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The Jumbie Bird is the tragic story of an East Indian family stranded in Trinidad, betrayed by the authorities and discarded by Mother India.

No-one can escape the sinister call of the Jumbie Bird, a ghostly message of death. It haunts the childhood world of Jamini: his father, a struggling jeweller; his fierce, proud grandfather, Kale Khan, a born fighter who dreams of returning to India; and the doomed relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Lakshmi.

Ismith Khan was born in 1925 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in a house that looked out on the famous Woodford Square where much of the action of The Jumbie bird takes place. Indeed this is where much of the drama of pre-independence politics in Trinidad was enacted through the years that Khan was growing up. His grandfather, Kale Khan, on whom the character in the novel is based, was Pathan, one of the fiercely independent, mountain-dwelling people whose ancestral homelands straddle what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pathans are renowned for their courage and military prowess: they resisted the British in India for generations and are presently involved in another colonial war, fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. They are a proud people with a strong sense of their own traditions and culture. Like the fictional character, the ‘real life’ Kale Khan was very conscious of his Pathan background and tried to instil the values of his culture to his only grandson. In a letter to the critic Arthur Drayton, Ismith Khan wrote of his grandfather that he was ever involved in all things anti-British… his was a rebelliousness, his life was one of dissent, he ridiculed the Raj, chastised fellow Indians for being run over rough shod by the Sahibs.