Blue-Skinned Gods

Starred review from September 13, 2021
Sindu’s marvelous coming-of-age story (after Marriage of a Thousand Lies) features a young healer in Tamil Nadu, believed to be an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, who eventually breaks away from his domineering father. Kalki Sami has blue skin and black blood, and his father, Ayya, has built an ashram for the family to live in, where Kalki, on the eve of his 10th birthday, must undergo three tests, beginning with the performance of a miracle. After struggling to heal Roopa, a sick girl brought to the ashram, he doubts the prophecy about him. Kalki may be seen by strangers as a guru, but as a teen he is easily swayed by Ayya; his cousin, Lakshman, who is his best friend; and Roopa, whose condition eventually improves and with whom Kalki falls in love. After Lakshman leaves the ashram, Kalki travels to New York City as part of a “world healing tour” conceived by Ayya to promote Kalki, where the cousins unexpectedly reunite, and Kalki learns some news that breaks his life in two. Sindu juxtaposes the closed world of the ashram with Kalki’s vibrant experiences in New York, where he performs with Lakshman’s band, the Blue-Skinned Gods; eats meat; and “figures out who I was and who I was going to be.” The imagery is vivid—“my body a colony of ants puttering in all directions”—and the slow-burn narrative by the end becomes incandescent. Sindu’s stunning effort more than delivers on her initial promise.

September 15, 2021
A blue-skinned boy is believed to be a god. Sindu's third book begins with a bit of what might or might not be divinity. Kalki is born with blue skin, prompting his family and Tamil Nadu villagers to believe that he is the latest--and last--human avatar of Vishnu, the Hindu god. In other words, Kalki, who is 10 when the novel begins, is himself a god. His father builds an ashram around him, and the faithful come from near and far for healing sessions, rituals, and ceremonies. Almost immediately, however, Kalki has reason to doubt that he is what his father says he is. Sindu's excavations of Kalki's internal struggles are detailed, nuanced, and rich. "My divinity had been as real as flowers, or the sun, or my own skin," Kalki thinks. "And when that godhood broke"--when his faith finally gives way--"reality itself had shattered to pieces around me." Throughout the book, Sindu's prose has a textured intricacy that never becomes florid. Occasionally, though, she does slip into a slightly didactic tone when explaining Hindu practices; her assumption seems to be that her audience is entirely Western. These contextualizing passages, though not entirely necessary, don't significantly flaw the book. A larger flaw emerges, however, when Kalki, now 22, arrives in New York. For someone who has never left his ashram--never mind his country--Kalki seems remarkably unfazed by the drinking, smoking, and partying he soon becomes subject to. No, he doesn't know how to read a subway map, but his reactions to the wider world never feel quite believable. Still, these are minor quibbles for a novel that so admirably skates between insight and pathos, acuity, and poignancy. Remarkably moving in its explorations of faith, doubt, and what it might mean to be a charlatan.

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September 15, 2021
For always, Kalki--with his matching blue skin--has been told he's a god, the tenth and final incarnation of Vishnu. His godliness supports the family's Tamil Nadu ashram, where he lives with his controlling father, loving mother, uncle and his wife, and companion-cousin Lakshman. In Kalki's tenth year, the Sri Kalki Purana--"the Hindu text that prophesied [his] birth and life"--decrees three deity-proving trials. Kalki heals young Roopa and calls down a white horse from the sky. But the third challenge goes unproven, eclipsed by cleaving: half his family leaves when Kalki can't heal his aunt. Still, his believers remain devout. The ashram grows in spite of the dissolution of family life exacerbated by infidelity, depression, and a forbidden first love. On a world tour at age 22, Lakshman finds Kalki in New York City and their meeting shatters his very existence. As if channeling the prevarications dominating her debut novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies (2017), Sindu's sophomore title (despite a slow first half) proves to be an explosive, provoking examination of what we are forced to or choose to believe to be true.

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