During the 1910s, Hong Kong’s new Governor Francis Henry May seconded a delegation of Sikh police officers to Fiji. May had had a recent stint as Governor of Fiji and before that Captain Superintendent of the Hong Kong Police Force. He felt that Hong Kong’s police force could teach Fiji a thing or two. While it was by no means unusual for the British to employ Sikh policemen in their imperial possessions, Fiji differed in that it already had a population of Indian indentured servants who worked the sugarcane fields on a contract for five years.
Author Nilima Rao was born in Fiji to parents who descended from sugar cane plantation workers and has used this backdrop for her debut novel, A Disappearance in Fiji. Rao’s book is (it notes) to be the first in a series and so joins the likes of Qiu Xiaolong and Alexander McCall Smith, authors who write as much about place as they are about the crimes at hand.
Rao’s story takes place in 1914 when Akal Singh, a young detective from the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, is sent to Fiji and put on a case to find a night prowler. When a Catholic priest sounds the alarm after a female Indian plantation worker named Kunti disappears at the same time that the white Australian overseer of the plantation goes missing, Akal is put on that case, too. But Akal doesn’t feel the same support from his commanding officer in Fiji as he did in Hong Kong.
Akal approached the door to the inspector-general’s office with some trepidation. He had been in this office only once before, when he had first arrived to the colony. As soon as he had walked in, it had become apparent to Akal just how far he had fallen. The concrete room with its grimy louvres was a hovel compared to his previous commander’s office in Hong Kong, which had been all high ceilings and polished wood. He had spent countless hours in that elegant space, consulting with his commander as his star rapidly rose with the British administration in Hong Kong.
Akal finds it difficult to make friends in Fiji as few take him seriously. But it goes the other way, too, as he does not feel connected to the Indian coolies or plantation workers. He instead finds friendship with a Fijian police counterpart named Taviti and a Dr Holmes, both of whom help him with the disappearance case.
At first, the other plantation workers think that Kunti has run away with the overseer, an Australian named Brown. But Kunti’s young daughter knows better. There’s also a mystery, with some hints of a scandal, as to why Akal was sent to Fiji from Hong Kong. Akal hopes he can solve the crime of both the night prowler and Kunti’s and Brown’s disappearances to gain standing with the Fiji police force and be allowed to return to Hong Kong.
At the beginning of each chapter, Rao includes a short excerpt from the Fiji Times from 1914. In one dated October 8, a columnist who went by the name Chop Chop paints a clear picture of the sentiments of the time. Exploitation of the plantation workers, especially the women, is a central part of the story.
At Government House they say there are far too many suicides amongst Indians in Fiji. Planters must really stop this practice. Why not placard the plantation with notices “Anyone committing suicide here will be fined!”
By the end of the story, some of the mysteries are solved—including the disappearances and Akal’s backstory as to why he was forced to leave Hong Kong—but the night prowler is still on the loose. Akal also feels more of an allegiance with the Indian indentured servants than he did when he first arrived in Fiji half a year earlier. And from his work in Fiji, he starts to feel at home there.
He thought about the cases he had solved in Hong Kong to much acclaim. None of those cases had been as important as this one. None of them had revealed anything that could shatter the foundation of a society, as this case had. None of them had had the potential to save a class of people from the kind of systemic abuse this case had revealed. And none of them had cost Akal anything personally—but this one was going to cost him everything he had worked so hard to regain.
It appears as if Akal is in Fiji to stay. And he would have to if there’s going to be a sequel.