For a better part of the last millennium, we Indians have taken pride in all that we have given to the rest of the world. Long after cosmetic surgery and the numeral zero, we were still contributing in scripts and metallurgy, arts and sciences, literature and logic. So overwhelmed were we by our own immeasurable expanse and propensity of dispensing discoveries and inventions, that we didn’t even bother to allow ourselves time for modesty.
I won’t even go into how many of us can actually recall the history of royal India, the India of palaces and forts, or the India of fantastical stories and mythological proportions. The only way the younger lot of our future will retain a connection with our past is through the stories and narratives of these very authors who visit India adopting it, embracing it, so much so that when they leave India, they take a piece of it with them, and now, they leave us a part of their own discoveries.
And such is the case with the Pyre of Queens by David Hair, a lovely little pacy read, running back and forth in time, whizzing in and out of the past, dipping into the stories of kings and their palaces and then surfacing in the world today, effortlessly, quickly, seamlessly and engrossingly.
The story is set on track but not in time. It repeats itself till it can have a different ending. Like Groundhog Day, but with a lot more sword-buckling action and sorcery thrown in.
It is the story of a cruel ruler Ravindra, a reincarnation of Ravana, who aspires to gain immortality and rise in his original demon form by sacrificing his seven wives on his funeral pyre. Trouble brews then when the court poet, Aram Dhoop, makes away with one of the wives, the beautiful daughter of a Persian trader, who was forcefully married to the king and never truly accepted him. Senapati Shastri, the commander of the army looks on but his empathetic nature doesn’t allow him to pursue the two and when he does accost them, he ends up trying to protect them.
But alas they lose their lives then. And the cycle is repeated every century or so till this point in the story when the three go by the names of Vikram, Deepika, and Amanjit. Ravindra returns to haunt them, alongwith his six sacrificed queens, all trying to persuade the last of the seven to join them, in an effort to bring back the king to life, thereby imbuing him with immortality, the kind that he would use to enslave all.
The author doesn’t just know his history, he also knows his geography, which is perhaps what metamorphoses into great chemistry on paper.
All in all, it has all the makings of a little movie series — our answer to the Harry Potters of the world — for it has everything: kings and queens, evil witchcraft and sorcery, romance, and the one thing which lies at the very base of our religious and cultural beliefs — reincarnation.
Sommelier Magandeep Singh is the author of Wine Wisdom