![]() ![]() We also read of Perveen’s British friend Alice who has returned to India after spending time abroad. Perveen is worried that they are being taken advantage of as they seemed to have signed over their inheritance. ![]() As these recently widowed women reside in a purdah, a secluded and strictly, children aside, strictly female space, Perveen is the ideal go-between. Omar Farid, a well-off Muslim man who had three wives. ![]() She becomes involved with the will of Mr. Being the only, or one of the first, female lawyers in India comes with many challenges but thanks to her father’s endless belief in her capabilities and her law degree from Oxford Perveen feels ready for what’s in store. Anyway, Perveen’s family is Zoroastrian and has begun working at her father’s law firm. There are some info-dumpings now and again which read like something straight out of a textbook (aimed at younger audiences due to the dumbing down of certain facts). While the author succeeds in depicting the realities of colonialism, of being female in India at this time in history, and in providing her readers with some degree of insight into Zoroastrian and Muslim traditions, the setting wasn’t particularly vivid. ![]() The first part of the novel introduces us to Perveen Mistry, our protagonist, and works to establish the setting, which is 1920s Bombay. While there is indeed a murder and the identity behind the culprit is, supposedly, a ‘mystery’, The Widows of Malabar Hill struck me as something in the realms of a third-rate period drama. ![]()
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