Kunal Basu

Novels

• The Opium Clerk, 2001

Hiran, the eponymous clerk of the title, is born in 1857: the year of Mutiny and the year his father dies. Brought to Calcutta by his widowed mother he turns out to have few talents, apart from an uncanny ability to read a man's lies in his palm. When luck gets him a job at the auction house, Hiran finds himself embroiled in a mysterious trade, and even more deeply embroiled in the affairs of his nefarious superior, the infamous Mr. Jonathan Crabbe and his opium addicted wife. An unlikely hero, Hiran is caught up in rebellion and war, buffeted by storms at sea, by love and intrigue, innocently implicated in fraud and dark dealings.

• The Miniaturist, 2003

Set in the Mughal court of Akbar the Great in the 16th century, this novel tells the story of Bihzad, son of the chief court painter. A child prodigy, Bihzad is groomed to take his father's place in the imperial court but the precocious and brilliant artist soon tires of imperial commissions and develops a grand and forbidden obsession. He leads a dual life – spending his nights painting the Emperor as his lover, and his days recording the Emperor's official biography in miniatures. But rumours about the wild, passionate nature of his secret drawings bring his enemies out into the open, who use his art to destroy him.

• Racists, 2006

1855: on a deserted island off the coast of Africa, the most audacious experiment ever envisaged is about to begin. To settle an argument that has raged inconclusively for decades, two scientists decide to raise a pair of infants, one black, one white, on a barren island, exposed to the dangers all around them, tended only by a young nurse whose muteness renders her incapable of influencing them in any way, for good or for bad. They will grow up without speech, without civilisation, without punishment or play. In this primitive environment, the children will develop as their primitive natures dictate.^[2]

• The Yellow Emperor's Cure, 2011

Lisbon, 1898: philandering surgeon Antonio Maria discovers his beloved father is dying of syphilis, scourge of both rich and poor. Determined to find a cure, Antonio sets sail for Peking in the hope that traditional Chinese medicine has the answer that eludes the West. But when Antonio encounters the alluringly independent Fumi, he finds the first love he cannot leave behind.

• Kalkatta, 2015

Jami is the Gigolo King of Kalkatta. Smuggled into India from Bangladesh and given refuge by his uncle, a leader of the ruling Communist Party, he grows up in Zakaria Street—a Little Baghdad of the old—dreaming of becoming a pukka Kalkatta-wallah. When friendship with a local gang disqualifies him from school, he ends up as assistant to a passport forger, and then a masseur. Soon enough, innocent massage leads to 'plus plus treatments', and Kalkatta opens its doors, drawing Jami into the world of the rich and famous, housewives, tourists and travelling executives, and occasionally to high-paying and dangerous 'parties '. Danger looms, too, from rivals and the police, and the ever-present risk of losing his cover. Jami's shadowy double life takes a turn for the unexpected when he meets Pablo, a young boy who suffers from leukemia, and his single mother Mandira. Made to oscillate between his refugee family, the neighbourhood gang, his massage-parlour clients, even the cultured world of Bengali intellectuals inhabited by Mandira, he succeeds in becoming a true Kalkattawallah, but a stranger to himself. Until his love for Pablo threatens to destroy everything, and even drive away from his beloved city.

Short story collections

The Japanese Wife (2008)