“It was finally here. Bombay Fever. The drug-resistant super-disease that public health experts in India had been dreading for decades.
Now they had to deal with its full, brutal, relentless force.”
Bombay, or Mumbai, if you prefer, is home for me. It is the city where I was born, and where I’ve spent the majority of my life. It is a city that is constantly on the move; constantly changing. But over the years I have seen it groan under the pressure of a massive population that is still expanding on the one hand, and the severe lack of infrastructure to support that population on the other hand. One good rain is all it seems to take to put the brakes on this city now. And what if this Bombay/Mumbai of today has to deal with a real, urgent medical crisis? That is the frightening question that Sidin Vadukut asks, and attempts to answer, in this cracker of a medical thriller.
The novel has an ensemble cast, and it is difficult to pick out one main character. It begins however with a journalist Hormazd, in Switzerland, where he witnesses a Sri-Lankan woman suddenly drop down and die in a gruesome manner. Hormazd travels back to Bombay, a carrier of the deadly disease–but he doesn’t know that yet. Other characters of note are: Aayush Vajpeyi a social medical officer in Mumbai, part of the Srivatsa programme–a national programme to combat drug resistant diseases, who uncovers the existence of the outbreak; Janani Ganesh is a journalist working on an article about SMOs; Nitin Phadavnis, the Prime Minister, caught between protocol and the need to safeguard citizens; Dr Ratnakar Joshi from the National Institute of Virology in Pune, tasked with identifying the virus causing the outbreak; Dr Anil Bansal, one of the owners of a private clinic, who senses early on that he might be dealing with an epidemic; Sati Rout, another SMO, dealing with the outbreak at the airport; Mohan Thomas, the owner of a restaurant on the Mumbai-Pune highway; Nishtha Sharma, the Chief Minster of Maharashtra, who must step up and lead her state out of the crisis; Annalisa Salmone, an American journalist working for “Buzzwire”. This mixed bag of civil servants, politicians, doctors and journalists and their attempts to deal with the outbreak; even as the general public panics are what make up the core of this medical thriller.
The scariest part of the book is how real it all is. The disease itself, is created in part, by self-medication and over-prescription of antibiotics–both extremely prevalent in India. The sluggish and confused response to the outbreak rings true as well, and the panic of the public exacerbated by half-truths and WhatsApp forwards make it all very believable. Sidin’s last non-fiction work, The Sceptical Patriot, was well-researched and it is admirable how research-focused even this work of fiction is. God forbid, but if an outbreak does occur, I imagine it will all play out exactly like this!
Sidin also invents a couple of interesting concepts, which sound so real, that it was disappointing to know that they don’t exist yet-the Beta Protocol and the Multi-Sampler. I would love to see a full-fledged thriller with the Beta Protocol front and centre.
Characterization is second to plot and pace in this book, but even then, one becomes invested in the characters. And the plot and pace more than make up for the characters. There is no point where I got bored or wanted to stop reading. Even when there is an info-dump, the writing and trivia are so captivating that one stays connected.
Bombay Fever is a wake-up call of sorts. It is an ugly truth couched in fiction.
Author Bio:http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Sidin-Vadukut/100352232
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