Such a Long Journey

Gustad Noble's domestic pressures, his son Sohrab's refusal of a hard-won IIT place in favor of studying art, his daughter Roshan's unexplained illness, the family's shrinking Parsi-community standing in a Bombay that increasingly has no particular use for it, run alongside Jimmy Bilimoria's request that Gustad launder money through his bank account, a plot drawn directly from the real 1971 Nagarwala affair, in which someone impersonating Indira Gandhi's voice ordered a state bank to release funds later tied to covert support for the Bangladesh Mukti Bahini.

Mistry keeps the geopolitical plot and the domestic one at the same emotional register rather than letting one dwarf the other, so that a compound wall used by strangers as a public latrine, and a pavement artist Gustad hires to cover it with images of gods and saints to shame people out of fouling it, carries as much weight in the novel as India's war with Pakistan does happening in the background of the same year.

Tehmul-Lungraa, the mentally disabled neighbor everyone treats as background comic relief for most of the book, his repeated phrases, his devotion to Gustad, his fixation on Roshan's dolls, turns out to carry more of the novel's real feeling than the conspiracy plot does, a small, overlooked figure the narrative has been quietly building toward all along.

The real 1971 case, in which a man impersonating Indira Gandhi's voice defrauded the State Bank of India of sixty lakh rupees later linked to funding for the Bangladesh Liberation War, gives Mistry the historical scaffolding under Bilimoria's request to Gustad, letting an ordinary clerk's moral crisis stand in for a genuine, still partly unresolved episode of Indian state corruption.

The pavement artist's deities and saints, painted across every religious tradition Bombay contains, work to stop public urination until the municipal road-widening project takes the wall down anyway, entirely indifferent to the sacred images it's demolishing, a small parable about how little civic institutions register the ordinary devotions of the people they govern.