Signed on to represent the British Raj via the Kolhapur Agency (an arm that oversaw 25 princely and feudal states around the Kolhapur region), Mistry travels to the princely kingdom of Satapur to adjudicate on the dispute over the education of 10-year-old Maharaja Jiva Rao between the dowager Rajmata Putlabai and her daughter-in-law, Maharani Mirabai. The details are merely exhausting and they detract from firmly outlining Mistry’s persona or her purpose. Yet, none of these are with a detective’s eye that may bring us to the brink of denouement through her brilliant deduction. However, the burden of taking the narrative ahead is on her frail shoulders, and she chooses to notice instead excruciating details of every bit of ornament on a person or furniture in a room. A lady separated from her abusive husband and a solicitor at her father’s law firm, Mistry has the right credentials for a cerebral gutsy woman much ahead of her times. The fundamental issue is with the central character, Perveen Mistry. If a book may be rated on atmospherics alone, this is a winner. The writer is a natural storyteller and the sequences flow as a nimble stream via her pen. Make no mistake, Massey writes with a deft touch from decent amounts of research.

The descriptions of saris are going strong and the next 175 pages will not be easy for one uninterested in crisply described rooms and gardens, mentions of kanda pohe and mutton curry. And, all that further aggravates the readers’ expectations set up by the legend ‘Perveen Mistry investigates’ on the cover.īy page 201, it is clear no thriller genre investigations are within Perveen Mistry’s ambit. Secondary cast figures are written off in such detail that you can guess the colour of their underwear by now. The descriptions of clothes are interminable.

There is a surprisingly attractive hero figure though. There is no menace and no scattering of clues that add up to one humdinger of an investigation. In The Satapur Moonstone, Sujata Massey’s descriptions are sweet, well researched, yet 100 pages in and there’s still no whiff of the mystery. And so the reader is bogged down in minutiae, waiting for the plot to get with the program.

To make the writing authentic, much of the focus is on inessentials.

Writing a period novel is perhaps the most fraught exercise.

The satapur moonstone by sujata massey