The Days Toppled Over is the second novel by Indian author, Vidya Madabashi. In Bangalore, at 8pm on a Sunday night, Malli puts aside her proof-reading and medical transcribing to wait for her younger brother, Surya’s regular phone call. When it doesn’t come, at first, she rationalises that there may be any number of reasons for this uncharacteristic omission. When her emails and texts go unanswered, she becomes more concerned.

A week earlier, in Sydney, Surya is excited when attractive Bobby has agreed to go out with him. He works as a delivery driver for Golden Fort Indian restaurant, while she manages another branch. He’s on a student visa (Hospitality Management), but his boss (and landlord) Narsing has promised him a promotion, and he’s hopeful of applying for a 457 visa with a view to permanent residency.

He hasn’t been entirely honest with his sister. He has already completed the Business Management course she thinks he’s doing, but doesn’t want to go back to India: he wants to live a different life, in Australia. Although “He’d thought that leaving behind his old life would replace his grief-filled memories with new, happier ones. But his grief continued to cast its long shadow over the rest of his life, tainting everything.” First, he needs to get out from under his slave-driver boss’s control.

Unusually for a thirty-six-year-old woman, Malli lives in the Vanavan Retirement Village, at the suggestion of her late mother’s good friend, Mrs Munshi. Malli has selective mutism since a young age, only able to speak to family at home. But since her parents died, and Surya went to Sydney, no one except Malli has heard her voice. At Vanavan, she looks after the residents’ needs, but they also keep a caring eye on her.

When no call from Surya is forthcoming, Malli’s concern increases: she ends up agreeing to travel to Sydney with a Missing Persons website administrator who is going to meet his sister. Nayan is a strange combination of worldly and utterly naïve, but she feels she has no choice but to trust him when he manages to track down the place where Surya was working. Can they find Surya before tragedy strikes?

With this tale, Madabushi demonstrates the trap that unsuspecting foreign students can so easily fall into while trying to survive in an unfamiliar environment, especially when there are unscrupulous types waiting to take advantage.

Madabushi gives the reader some wonderful descriptive prose: “isolation is a fertile cesspool, a septic tank around which other maladies congregate like eager summer mosquitoes” and “whenever anyone turned to Malli in anticipation of speech, her heart thumped, her brow creased with fear and her tongue grew heavy and thick, as though a red brick had been placed on it” are examples.

She also gives her characters wise words, insightful observations like: “In her less sentimental hours, Malli scoffs at herself, for the weakness in the human mind that sees it fill up all its cracks with soft and meaningless putty” and “We all just see what we want to see. There is an actual art to not seeing. It is a hard thing to do but we’ve mastered it. Like closing all our inner doors and windows, not letting the dark get in. because if we really looked, it would turn or lives upside down and some of the misery will become ours”. Topical, moving and thought-provoking.