Amal Singh’s first foray into full-length fiction, The Garden of Delights is a book that’s kind to even its monsters. For it is humans who bring misery in real as well as imagined world. Polished to almost perfection, it’s as delightful as the title.
Iyena Mastafar, a 15-year-old girl lives in Alderra with her father, an influential bureaucrat in the corridors of power. A cold and distant man, he pushes her to learn Albuchemy: an art of manipulating metal through words and intent. Mourning a mother who’s not dead, Iyena is recalcitrant when her father tells her they’re going to shift to Sirvassa. Sirvassa is a “city of dreams” and “petal rains” whereas Alderra has only two shades in the sky: grey and brown.
A cage inside a cage
Iyena, contrary to her reservations, falls in love with this new city where petals fall like rain and a net is drawn taut across the sky to keep a monster at bay. Here – she comes to know from her joyous friend Trehan – is a Garden. The Garden is magical and so is its Caretaker. He distributes delights to the populace of Sirvassa – harmless magical tricks that enable an ordinary person to move a boulder or jump across rooftops. In her first meeting with the Caretaker while seeking delight, she expresses a desire: “What if I want to defeat monsters?”
Although the story is populated by multiple characters, these two are our protagonists. Singh has dressed them both in multiple layers. Neither Caretaker is just an old man nor is the girl just a kid. Age is a curse thrust upon him by a god. At midnight, “a ghost shakes loose from the body of the Caretaker” and he becomes young again. Iyena, Caretaker thinks, “is a cage and inside the cage, there’s another girl.” This is also a reference to the control exerted by her unloving, power-hungry father and also a portent of things to come, an author’s way of telling their readers that once the cage breaks, exciting things can be expected.
Singh has wrapped both these characters in contrasting skeins of yin and yang, pitting them against each other and in doing so, making them each other’s equals. Singh has spun the trope of master-apprentice on its head and rearranged its cranium. If Caretaker “speaks with a calm certainty”, Iyena’s “eyes command respect.” “When she asks a question, she knows the answer to it already. While he has a “calm flourish”, she is a “mirror and turbulence. Calm and rage.”
Iyena, in Urdu, is mirror. And Singh makes her character mirror Caretaker’s. She morphs into someone – something – towards the end of the book and the choice of this “something” is quite spectacular. Caretaker and Iyena are both wearers of two souls, two bodies. She isn’t just an apprentice but a potential successor, hence put on an equal footing, regardless of her young age.
The story of Three Realms
Sirvassa and Alderra, the two cities of the Three Realms, are inhabited by Inishtis and Abhadis respectively. They don’t share many things but they do share a war. In this war between the Inishtis and the Abhadis, the Caretaker had fought on the side of the former and defeated a Champion – (bashful, arrogant gods who are “short on mercies” – fighting on the latter’s behalf. They sing songs that force entities into unquestionable submission. This war led to widespread destruction but the Caretaker doesn’t wallow in self-pity. Singh writes: “But he doesn’t blame himself. He blames the war. He blames the hate that preceded it.”
Although the Abhadis were defeated, a few people in the place of power want to wage a proxy war of sorts. Iyena is forced to shoulder the blame when her father, in cahoots with Minister Yayati, tries to force Alderraan way of life on Sirvassa. The readers can draw parallels between the conflict in the story and the real world. It’s all there: Majoritarianism, book-banning, framing, torturing, fatal attacks, revision as well as the erasure of history. There’s so much interference in the everyday Sirvassan way of life that citizens begin to flee, choosing to leave their beloved city rather than having to stay and watch it being ruined day by day. Trulio, the apprentice of Caretaker, says: “I can describe what darkness looks like – it’s a cumulative weight of everything light touches and leaves.” In the story, the darkness is wrought by men who are not only trying to impose their way of life upon Sirvassa, but also seeking to change the way the city and its inhabitants lead their lives.
The story is crisscrossed with veins of kindness. The world of Three Realms has many cities but the kernel of kindness lies in Sirvassa. It has a god but Singh doesn’t dwell much on the intricacies of religion. Eborsen, the half-formed god is a kind, accepting entity. Even the Rhisuan beasts pulling carts here need just a whisper of destination in their ears to ferry commuters from point A to point B.
The story is full of magical moments. The part where Caretaker is cursed and the one where Iyena visits the temple of the half-formed god especially shines. The sections featuring Champion deserve a special mention too. So does the part where Iyena goes through a sort of metamorphosis.
Now let’s come to the things where I was left wanting. Singh uses the trope of coming back from death, which is all the rage now in the fantasy space. I was being greedy and expected more than one character to come back from the dead. Okay, that’s on me. A sucker for clashes and duels, I felt a little more action and explosion was needed at the end.
At one point in The Garden of Delights, a character says, “Telling a story is always better than writing it down. Eyes are deceptive receivers, and look for hidden clues while reading. They might betray you. Ears, on the other hand, take the story as it is, without judgement.”
Well, I think my eyes and ears would equally appreciate Singh’s story.
The Garden of Delights, Amal Singh, Flame Tree Press.
