Hormazd Patel, a freelance journalist from India, is visiting a Swiss luxury watch expo in Geneva where he loses his iPad. It is returned to him by an immigrant cleaning lady, Sri Lankan-born Kanimozhi Balasingham, who is suffering from an irritating cough. While they chat amicably, her cough intensifies and she suddenly explodes in a gory mess, her body completely disintegrating in a fountain of blood before the journalist’s eyes. He runs away in shock.
Back home in Mumbai, Mr. Patel starts feeling unwell. But instead of seeing a doctor, he pops some antibiotic pills at home. It does seem to fix the problem, but soon the staff at the digital news organization The Indian Opinion — where he goes to apply for a job — displays similar symptoms, starting with the office manager Amod Patil. Soon I start to lose track of the characters — employees at the airport and shoppers at a shopping mall, doctors and medical officers, journalists and editors, upper-class people and slum dwellers, Indians and foreigners — that are all but names on the page.
Chance discovery
Meanwhile, the virulent epidemic fever — which is the subject of the novel — results in repeated horror movie style deaths, including wiping out almost all the people at the World Financial Forum which is being hosted at a fancy hotel in Mumbai. But how come I don’t care? I try to analyse why I don’t feel sorry for them. Could it be because the people so dying appear to be statistics: described in terms of little more than their names, ages and occupations?
The disease affects thousands and causes widespread panic — resulting in unrest as far away as in Pune — which ought to be a thought-provoking scenario. The speculation on everything that might go wrong during an epidemic outbreak in India, down to the smallest details, is quite a journalistic feat but it doesn’t make a novel and certainly not a thriller. It remains just a scenario.
Instead of suspense, what we have is an undoubtedly well-researched work that reads like a collection of sample cases involving characters having discussions about a hypothetical medical crisis.
Coincidences, rather than some form of action-reaction pattern, drive the plot forward: such as the discovery — by chance rather than thrilling detective work — of a stolen medical machine at a fast food stall that might hold a key to the disease or the equally random discovery of a cure for the mystery disease by a happy-go-lucky unlicensed doctor rather than by the 300-strong expert team with state-of-the-art equipment that is working on the case.
After a few hundred pages, the reader inevitably starts wanting the lethal disease — which by now seems to be the only complex organism in the book — to quickly kill off all the paper-thin characters faster and thus bring the story to a quicker end.
Beware of the cough
It also becomes frustratingly obvious that no editor read the text before sending it to the printer or there would not be gaffes such as the ‘pubic response’ to a public health hazard.
Other errors: two characters chatting over a meal in a restaurant are eating stuffed sardines, while the dish of sardines they ordered is only served about a page later. A character shuts her laptop in anger and seconds later sends off an email. A phone that’s been switched off starts ringing. Clichéd phrases recur such as ‘the truth is somewhat more complicated’ followed a paragraph or so later by ‘the truth is far more complicated’.
Journalism as novel
Fiction writers can often produce interesting narrative journalism, but it rarely works the other way around. Why is that? It could be because the journalistic instinct is to explain whereas novels tell stories layered with meaning.
In the case of Bombay Fever what we have is a very long semi-journalistic message, the short version of which is: you should not eat antibiotics unnecessarily as it creates resistant viral strains which might lead to a catastrophe. Next time you have a mysterious cough, you should go and see a qualified doctor rather than self-medicate and thus kick off a potentially disastrous global epidemic.
This could have been an amazing speculative book in the hands of a novelist like Amitav Ghosh, who combined the theme of disease with suspense in The Calcutta Chromosome, which deals with the detection of the malarial parasite that eventually resulted in a treatment for malaria. As it stands, Bombay Fever’s relevance is more as a manual dealing with various disease control scenarios in the event of a future plague in the country.
The author’s latest comic detective novel set in Bengaluru is the bestsellingHari, a Hero for Hire.
