Breakaway Books

Authored by Alka Joshi; Published March 2025; Historical Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

There is something dreamy about the idea of discovering oneself in a weeks-long journey through the famous old cities of Europe. But, it’s not necessarily something I would expect for an Indian-English nurse in the 1930s—yet this is what we find in Six Days in Bombay.

In Six Days in Bombay, nurse Sona is shocked to be fired from her hospital job in Bombay after the mysterious death of a wealthy patient, Mira. Reeling from the dismissal and the concurrent death of her mother, Sona discovers that the deceased patient has left her several paintings that she intended for friends across Europe and decides to set off to deliver them herself. Her journey to Prague, Paris, and Florence gives Sona a much clearer view of Mira, herself, and her family history.

For me, Sona is an easy narrator to love. Her compassion for her patients and colleagues immediately set her apart from the other nurses, and her care for her mother feels tender, the only family she has left. Mira, on the other hand, might be considered the protagonist of the book, although of a very more complex nature—every friend of hers that Sona meets shows Mira’s extensive flaws, including her cruelty, her betrayal, her unreliability. Sona struggles to reconcile this person with the patient she knew for a little under a week and who provided so much light in Sona’s daily routine. But the depiction of Mira holds up a mirror to who we are as people: growing, stumbling, and hurting those we love along the way. It sparks exactly the introspection that Sona, and perhaps many of us, need in our lives: What will we leave behind when we go? Who will have wounds left untended?

Sona has a distinctly untraditional love story, especially for the 1930s, but the novel is far more centered on her relationship with her absent English father and another patient who becomes a father figure, Dr. Stoddard. The doctor gently walks Sona to the brink of forgiveness for her father who abandoned her, encouraging her, but leaving her to make the choice for herself. I loved Dr. Stoddard, a charming, engaging, elderly man who is exactly the guide I wanted for Sona. He was also precisely the fairy godfather Sona needed in her travels through Europe, which sounded far more delightful than I imagine most travel actually was in the 1930s—so very civilized! Even the backdrop of the impending war intruded only briefly on the story, not nearly enough to cause inconvenience or pose any serious obstacle.

Six Days in Bombay is a lovely tale of romance, forgiveness, and legacy. And really, who doesn’t want to imagine traveling around Europe on a journey of self-discovery?