Delving into Salini Vineeth’s The Three, the Well and the Drag Queen was like falling headlong into a veritable Carrolesque rabbit hole, one from which I didn’t want to return, even when I knew the story was over and I had to come back to boring reality.

I lay amidst the delectable remnants of the finished tale, savouring the emotions and images it evoked, rethinking about the small, lovable boy, his grandmother, his mother, and his father, unwittingly trapped in the world created by someone before them, and wondering how this tale was restricted to just a novella instead of a full-fledged novel, maybe even a trilogy, the trend of the times! My grievance comes a little later. 

Salini creates a fabulous fantasy world triggered by a vulnerability that evil finds easiest to prey upon, greed. As the scenes shift and meander through this fantastical world, from the original greedy couple who sell their souls for prosperity and domain control to the later ones inextricably trapped in this world, the unseen-but-unmistakably-felt-in-every-page-of-the-book Evil (beautifully allegorized as suppressed anger), I fell deeper and deeper in love with Salini’s highly evocative writing. 

My heart went out to every generation of the cursed family, but most of all to the drag queen who transforms, most agonisingly yet beautifully and sensitively, from a vulnerable little one yearning for love to an intrepid saviour. I loved and savoured this journey of the drag queen. 

The biggest problem with the book was that it was meant to be more, much more than a novella. I was disappointed with not having enough details of the multiple generations between the first ones who hit at the root of Evil to release it into the world and the final one that put it back in its place, how the family evolved from finding prosperity suddenly to what had become of it now. That part should have been given more words to be fleshed out well. That absent part left me wanting.

And the Kerala-ness of the story, replete with chathans, temple and village guardians, quintals of overly ripe, squishy, mushy, flabby jackfruit (with the power to bury their victims alive), added to the alluring authenticity of the tale. 

By the way, I’ve never been a fan of jackfruit (the smelly fruit, not the raw one), ever. After reading Salini’s book, I reiterate my disdain for it. But rest assured, the poor jackfruit is not the villain, only a tool. Read the book if you want to know the real villain.

If you liked this review, you might like my review of Circe by Madeline Miller

This post is part of the Bookish League blog hop hosted by Bohemian Bibliophile.