As India emerges into independence in 1947, Englishman Charlie Strongbow and 23 colleagues set about setting up a smuggling operation on the previously uninhabited Cross Island, just off Bombay’s Ferry Wharf. The aim is to supply the good and the great (and the not-so-good) with contraband cigarettes, cheese, booze, perfume and whatever other Western products the new Indian government is trying to tax.
Godfrey Joseph Pereira’s Four and Twenty Black Birds tells this tale. The book itself defies categorization. Pereira himself calls it “historical fiction” but the book is, he says in the “Author’s Note”, based on a cash of letters passed to him by Charlie’s grandson in a New York bar in 2015. So perhaps this is instead “fictionalized history”. There is always a chance, however, that the “Author’s Note” is fiction as well—who’s to know? The description of Cross Island is suspiciously close to that given in the (very brief) Wikipedia article. Pereira says “The Navy has thrown a secretive cordon around Cross Island. You cannot go there.” Maybe he’s having us all on. Once one is sucked into Pereira’s story, it’s very hard to find the way out again.
Indians have only supporting roles in this story: the protagonists are all erstwhile colonialists trying to profit from being caught on the wrong side of history.
Pereira affects a somewhat old-fashioned prose style:
Charlie is a six-foot-seven-inch Gulliverian entity. His white body is sun scorched, sculpted, lined and honed by the intense labour that he has had to endure at the Bombay Docks. His long black hair parted in the middle reaches his shoulders, his moustache and flowing beard seem to grow wild. A slender aquiline nose sits between high cheek bones and his piercing eyes have rutted crow’s feet by their sides. A European Moses, with a faint sympathetic aura of the crucified Nazarene, his demeanour and deep blue eyes appear to possess learnings beyond his years. His almost reverential physicality, if confronted with antagonism, suggests a retaliatory possibility of fire and brimstone, still, no one can recall a time when Charlie used his physical prowess to win a fight. Even the lofty, sturdy Pathans eye him with respect.
A touch of Eric Ambler there, perhaps. But there are lengthy diversions into the politics (and corruption) of the time.
It soon becomes apparent that Pereira is an Indian writer writing about India at the time of Independence and Partition, yet Indians have only supporting roles in this story: the protagonists are all erstwhile colonialists trying to profit from being caught on the wrong side of history. They are rogues, but Pereira treats even the worst of them with empathy, something he rarely extends to the parade of venal Indian officials and politicians Charlie and buddies have to cajole, bribe and threaten. Not that Charlie is treated with kid gloves:
Charlie had learned and fine-tuned the ability to barter and haggle like an Indian housewife at a fish market. He could be tenacious, conniving and mildly intimidating in incessant waves as he slowly whittled down the price. His mind stored an encyclopaedic rolodex of names and places, prices and pleasures offered in Bombay. Sailors approached him all the time, looking for expensive watches sold cheap in the black market, gold, hashish, ganja, heroin and prostitutes who were willing to perform out-of-the-ordinary Kama Sutra positions. From underage boys and girls, to influential madams, pimps and transvestites, to girls from continental Europe, Japan and Nepal who were trafficked into Kamathipura, Charlie knew the flesh market, warts and all.
The characterizations are superb. Charlie is matched is by Dona Maria:
mysterious and unfathomable, lusty and unreachable; a Portuguese alpha she-wolf. She was aware that her predatory brown eyes flamed with the promises her supple body advertised. From Lisbon, she had journeyed to Goa to join her rich Portuguese lover who was now working with people from India. When she returned from the Mapusa Market one Friday afternoon, she had found him in bed with one of his servants, a young boy.
Dona Maria, equal parts sex and competence, flows through the book like a stream of lava. Was she a real person from the original letters? Or made up from whole cloth?
Once sucked into Pereira’s story, it’s very hard to find the way out again.
The book therefore presents itself as the story, goes the subtitle, of “The Insane Life of an English Smuggler” (who subtitles a novel anymore?), but it really isn’t this either: it is instead the story of a man’s slow descent into and transit through madness. Charlie is suffering from schizophrenia, perhaps brought on by the trauma of having abandoned two daughters to Indian orphanages, whence they were adopted to England, never (we are led to believe) to be seen again. But they wrote letters, none of which reached Charlie. Pereira engineers another slight of hand in the ending, which masquerades as a sort of anticlimactic epilogue after the adventures on Cross Island. It is in fact anything but.
This engaging novel is not without its problems. There is perhaps a bit more editorial commentary than entirely necessary and Charlie has an imaginary friend who pales in comparison with the flesh and blood characters.
Yet once sucked into Pereira’s story, it’s very hard to find the way out again. One’s left with a sneaking doubt that the “Author’s Note” may be fiction as well. The description of Cross Island is suspiciously close to that given in the (very brief) Wikipedia article. Pereira says “The Navy has thrown a secretive cordon around Cross Island. You cannot go there.” Maybe he’s having us all on with that story of the sack of papers in the bar. Who’s to know?
Four and Twenty Black Birds never ceases to surprise and intrigue, satisfyingly so.