This is the bizarre tale about an obsessive historian, a dapper Parsi, and a 1923 newspaper report in London which outraged a small elite community in Mumbai. They all come together in a book that has just been published.
Some years ago, Gyan Prakash, a history professor from Princeton University, was wading through many dry documents in the British Library in London, when he came across an unusual manuscript—a mystery novel, The Tower of Silence, written in 1927 by Phiroshaw Jamsetjee Chevalier (real name: Chaiwala). Happily distracted, Prakash started reading it and was instantly hooked. But he was soon in for a disappointment as the last few pages were missing. The mystery remained unresolved.
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