Excerpt from SIX DAYS IN BOMBAY by Alka Joshi
They had brought Miss Novak to Wadia Hospital around eleven o’clock at night. She was feverish and agitated, cradling her stomach with her arms. The back of her skirt was soaked with blood. Her husband, a pale man with broad shoulders, said she’d been complaining of pain for a few days. The husband hadn’t stayed. He left shortly after bringing her in.
When Dr. Holbrook, the house surgeon, finished tending to her—she’d needed a few stitches and quite a bit of morphine—Matron assigned me to nurse her. This was not unusual. Patients who were the least bit foreign were assigned either to me or to Rebecca, the other Anglo-Indian nurse on the night shift, because we spoke fluent English. In the daytime, Matron would assign another Eurasian nurse or take care of the patient herself.
“She may be here awhile,” Matron whispered, with a meaningful glance at me.
We’re a small hospital, and the patient had been given a private room. It did not escape my notice that she could have been taken to a larger hospital popular with the British but, apparently, there had been need for discretion. Even so, rumors ricocheted around the halls. This was no simple miscarriage. She had tried to do it herself. Her husband had done it. She had tried to take her own life. I paid no attention. It was enough to know that a woman needed our help; our job was to heal her.
Even before I read her chart, I knew who she was. Mira Novak. The painter. Famous, even here in Bombay. I’d seen her photo and read about her in the Bombay Chronicle. The article said she had studied painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenza in Italy when she was just fifteen, the youngest student ever admitted. Her Hindu mother, a woman of high caste, had accompanied her daughter from their home in Prague to Florence, and ultimately to Paris, to nurture Mira’s talent. Until the age of twenty, Mira had never once stepped foot in India.
But when I looked at the images of her paintings in the article, I didn’t see Paris or Florence or any of the other faraway places I dreamed about visiting one day. I saw village women in saris, their skin much darker than mine or Mira’s. In her paintings, the women sat quietly, somberly, as they painted henna on each other’s hands or tended sheep in the hills or pasted cow dung on the walls of their homes. Why was a young woman of privilege obsessed with the ordinary, the poor? I wondered.
She was six years older than I was—twenty-nine by the date on her chart. To my mind, she was lovely. Smooth, unblemished skin. A brow line that angled toward hollowed cheekbones. Even though her eyes were closed, I could tell they were large, per- haps a little protuberant, but in a way that would be attractive in her face, dominating it, demanding the viewer’s gaze. Her nose, which ended in a slightly upturned tip, gave her an imperious look. That must have come from her royal bloodline. She wasn’t beautiful. My mother would have said she was striking, that her face had character.
Now she blinked, her eyes round, regarding me curiously, as if we hadn’t spoken a few minutes earlier. Her pupils were constricted, and she seemed disoriented.
“Mrs. Novak?” I waited for a flicker of recognition. “You are at Wadia Hospital, ma’am. In Bombay. You were brought in several hours ago.” I spoke quietly, in English accented with Hindi.
She frowned. She looked down at her torso, then back up at me. “Not Mrs.,” she said, “Miss Novak.”
“My apologies, ma’am.” I didn’t quite understand but I didn’t let it show. How could a woman be married and still carry her maiden name? Still, my job was not to question, and after what happened in Calcutta, I was wary of speaking what was on my mind. There, I wasn’t the only nurse whose breasts and behind were pinched by male patients, but I was the only one who had complained—often and loudly—which gave the Matron at the Catholic hospital a migraine and the license to banish me from her sight. I was a troublemaker, she said. Why hadn’t I just kept my mouth shut like the others? But I wasn’t in Calcutta anymore. I was in Bombay. And I promised my mother things would be different here.
“How are you feeling, ma’am?”
She closed her eyes and laughed lightly. “I’ve been better, Nurse…” She let it hang, waiting for me to fill in the blank.
“Falstaff, ma’am.”
“And your first name?”
Warm honey spread through my limbs. Most patients didn’t bother with anything beyond Nurse or Sister. “It’s Sona,” I said shyly.
She opened her eyes. “Sona? Like…” She pointed to the tiny gold hoops on my earlobes.
I smiled. “Yes, ma’am. It means gold.”
I could have told her that my mother had pierced my ears on the third month after my birth. Auspicious, the pundit had told her. She’d taken me to a goldsmith—a safer choice than the tailor. The jeweler had threaded a thin black cord through the holes with a gold needle and told her to bring me back in two weeks. If I’d been able to speak at that age, I would have told my mother not to bother with the expense. The tiny gold hoops he inserted when my mother brought me back cost her two months’ earnings.
But I said none of this to the new patient. I didn’t talk about my life with anyone except Indira. And even with her, I only revealed a little at a time, the way Gandhi spun thread on his charkha, adding only as much cotton to the spool as he needed.
Mira cried out, more sharply this time. My body jerked in response. It wouldn’t hurt to give her a smaller dose, would it?
As soon as I did, Mira’s eyes closed. I watched the painter until she was breathing evenly. Then, I left the room to attend to my other charges.
Copyright © 2025 Alka Joshi with permission from MIRA.
A continent-spanning historical novel of friendship, identity, and mystery from the New York Times bestselling author of The Henna Artist
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Henna Artist, this sweeping novel of identity and self-discovery takes readers from Bombay to Prague, Florence, Paris and London, to uncover the mystery behind a famous painter's death.
When renowned painter Mira Novak arrives at Wadia hospital in Bombay after a miscarriage, she's expected to make a quick recovery, and Sona is excited to spend time with the worldly woman who shares her half-Indian identity, even if that's where their similarities end. Sona is enraptured by Mira's stories of her travels and shocked by accounts of the many lovers she's left scattered through Europe. Over the course of a week, Mira befriends Sona, seeing in her something bigger than the small life she's living with her mother. Mira is released from the hospital just in time to attend a lavish engagement party with all of Bombay society and invites Sona along. But the next day, Mira is readmitted to the hospital in worse condition than before, and when she dies under mysterious circumstances, Sona immediately falls under suspicion.
Before leaving the hospital in disgrace, Sona is given a note Mira left for her, along with her four favorite paintings. But how could she have known to leave a note if she didn't know she was going to die? The note sends Sona on a mission to deliver three of the paintings—the first to Petra, Mira's childhood friend and first love in Prague; the second to her art dealer Josephine in Paris; the third to her first painting tutor, Paolo, with whom both Mira and her mother had affairs. As Sona uncovers Mira's history, she learns that the charming facade she'd come to know was only one part of a complicated and sometimes cruel woman. But can she discover what really happened to Mira and exonerate herself?
Along the way, Sona also comes to terms with her own complex history and the English father who deserted her and her mother in India so many years ago. In the end, she'll discover that we are all made up of pieces, and only by seeing the world do we learn to see ourselves.
Women's Fiction Historical [Mira Books, On Sale: April 15, 2025, Hardcover / e-Book , ISBN: 9780778368533 / eISBN: 9780369761187]
Alka Joshi is the internationally bestselling author of the Jaipur Trilogy: The Henna Artist, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur and The Perfumist of Paris. Her debut novel, The Henna Artist, immediately became a New York Times bestseller and a Reese Witherspoon Pick. It has been translated into 26 languages and is currently in development at Netflix as a tv series. Joshi was born in India and came to the U.S. with her family at the age of nine. She worked for 30 years in the advertising/marketing fields. She has a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from California College of Arts. She lives on the Monterey Peninsula.
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