacy as intensely as most patients avoided it; they wanted only to reclaim their body—the one we poked and prodded—as soon as possible, shrugging off the memory of their convalescence. They had brought Miss Novak to Wadia Hospital around eleven o’clock at night. She was feverish and agitated, cradling her stomach with her arms. The back of her skirt was soaked with blood. Her husband, a pale man with broad shoulders, said she’d been com-plaining of pain for a few days. The husband hadn’t stayed. He left shortly after bringing her in. When Dr. Holbrook, the house surgeon, finished tending to her—she’d needed a few stitches and quite a bit of morphine—Matron assigned me to nurse her. This was not unusual. Patients who were the least bit foreign were assigned either to me or to Rebecca, the other Anglo-Indian nurse on the night shift, because we spoke fluent English. In the daytime, Matron would assign another Eurasian nurse or take care of the patient herself. “She may be here awhile,” Matron whispered, with a meaningful glance at me. We’re a small hospital, and the patient had been given a private room. It did not escape my notice that she could have been taken to a larger hospital popular with the British but, apparently, there had been need for discretion. Even so, rumors ricocheted around the halls. This was no simple miscarriage. She had tried to do it herself. Her husband had done it. She had tried to take her own life. I paid no attention. It was enough to know that a woman needed our help; our job was to heal her. Even before I read her chart, I knew who she was. Mira Novak. The painter. Famous, even here in Bombay. I’d seen her photo and read about her in the Bombay Chronicle. The article said she had studied painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenza in Italy when she was just fifteen, the youngest student ever admitted. Her Hindu mother, a woman of high caste, had accompanied her daughter from their home in Prague to Florence, and ultimately to Paris, to nurture Mira’s talent. Until the age of twenty, Mira had never once stepped foot in India. But when I looked at the images of her paintings in the article, I didn’t see Paris or Florence or any of the other faraway places I dreamed about visiting one day. I saw village women in saris, their skin much darker than mine or Mira’s. In her paintings, the women sat quietly, somberly, as they painted henna on each other’s hands or tended sheep in the hills or pasted cow dung on the walls of their homes. Why was a young woman of privilege obsessed with the ordinary, the poor? I wondered. She was six years older than I was—twenty-nine by the date on her chart. To my mind, she was lovely. Smooth, unblemished skin. A brow line that angled toward hollowed cheekbones. Even though her eyes were closed, I could tell they were large, perhaps a little protuberant, but in a way that would be attractive in her face, dominating it, demanding the viewer’s gaze. Her nose, which ended in a slightly upturned tip, gave her an imperious look. That must have come from her royal bloodline. She wasn’t beautiful. My mother would have said she was striking, that her face had character. Now she blinked, her eyes round, regarding me curiously, as if we hadn’t spoken a few minutes earlier. Her pupils were constricted, and she seemed disoriented. “Mrs. Novak?” I waited for a flicker of recognition. “You are at Wadia Hospital, ma’am. In Bombay. You were brought in several hours ago.” I spoke quietly, in English accented with Hindi. She frowned. She looked down at her torso, then back up at me. “Not Mrs.,” she said, “Miss Novak.” “My apologies, ma’am.” I didn’t quite understand but I didn’t let it show. How could a woman be married and still carry her maiden name? Still, my job was not to question, and after what happened in Calcutta, I was wary of speaking what was on my mind. There, I wasn’t the only nurse whose breasts and behind were pinched by male patients, but I was the only one who had complained—often and loudly—which gave the Matron at the Catholic hospital a migraine and the license to banish me from her sight. I was a troublemaker, she said. Why hadn’t I just kept my mouth shut like the others? But I wasn’t in Calcutta anymore. I was in Bombay. And I prom-ised my mother things would be different here. “How are you feeling, ma’am?” She closed her eyes and laughed lightly. “I’ve been better, Nurse…” She let it hang, waiting for me to fill in the blank. “Falstaff, ma’am.” “And your first name?” Warm honey spread through my limbs. Most patients didn’t bother with anything beyond Nurse or Sister. “It’s Sona,” I said shyly. She opened her eyes. “Sona? Like…” She pointed to the tiny gold hoops on my earlobes. I smiled. “Yes, ma’am. It means gold.” I could have told her that my mother had pierced my ears on the third month after my birth. Auspicious, the pundit had told her. She’d taken me to a goldsmith—a safer choice than the tailor. The jeweler had threaded a thin black cord through the holes with a gold needle and told her to bring me back in two weeks. If I’d been able to speak at that age, I would have told my mother not to bother with the expense. The tiny gold hoops he inserted when my mother brought me back cost her two months’ earnings. But I said none of this to the new patient. I didn’t talk about my life with anyone except Indira. And even with her, I only revealed a little at a time, the way Gandhi spun thread on his charkha, adding only as much cotton to the spool as he needed. Mira cried out, more sharply this time. My body jerked in re-sponse. It wouldn’t hurt to give her a smaller dose, would it? As soon as I did, Mira’s eyes closed. I watched the painter until she was breathing evenly. Then, I left the room to attend to my other charges. I found Ralph Stoddard in his striped cotton pajamas reading the newspaper by the light of his bedside lamp. He had broken his left leg when he slipped on the floor of his bungalow. His servant had recently finished polishing it, but Dr. Stoddard hadn’t noticed. He’d been flicking through his mail, walking toward his study. A retired doctor, he was eighty, if a day. At his age, it was easy to break a bone or two. “It’s three o’clock in the morning, Doctor,” I scolded. He lowered a corner of the paper and regarded me through the thick lenses of his spectacles, which made him look like an owl. “I’ve broken my leg, Nurse. Not my ability to tell time.” A smile played about his lips—lips so thin they folded into his mouth. “Besides, with that racket—” he pointed with his chin toward his snoring roommate, Mr. Hassan “—who could catch a wink?” He went back to reading the paper. On the front page was more news about the Hindenburg disaster. Casualties continued to be found in Lake-hurst, New Jersey, a place so far and exotic to me that I couldn’t ever imagine seeing it in person. “It says here England has started an emergency 999 service.” He tapped the paper. “If India had one, I would have used it when I fell like a blasted domino in my house instead of waiting for Ramu to return from the shops.” He folded the paper and set it aside. “Fancy a game?” he asked hopefully. I hesitated. We were short-staffed, and I had many patients to look after. But it had been three hours since my last break, and I could use a breather. Besides, Dr. Stoddard’s good humor was hard to resist. He was an insomniac who could always coax me into playing backgammon when I had a little time. At his insistence, his nephew Timothy had brought a game board from home, which Dr. Stod-dard now kept on his bedside table. I asked if we wouldn’t wake Mr. Hassan in the other bed. He raised his eyebrows and observed dryly, “Not even the Hindenburg disaster could rouse that man.” When Dr. Stoddard had first asked me if I played, I’d said yes. There was a girl at school in Calcutta who’d tried to teach me. But the bell for the next class always rang before we could finish a game. She was a fast player; it took me forever to catch up. “Smashing,” he’d said, his smile sly. On our first game, I noticed he moved his stone six wedges instead of the five on his dice. I let him. After all, I was there to help him pass the time, not challenge him. After the fifth time he made a fast move, he threw up his hands. “Dammit, woman, why are you letting me cheat?” Too startled to speak, I stared at him. He took off his glasses to clean them with the bottom edge of his pajama top. “I cheat. Can’t help myself. Need someone to tell me I’m a wanker.” I was appalled. “I don’t think I’m allowed to say that, Doctor.” “Who says?” “Well… Matron would never…” He leaned across the board and pushed his spectacles farther back on his nose so his eyes were magnified. “She’s not here then, is she? Unless she’s hiding behind the door.” Automatically, I turned to look at the door to his room. When I turned around again, he had moved all his stones on his side of the board, effectively winning the game. He gave me a charming smile. “Jolly bad luck for you. Another go, then?” Tonight, as he set up the board, I turned my wrist to look at my watch. Mrs. Mehta was due for her pill in another half hour. “Focus, Nurse. Focus,” the doctor said. These days, the game went faster. Ever since I’d taken to calling him on the liberties he took with his stones, he’d stopped cheating. I scrutinized the board with a sharper eye and strategized my moves. Ralph Stoddard had made a competitor out of me. Ten minutes into the game, I heard my name being called. I looked over my shoulder to see my friend Indira, a stack of folded sheets covering half her face. She worked the same shift I did and we often walked home together, but I hadn’t seen her since I clocked in at six this evening. I excused myself and warned the doctor, “Do not move those stones while I’m gone. I have eyes in the back of my head.” “Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said, “like a good Christian.” We both knew he was lying; he was an atheist. I followed Indira down the hall. Perhaps she needed my help changing a bed. But she opened the door to the stockroom and said, “Lock the door.” On Sale: 16/04/2025 Get the book here