Bombay Ice
A novel by Leslie Forbes
Bantam trade Paperback-June 1999

"Most people who get sick in Bombay assume it's the result of some filthy native cooking.  They say, " I never touched the water!  It's full of bacteria."  In fact the poison often comes from a more familiar source. They forget about Bombay Ice."

Leslie Forbes has taken her knowledge as a travel writer and created a thrilling murder-mystery set in modern India. "Bombay Ice" reveals the complexities of India and its Hindu culture, when Rosalind, a BBC Journalist returns to India after twenty years to reunite with her step-sister, Miranda and is intrigued by the recent deaths of four hirjas or eunuchs.  The Hirja community of Bombay is a diverse group of TGs, TSs and gay men who live together as women with a guru in group houses without regard to caste or education.  Many have been kidnapped or sold into the Hirja life at the age of 10-13 by their parents, who believed them to be effeminate.  Many undergo forced castration and some remain with their genitals intact. They have varied talents, education and goals, but they have one common denominator, poverty. They are not allowed to work or attend higher education, so they are usually beggars or prostitutes. They are sanctioned by the government to perform dances and give blessings at births and weddings.  If they follow this occupation they are considered below the untouchable caste.  But their transgendered state gives them mystical powers over the average Hindu, who rarely refuses their entreaties.  Refusal is usually met with curses, threats to your fertility and libido, which they control and as a last resort, a threat to expose themselves.  Sami, the last hirja victim, is intimately related to the main characters of the novel,  but her true parents remain a mystery until the end. She sleeps with the man she believes to be her father in order to gain access to his home.  Rosalind's sister, Miranda, is married to a movie film director, Prosper Sharma of Bollywood (Bombay's Hollywood), whom Rosalind believes killed his first wife and may be involved in the recent murders or "icings".  So Rosalind in her investigative journalistic mode pursues the connection into  the world of the Hirjas, movie people, gangsters, who fund the movies, old Brits and the street people who know everything. The cast of characters is right out of a Dostoevsky novel requiring a cast list on the first page. In her pursuit of the killer, she keeps remembering events from her first seven years in India in a dysfunctional family.  Her father deserted her and her mother successfully commits suicide after several attempts.  She remembers the cobras, the Gods and the lessons she learned from her father about the weather and the environment.  In order to gain access to various quarters, we find a cross-dressing Rosalind as a tee-shirted male, a hirja and an Indian movie extra, who is usually made.  Rosalind sleeps with another director to gain information and soon finds herself in the middle of a political nightmare, which involves the police, goondahs, a New India movement, land developers and high-level bureaucrats, who wish to discredit her newly developed evidence.  At the center of the novel is the Monsoon season, the Cyclone and Prosper's production of the "Tempest" , all rotating counter-clockwise to a destructive climax. This book has been thoroughly researched and has much historical fact to recommend it, but first of all it is a marvelous work of fiction.  Luv Ya, Cerise