Review: The Passage East

Anil Nijhawan, The Passage East, (Blue Horizon, 2026)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/246178868-the-passage-east-1934

The Passage East, Anil Nijhawan

A saga of four friends, from Calcutta to London

Damon talks a boy out of a petulant, dangerous sit-down in the middle of the street and thus makes a new friend, Robert.

Now both of university age, Damon takes Robert to India to stay in the house of Damon’s rich uncle Fred, who has left the house in the care of servants.

In Calcutta, the boys meet Flora, a girl from an orphanage who bizarrely moves in with them. Flora shows them ‘how the other half lives’, and they witness the lazy extravagance of the British as contrasted against the poverty of the Indians.

This is set against a background of the Ghandi movement, so the boys also see India from the point of view of the people fighting back. Did the ‘British, get out of India’ slogans apply to them?

A crime is committed, and they are unsure how far their involvement reaches. They take in another stray, a French journalist who tells them some background related to the crime, and the boys investigate the case.

Meanwhile, there is more to Flora than meets the eye; Damon and Robert are fully involved in her story now. And there is another crime.

Years later, back in London, they have to face the ramifications for what they did on one day at Uncle Fred’s cottage in Calcutta. War in Europe changes them and their relationships to each other.

The characters’ behaviour is sometimes hard to understand, and the dialogue is a bit unnatural in places, yet a striking contrast between the two boys’ personalities emerges.

The English boys’ wide-eyed discovery of India is charming. They have to navigate very grown up problems, and they have to do it in a foreign country where they don’t know how things operate or what people or forces are against them. As the story continues into their adulthood, it becomes a saga, their adult relationships coloured by what happened in their youth.