Vaishnavi Patel's KAIKEYI

In Kaikeyi author Vaishnavi Patel has not only brought a complicated figure from an Indian national epic, the Ramayana, to vivid life in a manner reminiscent of Pauline Gedge or Diana Paxson, but also taught us an incredible lesson on the power and worth of emotional intelligence. 

Kaikeyi, Yuvradni (princess) of a kingdom with a name virtually identical to hers, discovers not long after her father banishes her mother from the kingdom, that she has a certain magical gift: with concentration, she can enter what is called the Binding Plane, upon which she can see visual representations of the emotional bonds between people and, to a certain agree, manipulate those bonds. As a young girl she can only manipulate the bonds between herself and another, as she does when she convinces her twin brother, Crown Prince Yudhajit, to teach her what he's learning from his tutors but is forbidden her by sexist tradition, even after she proves to be the best administrator the kingdom's palace ever had. Thus young Kaikeyi gets to learn how to ride horses, fight with swords, shoot arrows, throw spears and drive a chariot -- skills she will later put to use in addition to her Binding Plane powers to secure herself firmly in the esteem and affection of her eventual husband, Raja Dasharatha of Kosala. While she's already kind of his favorite of his three wives because she's pretty and sure of herself, she rises to Number One in everybody else's estimation (well, almost everybody else; there are some Sages who still scowl at a woman being anything but a brood mare, of course) when she persuades her husband to let her ride out to battle with him, and then by a combination of her martial and Binding Plane skills lands herself with a chance to serve as her husband's charioteer in battle! And then she saves his life! And still manages to make it look like her husband was the real hero, because emotional intelligence isn't just a power she wields on the Binding Plane! This deed wins her his eternal gratitude and esteem, an eventual place on his governing council despite her being a woman, and the promise of two boons, requests that she may make at any time during their lives that he vows to the gods he will fulfill, no matter what she asks for.

I am only now reading the Ramayana, in an old fashioned translation into English verse, but I know that in that story Queen Kaikeyi is pretty close to being a villain (or is an unambiguous villain, if you're a misogynist, which, there's lots of misogyny in this story), so it's nice to see her get a chance at rehabilitation as a whole person with recognizable and relatable motivations and loves and fears. Patel gives Kaikeyi only a tiny chip on her shoulder about ancient India's sexism and a whole heart full of love for her husband (just not in a romantic or sexual way; she tolerates her wifely duties but comes to esteem Dasharatha as a close friend and an honorable man), his other two wives, and all of her husband's children, not just her own son by him, Bharata. This even though one of his sons by his other two wives turns out to be an earthly incarnation of the god Vishnu, the Rama that gives the Ramayana its name, and thus turns out to be quite a handful even before he's fully grown. Throughout the novel, though, she shows in word and deed that she considers all four of Dasharatha's sons to be her sons as well, little boys she loves to cuddle and play with and teach, then young men whose futures she plans for carefully despite knowing that they can't happen as everybody expects, for when she became Dasharatha's third wife she extracted a promise from him that whatever the birth order of his children, his first son by Kaikeyi would inherit his throne. This promise, and concerns that arise for Kaikeyi during the boys' childhoods stemming chiefly from a fundamentalist tutor who has persuaded Rama, and therefore all four of the sons, that women like Kaikeyi are an affront to the gods and should keep to their place, and that all the work she has done to help the people of Kosala, and especially the women, has been evil and needs undoing, are what forces her to use her two boons to affect the succession when Dasharatha suddenly decides to abdicate despite still being young and vital.

Dasharatha is totally under Rama's divine (but not necessarily benign, or even conscious) influence, Kaikeyi sees, and furthermore sees that Rama is not remotely ready to wield his divine or royal powers wisely yet, himself being under possibly demonic influence. Her boons are thus to send Rama into exile for ten years, and for Bharata to take the throne. Thus in the novel this is not a matter of her pride or status-panic; it's a sacrifice, of her relationships with everyone she loves, of the esteem her kingdom has held her in, of everything. By the time this inevitable doom befalls her, Patel has made us feel every bit of Kaikeyi's complex emotional world, but has left it all just ambiguous enough to let us wonder, even as we cry with her when her sons turn on her and her husband fades away, if Kaikeyi's understanding of events is actually correct. Sometimes the majority is wrong, but sometimes they're right. Sometimes we get confirmation of which side has the correct perspective, but most of the time we're stuck muddling on through without ever being sure, and that's where good literature comes from.

Kaikeyi is exceptional literature and good storytelling and I can't wait to see what Vaishnai Patel does next.

Indra Das' THE DEVOURERS (Narr by Shishur Kurup & Meera Simhan)

After spending what felt like months entangled in some very long 18th-century styled doorstop fiction, it's pretty refreshing to return to what mostly feels like a straight-up monster story, though there's a lot more going on in Indra Das' The Devourers than that, of course. 

The subject/object of the story has a dramatically weird entrance as a stranger approaches a lonely college professor, one of our twin narrators, Alok, with an arresting declaration -- "I am half-werewolf" -- and says he wants to tell the professor a story. His compelling announcement and first teaser serving of that story have an uncanny and hypnotic impact on Alok that seem more like the powers of a vampire than a werewolf, but as we soon learn, this Stranger sort of started self-identifying as werewolf for complex cultural reasons that started off when he saw,  in his third century of life, An American Werewolf in London. So, uh, buckle up, this is a strange'un.

The novel's overall premise takes more from  Interview with the Vampire, than from any werewolf story I've heard as The Stranger's tale unfolds over several intense encounters with Alok, but it goes Anne Rice one better. Or several - what if Louis were not merely one of Lestat's metaphorical children but his actual biological child by a human mother? And what if most of the story concerned that human mother's epic quest across the length and breadth of Mughal-era India to find her rapist (because of course he was) and give him a good talking-to? And that her traveling companion was one of the werewolf/rapist's ex-packmate, who is pursuing the rapist not out of a quest for justice or to help the newly-pregnant victim, but basically to berate the rapist for having sex with a human, and a female human at that, eww gross, that would be like if a human had sex with a chicken or something because humans are prey. I mean, it's already way more interesting than the pseudo-gothic whining of Anne Rice's sexy but self-pitying characters, right?

The story unfolds in two narratives, one told by Alok, chiefly in the form of intervals in which he tries and fails to make any headway in his relationship with the Stranger who has appointed Alok to transcribe and type a manuscript about the Stranger's shapeshifter people. As with the other narrative, of Cyrah, the Mughal rape victim, there is some sexual tension in Alok's scenes with the Stranger but that's really not the point of the story, any more than it is when we travel with Cyrah and her rapist's friend Gévaudon. Both stories are more concerned with the ineffability of the predators who have made humans their prey, while looking just like them, holding out as a tantalizing mystery, rather than a lore-established certainty, that these shapeshifters were once full humans and that the same transformations they've undergone can happen to Alok or Cyrah as well.

Or, perhaps, the Beasts can regain the humanity that they only think they've lost?

Of course, the Stranger could just be pulling Alok's leg and extorting free editorial services from him, a possibility which is also carefully kept in play as the two intertwined stories unfold.

As often works brilliantly with dual first-person narratives, the audio book edition's producers chose to use different narrators for the two stories, with Shishur Kurup giving Alok exactly the kind of precise diction and haltingly thoughtful speech we'd expect of a lonely college professor who maybe should be questioning his sexuality a little more carefully than he has been, while Meera Simhan gives Cyrah a forcefulness and, yes, bitchiness, that a character like hers would need to survive in a world that is already plenty hostile to a lone, uneducated Muslim woman who has had to turn to sex work in order to survive and has barely done so even before crossing the paths of three slavering monsters who would ordinarily just think of her as a midnight snack. If they are what they think they are. But even if they aren't, Cyrah would have been doomed without that strident willfulness Simhan gives to her every syllable. As her rapist, who claims to be Fenrir from the Norse pantheon just to make sure this story is weird enough, observes, his and Gévaudon's kind are to mere humans as human men are to human women: predators.

Yeah, it's a bit simplistic, but this is the 1650s in India. I mean, an early bit of Cyrah's account describes a partially completed Taj Mahal surrounded in scaffolding.