It was at a bar in South London’s Croydon that ex-Bandra resident and journalist Godfrey Joseph Pereira first heard the story of an unscrupulous English smuggler, and his insane life in Bombay. “This was over a decade ago when I was visiting the UK,” shares Florida-based Pereira over a telephonic interview. “My friend and I were sitting at this local bar, probably discussing my writing and journalism, when this man and his son, who were eavesdropping from the next table, joined us. In Croydon, everyone knows everybody—these guys were acquainted with my friend. We got talking. During the course of that conversation, the man told me that he wanted to show me something. We met the next day at the very same bar, and he showed me letters [written by his father to himself], which completely blew me away. His life [the smuggler’s] was just so fascinating.”

Nothing came of it then. But, several years later, in the summer of 2015, Pereira happened to meet up with this man’s son in New York City. “He handed me a large shopping bag, which contained all those letters, hoping I would do something with it.” They were a gold mine, recounts Pereira, and detailed the tragic story of the young man’s grandfather, which unfolded on Cross Island, an uninhabited stretch of land off the Bombay coast, ending with his incarceration at an asylum in England. These letters became the framework of Pereira’s just released novel, Four and Twenty Blackbirds (Speaking Tiger), which tells the story of Charlie Strongbow, a fictional schizophrenic Englishman, who like the man he had read about in the letters, operated in Bombay during the Partition Era, and was fuelled by an unrealistic dream to set up a smuggling den on Cross Island.