Book Review: Room 000

Book: Room 000Author: Kalpish RatnaTitle: Room 000Pages: 512 pages (hardcover)Publisher: Pan Macmillan IndiaPrice: 449

Making your way through a Kalpish Ratna book is never an easy task. The devil is almost always in the details. Room 000, their newest, on the bubonic plague of 1896 in Bombay, will attest to that.

This is not the first time that surgeon-writers Ishrat Syed and Kalpana Swaminathan,, writing under the pseudonym Kalpish Ratna, have written about the Bombay plague. Their 2010 The Quarantine Papers, too, put the plague centre stage, with a story of religious divisiveness unfolding around it.

Kalpana Swaminathan, a paediatric surgeon, has written over 13 solo titles, including the Lalli series. Ishrat Syed, on the other hand, prefers to be published as part of a duo and translates Ghalib when he's not doing so.

This time, their book is a rather fertile literary re-investigation of the bubonic plague. The writers say that the story started a few years ago in a certain room in Mumbai's Grant Medical College, where those who fought off the plague, or rather tamed it, remained forgotten. A room that is today flanked by "piles of notebook, bundles of paper, mounds of ledgers shored up against" it.

And the anger they felt over the mis-spelt word in a plaque honouring Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine, the man who discovered a vaccine at the height of the plague, and saved the lives of millions around the world: "Haffkine protected millions of Indians from plague and cholera — couldn't we even protect him from a spelling mistake?"

Winding its way through the various landscapes of 19th century Bombay, the novel, in its quirky and heavy medico-adventure tilt, presents several key people. There's Dr Acacio Gabriel Viegas, a Goan who stumbles on the first identified case of plague in the labyrinthine Vor Gaddi. And Nusserwanji Surveyor, a bacteriologist, who finds the bacillus that causes the disease in a sample from a patient's groin lymph. Alexandre-Émile-Jean Yersin, a bacteriologist-physician, who wades through Chinatown in Hong Kong in hot pursuit of the monster germ, and after whom the plague bacillus, Yersina pestis, is named. There is also the impressive Tatya Lakshman, the first detective of the Maharashtra police, who leads us to some rather delightful distracting adventures.

And then there's Haffkine, who with his distinguishable voice, comes to Mumbai at a moment he is needed the most. He not only finds the vaccine, but also volunteers by injecting himself with it for the first time. The state eventually honours him with the Haffkine Institute of Infectious Disease Research.

There is a lot of medical jargon, with cadavers and sliced up mice appearing with dangerous alacrity. And yet, as one makes their way through the germs and microscopes, there is also the heightened will to turn the pages.

On the fringes of the quarantined labs are 'the natives', who die in astonishing numbers, usually before fetching a doctor, and resort to horrendous means like branding the delirious patient, already in pain.

The writer duo's inimitable literary style is what holds a daunting read like this in place. They investigate a ground they are well-versed with, and pepper it with imaginative metaphors. They hop from Vor Gaddi to Argyll Street to the shanties of Hong Kong's Chinatown with ease. They inhabit a space seldom seen in the Indian literary scene.

And there's Mumbai, a perennial muse which is almost a trope in their writings. Slowly, and lyrically, they thaw away to unravel the geological past of a city, a large part of which today remains forgotten. Did you know that the Dr Nusserwanji Choksy Wards at the Arthur Road Hospital are dedicated to Choksy because he painstakingly recorded more than 4,000 plague cases. Or that the Bombay City Improvement Trust, that led to the construction of South Bombay, would have not happened had it not been for the plague?

You don't? You could do well by reading this book then.