Bombay Ice

Rating:
Summary: tedious, boring and full of factual errors
Review: The only reason I bought the book is because it is about two things I love - Bombay and the monsoon. Now I regret the waste of my time and my money. She recreates the city and the people in it from a tourist's eyes, rearranges the geography of the city to suit her purpose. Of course she misses the real Bombay completely. The author seems to have spent so much time developing the infuriatingly complex plot that she pays almost no attention to the characters. Some of them flit across the pages briefly and then completely disappear (whatever happened to Bada Johnny and Chota Johnny? who were they? where was Robi at the end? Sunila? Gulab?). The errors she makes when naming the characters should have been the first giveaway for me that her understanding of the place and its people is far too superficial. She turns a Sharma into a Parsi, and a Mistry into a Maharashtrian and gives many of them western first names which is more than a little unusual for india. Her depiction of the city is authentic only in tiny little vignettes spread through the novel, and even those would are more suited to a travel guide than to a novel.
If anyone is looking for an understanding of Bombay or India or Bollywood, this is not the place to find it. If you are looking for a good murder mystery, keep looking - this one makes very little sense. Her literary allusions just cloud the plot and leave the reader confused.