Northern India, 1930
In the fiction English township of Jamalpur is a railway station on the East Indian Railway Loopline. It is the workshop for maintaining the rolling stock of the entire East Indian Railway company.
Covering a good fifty square miles of flat land in the middle of a purple plain, it grows each year, sprawling aimlessly across the landscape.
A marble statue of Queen Victoria stands in the town square; and in the hills above, there is a strange black boulder that remarkably resembles the Empress of All India.
It is the training ground for Railway personnel, both official lower class, and the worker, graded according to sports ability, colour, caste, and education, in that order. The real quality bosses were the covenanted, straight out from Blighty wallahs; worshipped, feared, and greatly envied. Every mother with daughters prays nightly for single men to arrive.
Everyone in town is either sex-mad or plain loony.
At church services, Sgt. O'Leary leaves his place beside his mistress, Mrs. Ray, to fondle the beautiful organist, Jane, in mid-hymn, despite her cries of outrage. The town's richest man, Mr. Edwards, comes home to find his daughter standing on one leg and tweeting under the impression that she is a bird.
New oddities arrive, seemingly, on each train. An unhinged clergyman, the Rev. Morgan, comes to take the place of the clergyman who tipples. A blond adventuress hits town with claims upon the manager of the local club, where the annual ball of the Railroad Apprentices is to take place.
The weather grows ominous. Menacing growls are heard from up in the hills. And not long afterward, a blond head and a dismembered body is fished in neatly tied parcels out of the Maidan Lake...
This sparkling comic novel highlights the conflicts, rivalries, and erotic complications that disturb the orderly surface of Jamalpur, with devasting results ...
Roar of the Tiger was originally published as After the Ball Was Over.
