The Earthspinner by Anuradha Roy

First published in the UK in 2021; published by HarperVia on July 5, 2022

The Earthspinner is in part a story of forbidden love. More fundamentally, it is a story of creative obsession and prejudice against art that crosses implied boundaries. Elango is a potter, carrying on the tradition of his caste. To make ends meet, he also drives an autorickshaw. His favorite passenger is Zohra, a girl who walks with a limp. Elango falls in love with Zohra but “they belong to tribes that hated each other and he knew they could never be together.” Elango “could not utter what she was, a Muslim. The space between the two was a charnel house of burnt and bloodied human flesh, a giant crack through the earth that was like an open mouth waiting to swallow him.”

Elango dreams of an earthen horse and comes to believe that if he shapes the horse from clay, Zohra will be his. The novel follows Elango as he devotes his free time to creating the horse of his dreams. Zohra’s grandfather, a blind calligrapher, carves into the horse a beautiful poem about riding the freedom of imagination. But Anuradha Roy wants the reader to understand that freedom in India only lives in the imagination. Elango is not free to marry Zohra. Nor is he free to express himself with a horse that does not suit the arbiters of his religion.

Elango’s grandfather once made horses for temples. People who see the horse believe a temple is where it belongs. They do not realize that the poem decorating the horse is written in Urdu, “the language of mullahs,” a desecration of a temple horse — at least in the view of Hindu temple priests.

Elango’s story is narrated by Sara, whose mother is a journalist. As a young girl, Sara learned the craft of pottery from Elango — to the chagrin of neighbors who thought she had no business learning such things.

The story begins and ends in the present. Five years have passed since Elango’s story ended. Everything has changed; the villagers have made new lives; the village has melted into the earth, taking with it the memories of the horrific event that is the novel’s defining moment. Sara remembers her father telling her that “change was the work of the earth spinning, spinning as it always had.”

Sara is studying English literature in England and making pots to relieve her stress. She notes the difference between rural India, where neighbors are nosy, and England, where “curiosity is bad manners.” One of Sara’s friends is experiencing, like Elango, a form of love that is forbidden by her culture.

The collegiate Sara catches up with Elango and becomes an audience to whom he can unburden himself, “a girl who shared his language as well as momentous bits of his past.” She decides to tell his story. Sara emphasizes how he has changed, how life has taken him on an unexpected path. She also assesses how she has changed, solidifying change as one of the novel’s themes, embodied in Sara’s understanding that the cosmos is “hell-bent on doing things we can neither anticipate nor prevent.”

A dog is central to the story, adding further evidence to my conviction that every work of fiction is improved by the addition of a dog. The dog is lost when its owners suffer a carjacking. Elango adopts the dog and it becomes beloved by the village. The dog creates tension for a character who knows that its former owners are searching for him, but the character is convinced that the dog is happy and should not be uprooted again. Uprooting and rebirth are among the novel’s themes. Sara explains that where she comes from, “we have always known that ordinary days can explode without warning, leaving us broken, collecting the scattered pieces of our lives, no clear idea how to start again.”

Religious fanaticism is the story’s darkest theme. Yet Roy makes clear that religion is not necessarily to blame for the fanatics that turn religion into a vehicle for hate. Sara’s father helps her realize that the war between Hindu and Muslim is not about religion at all, but it more like the blood feud that underlies Romeo and Juliet. The story’s most hopeful theme is the possibility of repair and restoration, of fixing what’s broken or learning that we don’t need the broken thing after all.

The Earthspinner might be viewed as an allegory of the teacher and student. It might be viewed as a love story or the story of a young woman’s unrequited (and perhaps unrecognized) love. It might be viewed as an indictment of prejudice in India and the larger world. It might be viewed as a commentary on the challenges and costs of artistic creation. It might be viewed as a reflection on tests of character, how we pass or fail them or fail to recognize them. The Earthspinner is a deceptively simple novel that works on many levels, giving the reader a trove of possibilities to unpack. Like all of Roy’s work, The Earthspinner is worthy of a careful unpacking.

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Blue-Skinned Gods by S.J. Sindu

Published by ‎ Soho Press on November 2, 2021

People engage in spiritual journeys to achieve personal growth. Blue-Skinned Gods tells the story of a man who needed to shed the cloak of spiritualism before he could find himself.

Kalki has blue skin. In an ashram on the outskirts of Tamil Nadu, Kalki’s parents raise him to be a god, the tenth incarnation of Vishnu. Kalki sometimes thinks he sees earlier incarnations, particularly Krishna. During playtime, he reenacts stories from Hindu mythology, always playing the heroic god. As Kalki gets older, he leads meditation and yoga sessions in the ashram. Even as a child, he engages in prayers and rituals that heal visitors. Or, at least, he believes he is healing them.

Despite — or because of — his status as a god, Kalki lacks faith. At some point he comes to realize that gods don’t need faith. Others have faith in their gods, but gods have nothing to prove. Yet Kalki has doubts, even as he passes tests that prove his divinity. S.J. Sindu plants clues that allow the reader to understand that the tests might be rigged, that Kalki’s father is using Kalki to attract believers to their ashram. Kalki is his meal ticket. He jealously protects Kalki from any outside influence that might have a negative impact on the ashram. Unfortunately for Kalki, his father believes that any glimpse of the larger world might divert Kalki from the course that his father has plotted.

Culture and religion are significant forces in the story’s background. Kalki’s family follows Vishnu. Kalki’s controlling father refuses to allow him to read Hindu texts favored by worshippers of Shiva. More important to the plot is India’s caste system. When Kalki falls in love with Roopi, a girl he believes he cured who works as a servant at the ashram, Kalki’s father puts an end to their relationship. Roopi comes from one of the higher castes but she isn’t Brahmin and therefore wouldn’t be a suitable mate for Kalki even if he were a mere mortal. Kalki’s father also forbids a friendship between Kalki and a transvestite whose status as a hijra is honored by Hindu mythology. Sindu illustrates social injustice in India by contrasting the god Kalki is forced to be with gods in his lineage who were less concerned with caste and sexuality.

As Kalki gets a bit older, foreign visitors to the ashram give him insight into the world he has never glimpsed. Kalki reads books that his father has forbidden for fear that literature might open Kalki’s mind to new understandings. One of those visitors exposes Kalki’s father as a hypocrite. A female visitor who might be in love with Kalki’s mother drives a wedge between his parents.

Kalki’s best friend is a cousin named Lakshman. Kalki’s true test comes when Lakshman’s mother is stricken with cancer. Lakshman and Kalki are separated for years after Lakshman moves to America. Their next meeting marks a turning point in the novel.

The last half of the story is driven by Kalki’s identity quest. If Kalki is not a god, perhaps he is a guru. Or maybe he’s a drunk. Or bi. Or a singer. As Kalki tries to understand himself, he knows only that he feels like a fraud who has harmed the people he cares about. It’s not easy being blue.

The story is told in memory. We learn early on that in the present, Kalki is a professor. He tells his students that religion is in a crisis perpetrated by scandal: Catholic priests and Hindu swamis using their positions to sexually abuse children; Middle Eastern honor killings, terrorist acts, and extreme reprisals committed in the name of religion; Buddhist monks inciting genocide in Sri Lanka. Having come to understand that he was not a god but a fraud, it is no surprise that the adult Kalki views much of religion as perpetuating a harmful charade for the benefit of charlatans.

The story at times threatens to become a soap opera, particularly when the controlling nature and unfaithfulness of Kalki’s father drives Kalki’s mother to an extreme response. Sindu's characterization of the father is a bit heavy handed. A scene in which Lakshman explodes at Kalki over a perceived grievance makes little sense, given that Lakshman is just fine with Kalki before and after the explosion The attempt at inclusiveness (including an off-camera gay sex scene) sometimes feels a bit forced. The plot loses some of its appeal after Kalki journeys to America and experiences a whirlwind identity crisis.

Yet the story as a whole is engaging. The lessons it offers about religion and intolerance, truth and fraud, are worthwhile. And Kalki, blue skin notwithstanding, comes across as representative of other young people whose parents have tried to fit them into a life that pleases the parent without regard to the child’s right to find his or her own way of living.

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The Archer by Shruti Swamy

Published by  Algonquin Books on September 7, 2021

Like many stories set in India, The Archer is about contrasts of privilege. While the story involves (and is promoted as) a woman’s quest to improve herself as a dancer, it is more fundamentally a relationship drama involving a wealthy man who weds a poor woman over his family’s objections and imposes his family’s expectations upon her. That drama is set against the backdrop of Bombay in the 1960s and the social restraints imposed by Indian society upon women.

Vidya was raised in a chaali, a communal, gossipy group “where children were largely left to their own devices, with a distracted eye of some mother glancing out from time to time over each child, and come suppertime a child could be fed in any house it visited.” Vidya’s father traveled for work and was usually absent from the home. Her mother died (by means that Vidya’s memory has suppressed) when Vidya was young, leaving Vidya to be raised by her father and giving her the duty of raising a younger brother who becomes entirely dependent upon her. As a boy, Vidya’s brother is the family’s more important child. Vidya’s assigned role — a role she eventually rejects — is to take care of the home and to assure that her brother’s and father’s needs are met.

As a girl, Vidya wanted to play the tabla, a drum that only boys are allowed to play. Her mother told her, perhaps prophetically, that if she asks why she isn’t allowed to do something, she will always be unhappy. Vidya’s grandmother tells her that “sometimes god puts a soul in the wrong body” and that Vidya should have been a boy with her “restless” and “unsatisfied” nature. Boys can find an outlet for their restlessness but, as a girl, Vidya is fated to get married and live in her mother-in-law’s home. Vidya tells her grandmother that she will never get married. Fate, circumstances, social pressure, and even love all make it difficult for Vidya to keep that promise.

Vidya’s true calling, she believes, is to be a dancer. Much of the novel explores Vidya’s love of dance, her perseverance in dance lessons despite a strictness from her instructors that almost borders on cruelty, her relationships with those instructors and her occasional performances.

In her first-person narrative, Vidya also describes her decision to leave home and to attend college. Vidya’s only true friend is a student named Radha, another woman whose soul is in the wrong body. Vidya’s relationship with Radha illustrates another taboo that limits the choices both women are allowed to make.

Vidya narrates her eventual marriage to Rustom, a young man who comes from a prosperous family and who seems attentive and kind, a man whose values appear to be more western than traditional Indian in his regard of women as (almost) equal partners in a marriage. Since Rustom’s family holds Vidya in little regard (she doesn’t meet their standard for social class, refined manners, or skin color), their only real expectation is that she produce a male child that they fully intend to raise.

Like many stories from India, The Archer is notable for its depiction of the clash between ancient traditions that favor the upper classes and encroaching western notions of fairness and equality. Vidya’s defiance of her husband, father, in-laws, teachers, and society is commendable, but her defiance is at war with her feelings of inadequacy, promoted by a culture that views her gender and dark skin as liabilities. Only when she becomes lost in a dance does she feel at peace with her nature, allowing her to “move deeper into my body as the world became sharper.”

Vidya lives her life in conflict, proving the truth of her grandmother’s observation that she cannot reconcile herself. Vidya wants one thing and settles for another. Her plans to become an engineer, to never marry, and to always dance are at odds with the life she must live. At the end of the novel, Vidya makes a choice between dependence and independence. The choice is not one that will make her happy, at least not in the moment, but there may be no choice that will produce immediate happiness. She instead bases the choice on how she believes her conflicts can be reconciled for the best, and maybe that’s the long distance route to a happy life.

The novel’s title comes from a character in an epic story from ancient India, a gifted archer who sliced off his thumb so that he would never be better than his teacher. When a dance teacher explains the story’s relationship to dharma, Vidya doesn’t understand it. By the novel’s end, she understands how to relate the story to her own life. I can’t say I ever quite got the point, but Vidya is clearly smarter than I am.

The plot may seem be familiar to readers who have encountered similar stories. While the novel does not stand apart from other entries in the field, I appreciated Shruti Swamy’s unwillingness to force a happy ending upon Vidya. In the current century, Vidya might have more choices. In her time and place and given her circumstances, she needs to make choices that work for her, even if no choices will allow her to put her soul into a body that will allow her to live as she pleases.

Swamy’s prose captures the rhythms of dance, sometimes spinning, speeding up and slowing down, progressing and retreating. She is an observant writer, and while I could have done with fewer observations of red or yellow or blue saris, she captures the atmosphere of a Bombay that is divided between the cultured silence of the privileged and the chattering voices of the chaali. The Archer should capture the attention and perhaps the hearts of readers who appreciate honest stories of women who find a path to some form of independence, even if the best available path is not the one that fulfills their dreams.

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The Mission House by Carys Davies

Published by Scribner on February 16, 2021

“Why is it a condition of life that we are made to love things if we are only to lose them?” Hilary Byrd asks himself sad questions throughout The Mission House. Whether he will find satisfactory answers to any of life’s riddles is the question that drives the reader’s interest in Byrd’s unremarkable life.

The reader is not told much about Hilary Byrd, but we know that his life was touched by tragedy during the Troubles. His sister Wyn may be his last friend, but even that relationship is strained. Byrd is in his early 50s. He spent half his life as a librarian in the UK.  Byrd particularly enjoyed the library’s alcove of dictionaries in multiple languages and was disheartened when they were replaced by computers. He was fond of discovering words that had fallen out of use and felt saddened by their demise. His favorite forgotten word of the Norn language is dagw’’ilj’’ (pronounced dag-wall-gee), a word that means “to work continuously with poor result.” The unwanted dictionaries and forgotten words (particularly dagw’’ilj’’) might be symbolic of Byrd’s life.

Now Byrd is traveling and has made his way to India, a country that is much too hot for him. Taking a train to the mountains, where the heat is reputed to be less oppressive, he meets a kind Padre who offers him a good rate on a bungalow near the Padre’s church. The cottage was last occupied by a Canadian missionary named Henry Page.

Byrd is happy with the simple life that the cottage offers. He engages a fellow named Jamshed to drive him to the village each day in an auto rickshaw. Byrd uses these excursions to purchase food and browse books in the village library, where he learns how British rule has affected the town and the Toda people who are indigenous to the mountain region. Byrd occasionally converses with Jamshed but usually ignores him. Jamshed keeps a journal of his interactions with Byrd and fantasizes about having an enduring friendship with the man.

Jamshed’s nephew is Ravi, who works as the town barber and dreams of becoming a country-western singer. He has acquired a Stetson hat and a horse named Stephen. Ravi might also be hoping to acquire Priscilla, the young woman who lives in the presbytery with the Padre, who hopes to one day find her a suitable husband, suitable meaning “a good Christian man.” Priscilla has a short right leg and no thumbs, disabilities that, in the Padre’s view, might make her unmarriageable.

The foolishness of aging men is a central theme of The Mission House. At first with fear and then with hope, Byrd wonders whether the Padre might be thinking of him as a suitable husband for Priscilla. As he warms to the idea, he searches his conversations with the Padre for clues and gives them an optimistic spin but is invariably disappointed when the Padre mentions other potential suitors. He fears being judged a fool if he expresses any interest in Priscilla, even as he considers purchasing an engagement ring. “As long as he held it all inside himself, his feelings and everything he is doing, it seemed to him as if anything was possible.” Priscilla thinks of Byrd as a kindly uncle because he is helping her learn to sew and make scones and read English. Whether she will return Byrd’s affection seems unlikely, but who knows what might happen?

Byrd’s longing for Priscilla builds the foundation for the novel’s gentle humor. Byrd begins to dress in Henry Page’s clothes in the hope that they will make him look younger. He begins to attend church (despite having renounced Christian faith) because the Padre thinks Priscilla should have a Christian husband. (Nobody has consulted Priscilla, who views religion with a jaundiced eye.) Jamshed’s fascination with Byrd and Ravi’s pursuit of a country music career add to the story’s comic appeal.

Despite its humor, The Mission House is ultimately an exploration of lonely people who are discouraged by life. In both the Bible and the fairy tales that Priscilla is learning to read, she sees “considerable suffering and occasional joy and people doing all kinds of ugly things to each other,” an observation that sums up life as experienced by most of the novel’s characters. Like Byrd and Priscilla, Jamshed and Ravi and Henry Page are all vaguely disappointed with their lives. But The Mission House is also a novel of hope. Byrd comes to realize that his trip to the mountains in India has changed him for the better. The changes are small, but he had new experiences, learned new things, and even experienced a new love. Perhaps embracing small improvements in life rather than obsessing about unfulfilled desires is the key to living a good life.

Yet living a good life might mean putting aside one’s own desires and making sacrifices for the benefit of others. The novel’s unexpected ending is inspired by the rise of a Hindu nationalist party in India and, like nationalism everywhere, an intolerance of different religions and people who come from other places. The ending isn’t quite out of the blue — it is foreshadowed by Byrd’s reading and by chance remarks — but it changes the novel’s tone in a way that is almost shocking. There’s no need to be put off by that warning because the ending is left open, giving optimistic readers a chance to believe that good things might ultimately happen to people who prove their goodness in unexpected ways.

Still, the novel is more personal than political. The depth of its characterization and the unanswered questions it poses are as nourishing as Carys Davies’ meticulous prose. The juxtaposition of decent characters and the indecent world they inhabit makes The Mission House a layered novel that springs a new surprise with every chapter.

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Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara

Published by Random House on February 4, 2020

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a grim novel, but it uses humor to ease the pain that readers who empathize with the main characters will necessarily feel. Life is a mix of joy and sorrow; both are represented here.

Two boys and a girl have disappeared from a slum. The police, having no incentive to look for them, label them as runaways. Parents fear that they have been snatched and sold into slave labor or to harvesters of kidneys. Jai’s friend Faiz believes they have been stolen by a djinn. At age nine, Jai is prepared to believe all those theories. He also knows one of the missing boys.

Having watched countless episodes of Police Patrol, Jai decides to solve the case. He expects success to be rewarded with a career as a detective (jasoos). His house is the present headquarters of the Jasoos Jai Agency, but only when Runu, his elder sister, is not present to break up the meetings he holds with his assistants, Faiz and Pari. Runu is a track star, although running track is her own version of running away. Eventually other children go missing, including two Muslim kids, sending the basti residents into a justified panic.

While calling attention to trafficking and forced labor of children in India, Deepa Anappara also focuses on other problems: divisions of religion and caste, nationalism, sexism, corruption, poverty, and judgmental gossip. The first girl who went missing is rumored to have worked in a brothel. Cheating wives and abusive husbands are among those who “disassemble her character with the viciousness of starved dogs chancing upon a scrawny bird.” They condemn her because her skirts are too short and she has been seen chatting with a Muslim boy, proof of her “utter moral failure.” The absence of evidence that she is a brothel worker does not discourage the gossip. Some people, Anappara suggests, enjoy the misfortune of others if it gives them an opportunity to gossip and condemn.

Other examples of hypocrisy fuel Anappara’s humor. It is widely believed that djinns have taken over an abandoned palace, but Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, and “maybe even Buddhists” join Muslims in leaving letters at the palace, filled with wishes they hope the djinns will grant. Some of the politicians “who became Union ministers only because they called us Muslims foreigners,” who “holler during rallies that Hindustan is only for Hindus, and that [Muslims] should go to Pakistan” sneak into the palace to leave their entreaties, first making sure no cameras can take pictures of them bowing to the djinns. Superstition has created the only place where all people are equal.

Jai’s family and other residents of the basti live in fear that the police will bring bulldozers and knock down their homes. They make regular payments to the police to keep their homes intact, but any trouble might provoke unwanted attention, spurring the government to demolish the slum. The police accept bribes to look for missing children but their only interest lies in protecting their own jobs, which means protecting the powerful. Jai’s father pretends not to worry because “Our basti has been here for years. We have identity cards, we have rights. We’re not Bangladeshis.” His mother argues that they only have rights two weeks before an election, the only time politicians pay attention to them.

The plot invites fear that Jai’s sister has been snatched, perhaps to avenge the beheading of a revered buffalo that lived in an alley near their home. Uncertainty about the fate of a missing child might be worse than certainty that the child is lost forever. Suspects are plentiful, as suspicion falls on anyone who has earned resentment, from bullies in the basti to prosperous hi-fi people who live in high-rise buildings, employing basti residents as servants.

In a sense, Djinn Patrol is a coming-of-age-early novel. Jai plays at being a detective, imagining he can use the skills he gleans from Police Patrol, but his imagination gives way to the harshness of reality by the time the story ends. He recognizes that crime reenactments are not stories, that losses viewed on television are not the same as losses experienced. He is not old enough to understand the words he hears from an older resident — the lucky are those who “grow old pretending they have some control over their lives, but even they will realize at some point that everything is uncertain, bound to disappear forever” — but it seems certain he will internalize the lesson.

Jai is a memorable character at the heart of a powerful story. The slow transition from humor to grim realism reminds readers that life is never as simple as we might wish it to be, and that it is wrong to turn away from the misfortune of others because they live in a different place, belong to a different religion, or live an impoverished life that they did not choose.

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