HE WHO RODE A PEACOCK Lush forests. Unpeopled mountains. Fantastic birds and beasts. Mighty armies fighting terrible battles with unbelievable weaponry. Usha Narayanan does it yet again with Kartikeya and his Battle with the Soul Stealer.

As is the wont with most mythological fiction, story meshes into tale to create an intricate weave that ultimately reveals the saga of the triumph of good over evil. When extraordinary evil rules the world, goodness of extraordinary dimensions has to be created, by the collusion of multiple fates, to combat it – in this case it was the six-faced, twelve-armed Kartikeya.
Not a lot is known about Kartikeya, the warlord of the devas, except that he was Ganesha’s sibling, rode a peacock and had a garden where women were forbidden. Ayappa, another avatar of his, is popular in South India and Usha has mined Tamil literature to add flesh to this otherwise elusive character.

She writes with aplomb, dotting the canvas with just the right words from her arsenal. The ‘ Kalanemi…plucked Vishnu and Garuda from the sky and thrust them in his mouth’ or ‘…a scarlet fountain erupting from his middle…’ are evocative indeed, and to me, somehow reminiscent of the description of the Universal form of Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita…the gigantic evil that can chew and spit out good and the retaliation of the good that simply tears out of evil to emerge triumphant and ‘glowing crimson… cloaked in the blood’ of evil. An undeniable universal truth there!

The novel works on many levels – it informs, is vivid and even magical sometimes. What’s more, it underlines the divinity of humans, a divinity that we have inherited and currently are unable to recognize.