Bombay Swastika

Think what it meant being a Jew in Nazi Germany. Then, read up on what happened to homosexuals. Simply adding the two together doesn’t do justice. For Jewish homosexuals, the persecution needs to be compounded—like the Seth’s interest—to get at what lay in store. Reasonably good at math, Siegfried Steiger knew he was in for the compounded fucking of his life. Bombay Swastika swings from a Nazi Berlin gearing up for its Final Solution, to 1964 Bombay, where Ernst Steiger, a German Jew, accidentally finds himself caught up in the murder of a

young tribal, killed amidst allegations of something being stolen from a secure, American compound. With the monsoons laying siege on the city, the reader accompanies Ernst past Bombay’s refugee camps and haunted whorehouses; food shortages, textbook mafias, communist protests against American PL 480 Food Aid, and peculiar happenings at India’s nuclear facility; where Dr. Homi J. Bhabha, the nation’s atomic mastermind, gets drawn into a

conspiracy hatched in his absence.

This one-of-a-kind thriller unfolds through the eyes of a motley cast— Salim Ali, the South Indian, Muslim

engineer and committed Marxist; Bhairavi, the enigmatic

and sensual refugee girl; Sethji, the dowry messiah; Tsering Tufan—Homi Bhabha’s Smiling Buddha—dying from radiation exposure; and Andhi Ma, the blind mendicant who sees what we can’t. Bombay Swastika is an exploration of the dark world of absolute truths.