Books: A Moving Meditation on Art and Identity
In her latest novel, Alka Joshi explores identity, the burden of dual heritage, and the quiet resistance of women who refuse to shrink. It is also a study in what makes for genius and what the world does to crush it.
Reflecting on her fascination with identity, Alka Joshi has often spoken of the split between her Indian and American selves even as she wanted to be true to both. In her new novel, Six Days in Bombay (MIRA Books), she investigates this theme well beyond the hybridity between nations. Joshi also explores this fluidity in gender, art, history, memory, and power. Written in the rich sensory narrative that we have come to expect from her, she weaves her story around Mira Novak, an artist celebrated for her unapologetic vision, and Sona Falstaff, a nurse who gets entrusted with fulfilling Mira’s dying wish.
Set in 1937, in the waning years of the British Raj, the novel opens in a hospital in Bombay, where Sona, an Anglo-Indian nurse, tends to bodies and follows orders. Not one of history’s loud characters, Sona has learned to survive by becoming small, by not asking for attention. She lives on the margins of the empire—British enough to pass, Indian enough to be overlooked.
Instead of grand imperial scenes, Joshi gives us the everyday abrasions of colonial life: an English doctor who ignores Sona’s concern for her patient, a matron who questions her morality, a hospital that smells of carbolic acid and hierarchy. One senses the weight of colonialism in who speaks, who stands, and who waits.
At the center of the novel is Mira, the half-Indian, half-Czech famous young painter. Just like Sona, Mira is caught in her multiracial identity. And just like Amrita Sher-Gil—the famous artist who inspired Mira’s character—Mira’s cultural hybridity, her refusal of domestic life, her intense friendships, and her fleeting affairs with both men and women, make her a threat to the gendered and racial boundaries of society. A storm of contradictions, she refuses to be palatable and beautiful in the way men desire. Just as her art refuses to be placed in neat categories. She refuses to let her brush be anything but an instrument to unsettle and provoke. She paints female nudes not for male pleasure but to reclaim the female body from colonial and patriarchal gaze.
When Mira dies in the hospital, after a mistreated miscarriage, she leaves behind three paintings and one instruction: for Sona to deliver them to three people across Europe. As Sona goes on this journey, each city—Florence, Prague, Paris—offers a different mirror, a different pocket of longing and grief. In Prague, a war between friends had long been simmering. In Paris, the story of an old betrayal uncovers some long-forgotten secrets. In Florence, an old lover tries to remember what Mira meant. In a world that forgets so easily, Mira’s paintings become her resistance, what survives when her body does not.
In delivering Mira’s paintings, Sona finds the outlines of her own story—a woman shaped by colonialism but not defined by it, marked by grief but not undone. Sona begins the novel as a woman trained to disappear. But as she reconstructs Mira’s life, she begins to reconstruct her own voice.
Joshi’s portrayal of Sona’s quiet awakening, through Mira’s presence and paintings, is itself a feminist arc. A graduate in art history from Stanford, Joshi also leans into that background to paint a vivid portrait of the artist, her art, and the times she lived in. The book also raises these questions: Who gets to be called a great artist? Who curates the canon? What is the cost of being a woman artist?
As Mira and Sona carry each other through the novel, we see how women have always carried each other’s stories when the world has refused to. Joshi’s Six Days in Bombay digs deep into the quiet labor women do to keep these stories from disappearing.
A USC Annenberg Writing Fellow, Pooja Garg is the deputy editor of Khabar. Her cover story (“What Matters to Indian American Voters in the South”) was picked by the Atlanta Press Club as a Print News finalist at the 2025 Awards of Excellence. The award results are still awaited. Connect with her at linktr.ee/pooja.garg.
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