The Towers of Silence

"You are now native roses. Of the country. The garden is a native garden. We are only visitors. That has been our mistake. That is why God has not followed us here." This third book in the remarkable Raj Quartet is bursting with metaphor. Barbie Batchelor, the principal character in this installment,......more

Barbie's Book       In September 1939, when the war had just begun, Miss Batchelor retired from her post as superintendent of the Protestant mission schools in the city of Ranpur.       Her elevation to superintendent had come towards the end of her career in the early part of 1938. At the time she......more

The Parsis - members of the Zoroastrian faith, who have immigrated to India from Iran - do not bury or cremate their dead. The corpses are hung upon huge wooden structures to be picked clean by vultures. (I have seen this place in Mumbai from the outside. No outsiders can enter.) An apt metaphor for......more

This is the third book in The Raj Quartet, and I found it the most complex so far. It does not pick up where the last one left off, but begins at a point in time even before the first book. More importantly, there’s a shift in perspective: we’re now in the life of Barbie Batchelor, a peripheral char......more