Author Jash Sen at her desk in happier times and (below) the cover of Skyserpents, her second title in The Wordkeepers Trilogy

An autumnal dawn in Calcutta as I write at my desk, with my first cup of tea. Did the morning light just get darker? I looked out of the window and immediately had a coughing fit — acrid smoke was billowing in from the window in a thick stream, accompanied by the sound of flapping wings.

“What in the...” I exclaimed.

She emerged from the smoke in front of my desk, ancient, frail, ragged, bad-tempered.

“...name of the Goddess is this?” completed a harsh voice. “It is I, Dhoomavati.”

A giant crow about three feet in height paced up and down my room, checking everything with its beak. Karkash, her mount. Meanwhile, Dhoomavati placed one hand on her bent hip and glared at me from the other side of the desk.

“What’s all this you’ve written in my book? The Wordkeepers? Skyserpents? What are these names? Nothing is as I had described!”

“It’s… um… being published by Duckbill, as a trilogy, they edited....” I took a hasty sip from my cup to calm my nerves, hoping she would leave me alone and visit my publishers instead.

She banged her gnarled fist on my desk. The room filled with stinging smoke. Tea spluttered over my keyboard as I choked on it.

“Duckbill? Who do you think you writers and publishers are? It is my book, I put the ideas in your head! You’ve turned it into a teen adventure — this Anya and this Bilal, why have you called them by their human names? Do your readers even know it’s about coming of the 10th avatar?”

“Well, yes, the first book is all about the avatar and the wordkeepers, the secret clans that are meant to find and protect the avatar. That and the Chiranjeevis.”

“The nine long-lived ones of our world who assist the wordkeepers — and you’ve only obsessively followed only Parashuram, Ashwatthama and Vibhishan. Hardly as I had told you to. This is why I hate writers — always go for the thrill of the story, the suspense, missing the fact that we are talking about the end of all yugs here.”

“But Goddess, that is just in The Wordkeepers, the others come in later, in Skyserpents we have....”

She made a gesture with her fingers and I found my mouth sealed shut. The crow was now turning the pages of my copy of Skyserpents with its beak, staring at me balefully out of one eye. Talk about a critical review.

“Karkash tells me you have described Alkapuri, hmm....”

“Yes,” I said enthusiastically, relieved she had calmed down a bit. “All the prehistoric flora and fauna was so fascinating, I just....”

“Prehistoric?” she shrieked. The framed photograph of Dickens on my desk fell face down with a crash.

Ouch. Wrong response.

“Prehistory, as you call it, is not even a pinch of snuff compared to the enormity of time that Alkapuri captures. It has life that is primordial, primeval, mythical! I knew I should not have trusted a human to do the job. We are talking about animals like the Navagunjara, the Sharabh, the Gandaberunda, Sanjivani trees, extinct seasons... prehistory is the mundane stuff of yesterday.”

Under her breath, I heard her mutter, “Cretin.”

I hid as much as I could behind my desk and said, “But I have talked about them, especially the Gandaberunda, the story is just as you said — they go from earth to Vishasha to rescue Anya’s mother, they travel through time to Victorian London to prevent an old conspiracy, live in magical Alkapuri and face their destinies. How do you think this generation will stay interested if I hide the thrilling, adventurous bits from them? You want them to know about this, don’t you?”

Dhoomavati frowned and considered this. She was emptying out my jars of Bourbon biscuits, all four of them, into her mouth.

“Well, yes. The world will soon be in great danger and they need to know. Thankfully, for all your annoying writerly exaggeration, you have enough adventurous women as well. I hate those namby-pambies that most stories pass off as heroines. So, when will you be done with the next book? Shall I visit next Sunday?”

“Goddess!” I protested. “I just finished this one, I’m thinking through the final one, I have to do justice to it, give me some time!”

Dhoomavati narrowed her eyes. A burnt smell started emerging from her smoky halo. Even Karkash glared, first with his left eye, then turning around, with the right one. I ducked.

“Time — as you know now — is an illusion. Stop this Bourbon biscuit dunking and tea drinking and get on with it. And remember, Karkash was an author too, once.”

“Then?” I gulped.

“He displeased me with one of his stories, that’s all.”

The crow tapped his beak on my volume of Poe’s stories. It slid out of the pile and opened at The Raven.

Then they disappeared with a massive sound like a gas cylinder bursting, leaving the room in clouds of thick smoke.

I must have fainted; for it was almost eight when I opened my eyes and thought I had been dreaming. But here’s the thing — my Dickens photograph frame was broken, lying face downwards, and all four of my emergency jars of Bourbon biscuits were emptied clean. The volume of Poe was open at The Raven.

Jash Sen
is the author of The Wordkeepers and its sequel, Skyserpents, which has just been released [Duckbill, Rs 275]. Jash is currently working, with some dread, on the third book of The Wordkeepers Trilogy

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What: Unnatural Creatures: Stories chosen by Neil Gaiman

Published by: Bloomsbury

Price: Rs 499

Griffins, manticores, werewolves, phoenixes, mermaids, invisible dragons and carnivorous inkblots — it is a menagerie like no other. Unnatural Creatures is a delightful read for all those who believe in fantastical creatures spoken about in myths and legends, those that inhabit the realm between light and shadow, creatures who you hear whispers about but never see. The 462-pager is a collection of stories chosen by Neil Gaiman, chronicling tales that are sometimes humorous, often chilling and mostly awe-inspiring.

You’ll love the book from the dedication itself, which reads: “For Bigfoot, for the time travelers, for the pirates, for the robots, for any boring people (who obviously aren’t actually secret agents in boring disguise), for people in space rockets, and for our mothers — N.G.” And the introduction by Gaiman, which gives a peek into how he invented the worlds of his fantasy tales.

The book has 16 stories by 16 authors, including one by Gaiman, each beginning with a short, often funny, introduction by Gaiman. Most of the stories had been published earlier, some from the early 1900s like E Nesbit’s The Cockatoucan, which was first published in 1900 and Saki (aka HH Munro)’s Gabriel-Ernest, which was first published in 1909. Others were published in more recent times like Gaiman’s Sunbird (2005) and E. Lily Yu’s The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees (2011). Some, however, have been published for the first time in this anthology like Maria Dahvana Headley’s Moveable Beast and Nnedi Okorafor’s Ozioma the Wicked.

The first story in the collection has an unpronounceable name and is about a carnivorous inkblot from another world that moves and grows every time someone takes their eye off it. Gaiman’s story about the Epicurean Club that has eaten everything, including dung beetles, lightning bugs and unicorn flank steaks and is looking for a new challenge in the form of the sunbird is eerie as is the fascinating story by Yu about wasps who make maps and bees who rebel against the order.

The anthology is presented by the Museum of Unnatural History. What is that you ask? It is a real place in Washington DC and the storefront of 826 DC, a non-profit literary organisation that works with students aged six to 18. They claim to have everything from “weagle to owlephant” and sell “Unicorn Tears, Confused Wood, Weather Rocks, Wallace’s Primordial Soup, Future Mold, Scorpion Finders, and much more”!

Chandreyee Chatterjee