Inspired by the life of artist Amrita Sher-Gil, ‘Six Days in Bombay’ is Alka Joshi’s deep dive into the struggles of cultural identity
By Monita Soni
Six Days in Bombay: Torn between worlds
Six Days in Bombay, Alka Joshi’s fourth novel, is a lush, emotionally resonant tale set in 1937 colonial India. As a follower of Joshi’s work since The Henna Artist, which brought my hometown, Jaipur, vividly to life, I was eager to read this story that weaves together my beloved Bombay, where I studied medicine, and the remarkable life of the artist Amrita Sher-Gil. The story follows Sona Falstaff, an Anglo-Indian night nurse at Wadia Hospital, caught between two worlds and haunted by abandonment and self-doubt. Her life takes a turn when she meets Mira Novak, a charismatic, enigmatic artist who dies an untimely death, leaving behind a cryptic note and four meaningful paintings. Sona resigns from her job and embarks on an unforgettable journey through Europe, unraveling Mira’s past friendships and associations while confronting her own fractured identity. Mira becomes Sona’s muse, and through the kindness of strangers, a tender romance, and memories of her late mother’s love, Sona begins to transform grief into courage and her internalized shame of rejection into self-acceptance.
A rich tapestry of East & West
Alka Joshi’s prose sings with detail and sensory richness—from the red silk cotton trees of India to Montparnasse cafés buzzing with stories of Picasso, Miro, and Gaugin. The narrator moves seamlessly between cultures, like a seasoned seamstress stitching together East and West with heady flavors, fresh tastes, sips of coffee, and Campari. Fragrances of cardamom and musk, silks, art, and architecture. Sona’s journey through foreign lands is layered with inner reckoning, beauty, heartbreak, and self-discovery. Her connection with Dr. Ralph Stoddard, a kind British doctor and father figure, is particularly striking.
Joshi’s signature themes—cultural duality, revelation through art, womanhood, and healing—resonate. Six Days in Bombay is not only about an artist’s mysterious death or a dazzling travelogue through bustling cities; it’s about what it means to be torn between worlds, and how love, memory, and acceptance of identity help us become whole.
In an exclusive interview with India Currents, Alka Joshi describes her inspiration and her process behind Six Days In Bombay, her characters and their struggles of cultural identity, and her desire to highlight the role of female artists.
The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
India Currents: How did you get the idea of writing this book? The novel touches on the idea of uncovering a hidden past and confronting one’s own identity. How much time did it take to complete the book?
Alka Joshi: Six Days in Bombay was inspired by the 1930s painter Amrita Sher-Gil —flamboyant, self-possessed, promiscuous, political, often compared to the feisty Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Born of an Indian father and a Hungarian mother, Amrita—like the fictional character of Mira—was the youngest artist admitted to the prestigious Paris Salon. Mysteriously, Amrita’s life ended in an Indian hospital at the age of 28. Leaving a cryptic note along with her paintings for her night nurse Sona, as Mira Novak does in the novel, is the kind of enigma Amrita would have done. The more I delved into Amrita’s life, the more I caught glimpses of a woman trying on different identities to see which one fit which occasion. Her free-spirited, daring nature intrigued me, and I wanted to write about her. How could such a vibrant, healthy woman have lost her life so young? If she’d lived longer, would her name trip off our tongues as easily as Kahlo’s or Mary Cassatt’s?
I ran across Amrita’s name when I was researching my debut novel, The Henna Artist. In 2019 I viewed her paintings at the National Museum of Modern Art in Delhi. But I was busy writing two sequels to The Henna Artist. It took another six years for SDIB to be completed and released.
IC: Mira Novak is inspired by Amrita Sher-Gil. How did you conceive other characters like Sona, Sona’s mother, the doctors, nurses, matron and staff at the Wadia Hospital in Bombay?
AJ: I wanted the protagonist Sona to be a stark contrast to Mira Novak, who takes such pleasure in celebrating both her Indian and her Czech identity. Sona, on the other hand, struggles with her dual heritage. Is she Indian like her Hindu mother, or is she British like the father who abandoned them when he returned to England? While Sona sympathizes with India’s fight for independence from the British, she realizes her British blood gives her advantages—better education, better pay, better job. Yet, in 1937, the setting of the novel, political tensions are high, and the tide is turning against the British, which spells danger for Sona. Sona’s “better job” entitled her to work in a private hospital where British nurses and doctors run the show. Sona looks after wealthy patients—English, Hindu, Jain, and Parsi among them. Once that was established, characters like the retired Englishman Dr. Stoddard, the gentle Hindu matriarch Mrs. Mehta, and staunch Catholic nurses like the matron and Anglo-Indian nurse Rebecca immediately sprang to my imagination.
IC: Mira plays a pivotal role in Sona’s life, yet she is also a mysterious and complicated figure. What was your aim and process in creating a character who is both alluring and ultimately tricky for Sona to understand fully? What was the most challenging part of writing such a multi-faceted character, and how did you ensure readers could empathize with her?
AJ: We’re often drawn to complicated characters like Mira in our lives. They’re the life of the party, the charming bon vivants. But the more we learn about them, the more we hear about disappointed parents or unfulfilled expectations or people who treated them cruelly or whom they treated badly. It’s only then that we begin to take them off the pedestal, examine their hardships with a critical eye and truly understand their humanity. I wanted readers to see Mira initially in the glamorous light in which Sona saw her. Once Sona embarks on her European journey and unravels more of Mira’s past, readers discover—as Sona does—the full spectrum of Mira’s charismatic personality, her flaws and weaknesses.
IC: Sona’s Anglo-Indian heritage seems to be a significant part of her character. Why did you make Sona Anglo-Indian?
AJ: Anglo-Indians are among the hangovers of colonialism but are not often addressed in literature. Unions between English men and Indian women were more acceptable, encouraged even, when the British first came to India without wives in tow. The East India Company felt the resulting progeny would provide the bridge between them and the native citizenry. However, by the late 19th century, exclusive British communities had been established, and Eurasian children came to be seen as neither fully English nor fully Indian. They were resented, prized, or manipulated to benefit the British Raj. Some, like Sona, were left behind.
IC: The novel takes readers from Bombay to across Europe. You love to take your readers on an adventure with you. How did you use the different settings to reflect the changing emotional landscape of the characters and their relationships?
AJ: As I began looking into the period of the novel, 1937, I realized how similar the resistance movements in India against British rule were to the resistance movements in Europe against the fascists and the Nazis. The more I consulted historians and academic scholars when I visited Prague, Florence, Paris, and London, the more I learned about the creative forms the resistance movements were taking. For example, Picasso’s famous Guernica painting at the 1937 Paris International Expo or Ferragamo’s cork wedge shoes in Florence. I knew I had to include those juicy details in the novel!
IC: Sona’s relationship with her mother and Mira’s connection to her mother is another important aspect of the story. How did you explore the generational and cultural differences between them, and how they affected Mira and Sona’s lives?
AJ: Mira’s mother is controlling and disapproving, which results in a rebellious Mira often doing the opposite of what her mother wants her to do. The actions of Sona’s mother are born of love and a desire to shelter her daughter from harm, but those very protections have made Sona unwilling to take chances. Mira sees the shell Sona has built around her and steers the nurse toward the defiant nature that comes so naturally to the painter.
IC: Sona’s history with her absentee Anglo father and Mira’s relation with her affluent Czecho-Slovakian Jewish Otec father weaves through the plot. Was Sona’s personal history of abandonment important in moving the story forward?
AJ: Mira’s wealthy father is loving but distant; he’s also powerless against his strong-willed wife. Sona’s father abandoned her when she was only three, leaving her mother to support the family as a seamstress. The hardship Sona and her mother experienced has made her turn against her father but has not quelled her curiosity about why he deserted them and what happened to him. The voyage to Europe to do Mira’s bidding allows Sona to find her father and discover what happened to him.
IC: Art seems to be a recurring motif in this novel. I know that you are very fond of visual art and you are a collector. Art was a prominent theme in your previous works. In this novel, I feel that you used art in terms of the paintings, character development, and engagement. What role does art play in shaping the characters’ identities and in the mystery that Sona is trying to unravel?
AJ: I’ve drawn and painted since I could hold a pencil, and I’ve always been interested in the evolution of art throughout the ages and civilizations. The artistic processes of painters, sculptors, architects, and designers are as fascinating to me as the work of scientists is to others. I studied Art History for my BA at Stanford. But why were my textbooks filled mostly with prominent male figures? Women have contributed to the arts as much as men have, but we don’t often hear or read about them. I intend to correct this imbalance through my fiction.
IC: The four paintings by Sher-Gil as Mira play a significant part in the story. How did you incorporate them into the novel?
AJ: I chose four of my favorite paintings from Sher-Gil’s collection to incorporate into the story. I changed their scale so it was easier for Sona to carry the canvases with her across Europe. What’s interesting about the paintings is that while the faces of the subjects are impassive, their posture and their gestures convey a deeper story, a stronger emotion they might be concealing just beneath that placid exterior.
IC: The central mystery surrounding Mira’s death is intriguing. How did you write about the underlying surgical complication from a doctor and nurse’s perspective?
AJ: My older brother is a doctor. He’s my go-to for all medical questions. Additionally, I researched the training of doctors and nurses in India during that era and the Florence Nightingale method of nursing. As we now know from various historical data, women’s medical complaints were often ignored or dismissed, as I imagined Mira Novak’s would have been.
IC: Sona’s mission to deliver Mira’s paintings is both a literal and figurative journey. How did you design this plot thread to deepen her understanding of Mira’s life and her own?
AJ: Had Mira lived beyond the six days at Wadia Hospital in Bombay, she and Sona might have deepened their friendship, and over time, Mira may have revealed the secrets she kept hidden. But Mira dies suddenly and those secrets die with her. It’s not until Sona inherits the paintings and a request to deliver them to Mira’s former friends and lovers that Sona has a chance to uncover more about her mysterious friend. But to do that, Sona has to leave the safety of everything she has known and journey into the unknown.
IC: By the end of the novel, Sona comes to realize that we are all made up of “pieces.” Were you exploring mosaics or thinking about another novel with a mosaic/chimera theme?
AJ: Interesting take! I hadn’t thought about mosaics. Only that we are all made up of parts—some of which we pick up from family, some from teachers or friends, some from celebrity/media culture. Only by understanding all of our parts can someone truly know who we are, what we care about, and what we want from our lives. Mira, for all her faults, was perceptive, probing the parts of Sona she would rather have kept to herself. By the novel’s end, Sona realizes why Mira wanted her to explore a larger life, even if it meant finding out what Mira would rather have kept to herself. And Mira knew that despite what Sona found, she would manage to love the painter, to forgive her transgressions, and remember her for her kindnesses.
Read: Indian Languages in the ICU
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Monita Soni grew up in Mumbai and works as a pathologist in Alabama. She is well known for her creative nonfiction and poetry pieces inspired by family, faith, food, home, and art. She has written two books: My Light Reflections and Flow Through My Heart. She is a regular contributor to NPR’s Sundial Writers Corner.
Courtesy: India Currents
