Six Days in Bombay

 by Alka Joshi

This is the story of a young half Indian/half English nurse who is working in a hospital in Bombay.  She becomes very friendly with a patient who comes in after an apparent miscarriage.  The woman is not recovering as would be expected.  The patient, Mira Novak is a somewhat well known painter.  Despite her state her husband only visits a few times and doesn't seem much concerned.

The young nurse has a colleague who doesn't like her and gets her in trouble at times.  The nurse lives with her mother who is a seamstress, they are ecking out an existence.  The patient dies and it is determined she may have received a heroine overdose, or possibly committed suicide.  The young nurse, Sona, is accused of malpractice and is fired. She is devastated.

Before she died Mira asks Sona to retrieve four paintings she has left in a storeroom in the hosptial and distribute them as follows, Sona is to keep one. one she is to take to a friend in Prague, a former art dealer in Paris and an art instructor/former lover in Florence.  Mira doesn't know what she should do, can she accomplish this with little money.  Her mother then tells her about some money that had been sent to her over the years by her father.  Her father and left her mother and her to return to his original family in England.  At the same time another patient of hers, a elderly gentleman, asks her to accompany him as he travels to Istanbul to meet with his son.  She feels she has nothing to lose so decides to do it.  She meets the man's son and is attacted to him.  He is a British diplomat and offers to help her locate Mira's friends so she sets off.

She meets the first friend in Prague and discovers Mira was not as nice as she had imagined.  She was a wild person and used people in her life.   Mira delivers the first painting.  Then she moves on to Paris and meets the art dealer who was also wronged by Mira.  Then off to Florence to meet the artist/lover.  She finds he is married to an older woman.  All Mira's friends are devastated at the news of Mira's death but especially her lover.  It turns out Mira had agreed to have a child for them.  The child she lost was hers and her lovers progeny.  The artist and his wife wanted a child to guarantee his wife's father would continue to support them financially.

Sona is ready to return to India but the elderly patient urges her to go to London to meet her father.  She has been angry with her father for abandoning her, her brother who died at three years of age, and her mother. She eventually gets up the nerve to do this only to find out he died a few years previously.  She meets his wife who had discovered the truth about his Indian family.  Despite the hurt the woman seems to welcome her and invites her to meet her half brother and sister. While in London she meets a doctor she knew from the hospital in India that she had a crush on.  They have sex and he invites her to consider joining him as he embarks on some humanitarian work he is beginning, but she declines.

She returns to India where she meets up with the old patient and his son.  She was attracted to the son and they marry a month later.  She never tells her husband that their daughter was actually the result of her liaison in London.

It was an interesting story, there were many stories of love/relationships that were abandoned, in addition to all the above, the old patient had a fiance in England that he abandoned when he fell in love with an Indian woman.  The story talks about the challenges of the half breeds in India -- half Indian/half English and also hints at the resistance to British rule that is building in India.