The Setting Sun Read Online Free PDF

request, I contact my brothers, asking if any of them found papers about Bill’s time in India after our mother’s death a few years ago. In the meantime, my historian colleague informs me that he’s written books on the Independence Movement in Bombay Province and has recently begun to focus on Satara District more specifically. He’s especially interested in a secret Memorandum Bill’s supposed to have written about the ParallelGovernment. Google reveals that Satara is a remote country district several hundred miles south of Mumbai, and that the Parallel Government was an armed underground movement formed after Gandhi’s imprisonment in August 1942. I’m now burning to know more about Bill’s involvement.
    Frustratingly, Bhosle doesn’t add much to what he said about him in his first email. He does, however, tell me where the relevant archives are located, offers some pointers about histories of Sindh and directs me to what he describes as the best book so far on the Parallel Government, by one A.B. Shinde. Unfortunately, it’s not in the British Library; nor can I find a copy for sale on the internet. When I report back from my brothers in the negative, Bhosle starts taking longer and longer to return my emails. Eventually, he says he’ll collate everything he’s got on Bill after his next research trip to Mumbai. He’s planning two weeks there in December. It’s only intuition, but I can’t help feeling he’s increasingly reluctant to answer my questions. Why?
    By the end of summer, the idea’s taken root. For the first time in years I’ll be free this Christmas. I could spend part of the vacation in the archives, alongside Bhosle himself, perhaps. Maybe, after all, something of the India of my father’s time has survived the tsunami of globalisation driving this latest tiger economy? It’s a golden opportunity to add to my knowledge of Bill. I only knew him for my first eleven years; that’s just two years more than the period he spent in India, which was no doubt crucial in making the man I remember. On the other hand, I wonder how much personal material there’s likely to be in public archives. Will I really learn much about what he was like as a young man from administrative reports?
    Still undecided, I contact Bhosle again in mid-October, asking if we can meet over Christmas. In his reply, the professor tells me he won’t be going to Mumbai in December after all. Nor can he receive me in his home city of Kolhapur, where I’ve offered to travel to meet him. However, he promises toadvise Dr Dhavatkar, the director of the Elphinstone Archives and a friend of his, to smooth my passage should I decide to go. His apparent evasiveness is disconcerting. But even if Bhosle’s so inexplicably unavailable all of a sudden, he’s given me enough to get started. If I don’t seize the chance, I know I’ll regret it. Before I can change my mind, I book the flight.
    On 26 November, ten days after getting my visa, and barely two weeks before my intended departure date, Mumbai is attacked by a dozen heavily armed Islamists, who apparently arrived by sea from Pakistan. Scores of civilians are killed in and around sites favoured by Westerners in the city, as well as in the main railway station. The Foreign Office immediately advises against all non-essential travel. Shocked by graphic pictures of the still-burning Taj hotel, the bloodied platforms of Victoria Terminus and the heart-rending story of the Israeli infant saved by his Indian ayah from the mayhem in Nariman House, I question the wisdom of my trip. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 provoked serious sabre-rattling between Pakistan and India and only a few years earlier the subcontinental neighbours were on the brink of nuclear war. The current rhetoric between the two sides is reaching an alarming pitch.
    ‘I wouldn’t go, if I were you,’ Anna advises when we meet again at the beginning of December in a Waterloo pub. ‘It’s