The island of Sri Lanka resembles a teardrop, also the title of Sue Amos’s latest novel, set in 1953 when the country was still called Ceylon. Teardrop is a murder mystery that weaves in both folklore and the beauty of the island.
Jacintha Barthelot is on her way to her first day of work as a newspaper reporter for the Colombo Courier. Known as Jazz to friends and family, she has recently returned from studies in England; looking forward to starting her career, she’s assigned to work with crime reporter Sonny de Roye. In their first conversation, Sonny tells Jazz that a gecko fell on him that morning, landing on his shoulder: there’s an old saying in Ceylon that a gecko that falls to the right of someone foretells a terrible death. Sure enough, the Courier learns that a dead body was found in a reservoir in the Eastern Province.
Teardrop is one of those mysteries where the setting can be just as much a draw as is the whodunnit.
The first hint of saffron on the horizon brings an explosion of birdsong to the city; mynahs, sparrows, and parrots suddenly awake and trading gossip from the overhanging trees. Below, the daily procession of overloaded buses belching diesel, motor cars, bicycles and rickshaws are filling up the streets of Pettah and Fort. Although Colombo is a modern metropolis, the remnants of its glory fringe the urban sprawl like ripples of fraying silk: emerald doves in the yellow cotton trees, purple-faced langurs scavenging for guavas, and further beyond, marsh crocodiles paddling in the wetlands.
Jazz and Sonny are both Burghers, or Sri Lankan Eurasian, although Jazz’s mother was Tamil rather than Sinhala. As Sonny explains to an expat the pair meets during their investigation:
Burgher is a term that gradually evolved to describe the descendants on the island of the first Portuguese, and then the Dutch invaders. My ancestor in the middle of the sixteenth century was a sergeant named Jan de Rooye who sailed to Ceylon on the Amber Cornelia with the Dutch East Indies [sic] Company, or if you prefer, Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie. VOC for short.
As Sonny and Jazz travel to the Eastern Province and talk with people who may know something about the dead body, they also encounter the pre-Sinhalese indigenous Vedda. Jazz enjoys interviewing people about the case and appreciates the diversity of Ceylon.
It is the people that matter, Burghers, Muslims, Sinhalese, and Tamils sharing the streets, the frenetic energy that comes from the mingling of cultures and the sharing of dreams. It is what she loves most about her country.
As for the murder mystery itself, the person found in the reservoir had not drowned but was in fact murdered by gunshots to the chest and heart. When another mystery emerges, that of a disappeared expat, the pace of the story slows in places.
At the end, Jazz realizes the mystery of the murdered man may never be solved and that she’s going to leave Ceylon to return to England to become a novelist.