Picture a canvas – blank, white, and sprawling. An artist stands in front of it and specks the cloth with small, bright, and purposeful dots of paint. Each move is mesmerising and fills the viewer with wonder. Each dot is part of a bigger picture, the final revelation a shock to all those who watched intently. Reading The Burnings by Himanjali Sankar was much like watching a seasoned artist conjure up a grand work of pointillism. She displays a flair in her writing that draws the reader in, keeps them guessing, and leaves them completely shocked at the end.
With a reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace before the prologue, Sankar sets the tone for the rest of the book, which features an eerie mansion, haunting pasts, and troubled minds.
Women and fires
Three women stand at the centre of this canvas, each of them intriguing and distinct. Behind them are flames – tall, cleansing, and destructively attractive. The story tells us seemingly different tales from three different points of view, all stitched together seamlessly – a feat only a skilled writer can achieve. All three women have troubled pasts that don’t seem to leave them behind, stories of love that are broken – jagged pieces still cutting at their hearts – and a familiarity with fire, one that proves to be devastating later on.
Shalini, the star of this novel, is one of these women and is called to the hills beyond Delhi when her lover from days bygone, Akshar, calls for her and tells her that he is dying and in need of help. Arriving at his mansion, however, leaves Shalini feeling a little more than unsettled with the empty, dark and dingy hallways pushing her away just as her selfish, changed, and supposedly dying lover pulls her closer. Sankar complicates this story by introducing an element of a pandemic of fires. All around the world, unexplained, magical fires erupt, drawing bystanders in and taking victims relentlessly.
She draws an unsettling parallel to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, capturing with precision the confusion and helplessness people felt at the time. The work-from-home chaos, panicked speculation, and the naive hope that the world would fall back into its rhythm within a week all find a place in this novel and make it real and relatable despite its magical elements. This also makes the book all the more suspenseful as the readers anticipate the next move despite knowing what the pandemic has in store for Shalini and Akshar.
Inside the minds of the women
The two other women – “the woman in the room” and “the woman who left” – are equally memorable and have unpredictable twists and turns in their stories. Through them, Sankar explores the trials and tribulations of motherhood, unrequited love, infidelity, troubled pasts and the inability to let go of that which weighs them down. She manages not to preach and keeps the characters human. Rather than boxing them into “right” or “wrong” and “good” or “bad”, she humanises them and provides no clear answers – just the plain simple truth, as it is.
Telling the story from three people’s points of view allows an exploration of everybody’s resentment and prevents them from being predictable. We wonder how credible their version of the truth is. The exposition of information is so wonderfully done that my margins had a dozen exclamation marks after every revelation. I berated myself for not noticing the hints – I was too taken in by the story.
The writing is unfussy yet fine. No word is a waste, and every seemingly simple idea is taken and flipped on the head for a new revelation. The vivid imagery and descriptions of the characters and setting leave behind unsettling images that I simply could not get out of my head for days. For the faint-hearted: consider yourself warned!
The stellar build-up and the honest exploration of the minds of these interesting women had me hooked from start to finish, prologue to afterword. That said, I did wish that there were a few more dots, differently coloured, that would have shaped the painting perhaps slightly differently at least in its final stages. I desired even more chaos and terror. The end felt as if it had stopped just short of the gut, ready to deliver the punch and left me wanting more. Perhaps the simplicity of the ending, the matter-of-factness of it, is what makes it as real and believable as it is.
The Burnings is a novel that displays Himanjali Sankar's ability to weave suspense, vivid imagery, and deeply human stories into a work of horror. Although the climax could have burned a little brighter than it already does, the journey is so gripping, layered, and well-crafted that it hardly detracts from the novel’s brilliance. With her haunting exploration of love, loss, and fire, this story will stay with you long after the final page, and I, for one, can’t wait to see what Sankar paints next.
The Burnings, Himanjali Sankar, Pan Macmillan India.
