Awaken has all the ingredients for excitement. Three girls — Kiara, Sia and Saumya — find strange things happening in their everyday lives. Kiara starts sprouting golden fur all over her body, Saumya pops in and out from Ahmedabad to San Francisco and Sia, an Angami Naga and transgender to boot finds that she can sing notes not found on any melodic scale with amazing consequences.
Ashok Banker presents us with three normal people — well Kiara and Soumya are normal — Sia being part of the North East leads an oppressed life under the heel of the special forces act.
Kiara’s first response to her hairy fate is to head for the nearest beauty parlour for a full body waxing while Saumya wants to share her popping in and out of international cities with her friends. However, all is certainly not well, as the blurb puts it, the Brahmaand has already rung the warning bell.
Given the mores of fantasy novels. Marvel Comics and movies like the Fantastic Four, most acute readers will realise that the girls are fated to play a special role in the world that they inhabit — the more so because there are the inevitable forces of evil out to stop them even before they know what it’s all about.
In Kiara’s case she discovers that her father has kept her on pills to hide the hair growth while Saumya’s conservative family are ruled by a Guru who seems to have known about her supernatural powers. Sia’s community too seem to be aware that her music has something different to it, which is why the elders refuse to allow her any prominence, even though she would like to go to the big cities and make a hit with her high notes.
Once the girls have understood that they have special powers, their task is to learn how to harness them while fighting off the adult powers that be who have ruled their lives so far. Banker tells enough to keep the reader hanging on hoping for more and raises the expected questions — who is the ultimate enemy? And if Brahmaand is the universe, is there some hidden reference to global warming?
The three girls have all been genetically modified at some point so that eventually they can combat the alien powers that threaten the universe. Their powers are linked, as one has come to expect from Banker, to Hindu mythology. Kiara, for instance, is a kind of Hanuman though initially, it seems that she is turning into some kind of big cat.
The book is primarily aimed at young adults and the Shakti trio will certainly resonate with the post millennial generation in their attitudes and interests while introducing them to Hinduism and concepts like Shakti in a manner which they will be able to understand.
Anjana Basu is the author of Rhythms of Darkness
