A disappearance in Fiji: a novel

1914, Fiji: 25-year-old police sergeant Akal Singh would rather be anywhere but this tropical paradise. After a promising start to his career in his native India and in Hong Kong, he got sent to work in Fiji as punishment for a professional mistake he's too embarrassed to talk about. Lonely and humiliated, Akal longs for the day he can finally solve a big case and win the inspector-general's favor, thereby redeeming himself and being permitted to return to Hong Kong. Otherwise, he fears he will be stuck in Fiji forever. When an indentured Indian woman goes missing from a sugarcane plantation and Fiji's newspapers scream "kidnapping," the inspector-general reluctantly assigns Akal the case, giving Akal strict instructions to view this investigation as nothing more than cursory. Fiji's economy depends on the already-controversial indentured servitude system; a high-profile case like this could imbalance the fragile colony. But as soon as Akal arrives on the plantation, he identifies several troubling inconsistencies in the plantation owners' stories, and it seems there is more to this disappearance than meets the eye. Over the course of his investigation, Akal must confront not only the painful realities of the indentured workers' existence and the racism of the British colonizers in Fiji, but also his own thorny notions of personhood and caste. As he closes in on the truth of what happened to the missing woman, he must ask himself: Should this case be the one that gets him sent in triumph back to Hong Kong? Or is it not so bad in Fiji after all?