Half-Blood

Description

’You see, Moonie, I did a terrible thing for which I had to leave Bombay. I don’t want to

burden you, in this letter, with the details of my deed-or my life. It’s a long story and

I’m not a man of words.’

It is 2009, more than a decade after Maya read this intriguing letter addressed

to her. The awkward, adopted child of an odd Bengali couple, she’s now a

34-year-old journalist in an existential mess that she alleviates by smoking pot

and going on long walks with her latest boyfriend. But in order to find the

meaning she craves, Maya must confront her past, and open a box of objects

she inherited. When she finally does, she’s led on a startling, sparkling journey

of discovery.

At the centre of this journey is Burjor Elavia, a ’fifty-fifty’, an ’Adhkachru’-

the illegitimate child of a Parsi man and a tribal woman-born in a

nondescript village in Gujarat. In 1952, not yet eighteen, he made his way

to Bombay, where he lived a colourful life-promiscuous, reckless, involved

in a string of shady businesses, but also compassionate and a charmer. His

greatest achievement was an audacious venture for fifty-fifty Parsis like

himself, many of them strugglers, some of them on the make and all of them

eccentric. In their tangled, mixed-up, funny life stories, Maya tries to find her

beginnings-and maybe her future.

Set in the teeming, varied universe that is Bombay, Half-Blood is an

entertaining, full-blooded novel about dysfunctional families, plucky

survivors, chancers, mavericks and good-hearted rogues. A celebration of

vitality, impurity and other true virtues of life, it is a marvellous debut.