The Road Not Taken - Short Story #storytelling

 

Book Review: The Lost Apothecary | Neha's Notebook

The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner

As I closed the book after reading it, the book left me with a lonely feeling. The world presented in the book was so immersive and intriguing that it had such an effect on me. I did not want to leave this world once dived into it.

The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner is a bestselling historical fiction novel based in the setting of London. It is a story of 3 women, and countless other women who desired to take control of their lives.

The novel presents the story of three protagonist women character named Nella, Eliza and Caroline. While Nella is a 17th century apothecary, Caroline is a present-day aspiring historical researcher.

Nella has a shop in which she secretly sells poisons to the women who want to get rid of the men who have betrayed or wronged them. She works hard to brew every poison working day and night in the disguised corner of her shop. She has only two rules – that her poisons will never be used against any woman, and second, the names of all her women customers will be recorded in her apothecary register.

One day Nella has a customer, who she expects to be a woman, but who turns out to be 12-year old girl named Eliza. Eliza works as a maid in the house of a woman who wants to get rid of her husband, and who has sent Eliza to get some poison for her purpose. Over time, Nella, a forty-year old woman and Eliza began to form a close bond of friendship. Nella shares some of her buried secrets with her.

Whereas in the present day, Caroline, a middle-aged woman is experiencing betrayal and infidelity from her husband James. She sets out on a solo trip to London to process her emotions and have some alone time. There, while on a mudlarking tour near a river, she discovers a blue-colored vial with an etching of bear. Upon researching in the library and on the internet, she comes across the story of Nella and Eliza, only discovering much more than what the world knows about them.

The novel beautifully blends the flavours of a contemporary fictional world and intriguing historical ingredients with a tinge of mystery concocted into it. The Lost Apothecary is a captivating read both for a reader’s mind and for a writer’s mind. The language is simple yet weaving an engrossing world of storytelling. So, if you are a fiction lover, do add this book to your reading list. It’s absolutely worth it, and therefore, a bestselling hit!

 
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Book review and 7 Insights from Coraline by Neil Gaiman | Neha's Notebook

 

Autumn is arriving.

 

There are crisp leaves about to fall, and drift into whispery breeze, sending spooky chills through the space.

 

This is the best time to read all those fantasy and spooky horror books.

 

Coraline is one of these books featuring a marvellous storytelling and spooky chilling scenes.

 

Coraline is the story about a girl who sets out to explore the other side of a door in her house. On the other side of the door is a world that is as enticing to her as torturous. On this other side, she encounters her ‘other mother’, her ‘other father’ and everybody’s ‘other’ version. Before she becomes a part of this ghostly world, she needs to find some lost souls, some hearts and the key to the mysterious door.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. In this video, I share seven insights I learned from reading the book!

 

#1 Be an explorer.

#2 The braver you are, the more you will see.

#3 Being brave doesn’t mean not getting scared. Being brave means getting scared, badly scared and doing the right thing anyway.

#4 Learn to discriminate reality from unreality.

#5 If it is too good to be true, doubt it, because, it probably is an illusion. Everything that is alive is imperfect. What is perfect is dead.

#6 Our subconscious speaks in the language of dreams, symbols and metaphors, not the usual direct language.

#7 Fairy tales not only teach us that dragons exist, but also that dragons can be beaten.

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Book Review & 12 Life Lessons: To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird is a bittersweet fiction book, narrated by the character of a girl named Scout Finch. The book elaborates the story of her day-to-day experiences, while her father, who is a lawyer, fights a case against a white man who has blamed a black man for abusing his daughter. Mr. Finch, while he fights this case, teaches several lessons to his children, Scout and her elder brother Jem, during the course of the book. I thoroghly enjoyed reading this book, and in this review, I share life lessons I learned from the book.

#1 The fineness of an individual doesn’t stem from their bloodline but from their integrity. Lead a life of integrity.
#2 Talk to people about what they are interested in, more than what you’re interested in.
#3 Never give up based on the criticisms from people. There will always be people who will try to bring you down. Keep fighting even if you know that you will lose.
#4 Treat everyone as an equal.
#5 Stand up for what you know and think is right. Listen to your conscience. Don’t go by what is popular.
#6 Most people are nice if we really get to know them.
#7 Nothing is real scary except only in books.
#8 You never really know a man until you step into his shoes and walk in them. See the good in everyone. Perspective is the key.
#9 People have a habit of doing everyday things even under the oddest conditions.
#10 Life is fair because it is unfair to everyone.
#11 Shoot all the bluejays you want but remember it is a sin to kill a mockingbird. Mockingbird is a metphor for how we deal with someone who is weaker and defenceless against us. Never take advantage of them.
#12 Our system stores memories of experiences until we are ready to think about them and process them.

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Book Review: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

For once, picture a religious cult in your imagination. A cult that follows secret rites and rituals. Then picture a man joining the cult and masquerading as the member of the cult but only to infiltrate it and dig out its mystical secrets to become powerful.

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown is a fiction novel depicting the story of a cult named as the Masons cult. Robert Langdon, a professor of symbology and Dan Brown’s signature protagonist character stumbles upon this cult quite all of a sudden.

Robert’s friend, Peter Soloman, is the head of the Masonic cult. One day Robert received a call from Peter’s assistant inviting him to give a lecture in an event going to be held in the Capitol Building in Washington D.C.

He also requested Robert to bring a package with him, a package which he entrusted to him many years earlier.

But as soon as Robert reached the venue, he came to know that the call was a hoax and the man posing as Peter’s assistant had lured him to find the secret Lost Word and the ancient pyramid owned & hidden by the Masonic cult, or else he would kill old Peter to death. This man named Mal’akh, tattoos carved throughout his entire body, had kidnapped Peter and was seeking to unfold the secrets of the cult in order to become more powerful. And so, he charged Robert for doing this work for him.

On the other side, led by the trail of clues Robert became more and more puzzled at every step.

When he reached the hall where he was asked to give his lecture, in place of an audience he found a hand displayed at the center of the hall. The hand had been severed from the body of his friend Peter by his kidnapper. The hand was tattooed with the symbols of the Hand of Mysteries.

Examining Soloman’s hand, along with the police officials, he discovered a clue which led them to a room in the building which was the masonic altar comprising several symbolic objects and a pyramid with inscriptions engraved on it. The pyramid’s capstone was missing.

The capstone was later discovered in the small package Robert had brought, when the police official named Sato examined his bag under the x-ray machine. Robert explained to her that he was unaware of the contents of the package. However, still, he was taken into custody by Sato. He was rescued by another man named Warren Bellamy who was the architect of the building. He too belonged to the Masons cult and was seeking Robert’s help in rescuing Peter from his kidnapper.

Meanwhile, the kidnapper man Mal’akh destroyed the Noetic Science laboratory of Peter’s sister Katherine by tricking and drowning her assistant in an animal pod of ethanol.

To save herself, Katherine united with Robert and Bellamy. Katherine and Robert reach Mal’akh’s house, where they were gagged and left to die in sensory deprivation tank and through needles respectively. Leaving both of them, Mal’akh fled away from the house with a weak Peter, arriving at the House of the Temple, where he threatened him to reveal the ancient secret to him.

Why was this man Mal’akh so vengeful towards Robert, Peter and the cult? Well, the answer lied in his history. Mal’akh actually was Soloman’s son Zachary. He was carrying wrath and revenge in his heart because many years ago he had been abandoned by his father in the jail as he had been spoiling his wealth in drugs and luxury.

By the time, his true identity became revealed, the police official Sato had reached Mal’akh’s house where she saved both Katherine and Robert. Thereupon, the entire crew moved towards the House of the Temple where one of their helicopters shatters the skylight of the temple, the shards of which killed Malakh to death.

In the end, Peter revealed that the Lost Word, the Word of God lay in the cornerstone of the monument where they were, buried in the ground beneath monument’s staircase.

He also told that the words inscribed in the base of the pyramid were Laus Deo meaning Praise God.

Masons had buried and hid the pyramid with the thought that when the time was right, the pyramid would be discovered and would usher a new era of enlightenment, which, apparently, had arrived, by means of Robert.

The novel mentions ideas of ‘mind over matter’, spirituality & enlightenment, ancient symbology & Noetic Science. Like other parts of this series, this book too is quite entertaining and immersive. I totally enjoyed reading it!

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Animated Book Review: The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall

Most of us humans like stories.

In fact, we love stories.

But why and how do we seem to love them?

For science, that may still be a puzzle. Nevertheless, our understanding of the human mind leads the way to the insight which streams in the backdrop while we’re immersed in a story and our mind is processing, forming connections, feeling emotions, rewiring neural pathways and churning information presented to us through the story.

The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall takes us through an immersive wordscape that is peppered with oodles of metaphors, pointers, insights, and lessons, pertaining mostly, to the topic of storytelling. The book features an interesting embroidery woven together with the intricate threads of researches related to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and various other sciences.

Encapsulating several stories-within-stories and pop-modern terminology, the book delves deep into some of the fundamental concepts and quintessential elements that make up the overall idea of storytelling. In this review, I’m going to share with you, 18 interesting pointers that I learned and curated after reading the book. Basically, my primary takeaways from the book…

So, let’s get started with these!

#1 The Origin of Storytelling
Storytelling is not some new-age science. But rather, it is as old as the existence of life itself on earth. Mr. Jonathan says that human beings are creatures of an imaginative realm called as Neverland. He also says that the primate version of human was not merely Homo Sapiens but also Homo Fictus that is, the great ape with the storytelling mind!
"And long before any of these primates thought of writing Hamlet or Harlequins or Harry Potter stories – long before these primates could envision writing at all – they thronged around hearth fires, trading wild lies about brave tricksters, and young lovers, selfless heroes and shrewd hunters, sad chiefs and wise crones, the origin of the sun and the stars, the nature of God and spirit and all the rest of it." – Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal

#2 ON SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF FICTION
The book describes how bringing science into fiction is not the best suited thing to do. We should not do intellectual dissection of fiction, as Wordsworth also said, "To dissect is to murder".

However, this doesn’t at all mean that fiction is by any means in conflict with science. Fiction, as a matter of fact, is deeply rooted in science. It enables the reader to envision new and creative ideas by requiring their willing suspension of disbelief.

The main thing, Mr. Jonathan writes, is to pry away the veneer of familiarity and to accept the bizarreness and strangeness of the story worlds, as they really are.

"Fictions, fantasies, dreams – these are to the humanistic imagination, a kind of sacred preserve. They’re the last bastion of magic. They’re the one place where science cannot – should not – penetrate, reducing ancient mysteries to electrochemical storms in the brain or the timeless warfare among selfish genes." - The Storytelling Animal 

#3 Humans are Addicted to stories
We, as human species, are addicted to stories. Of all, there are three main reasons to that.

First, we can’t resist the gravity of the alternate worlds. Secondly, our mind is addicted to patterns. The human mind is tuned to detect patterns. The same mental software that makes us very alert, to human faces and figures, causes us to see animals in clouds or jesus in griddle marks. This is part of the “mind design” that helps us perceive meaningful patterns in our environment. 

"Our hunger for meaningful patterns translates into our hunger for stories." - The Storytelling Animal

Thirdly, humans conjure gods, spirits and sprites to fill the explanatory voids.

What we don’t understand, that’s a story!

#4 Reader’s imagination is the catalyst for the storyteller
Writers and storytellers merely create storyscapes. But it’s the reader’s imagination that acts as a catalyst, churning the received information into an experience.

#5 Writing IS ANALOGOUS TO painting
"Each word is a daub of paint. Word by word – brushstroke by brushstroke – the writer creates images that have all the depth and crispness of real life. But writers are merely drawing, not painting. Our minds supply most of the information in the scene – most of the colour, shading and texture." - The Storytelling Animal

#6 Children are natural storytellers
Kids & children – what do they do? Mr. Jonathan writes that they do story mostly. The world of make-believe and pretend play is spontaneous and natural to children – they don’t need to be taught how to create stories. They are natural storytellers.


And even though we may grow up into full-fledged adults, but this inner child prevails within us.
"We are all more like Peter Pan than we know. We may leave the nursery, with the toy-trucks and dress-up clothes, but we never stop pretending. We just change how we do it. Novels, dreams, films and fantasies, are provinces of Neverland." - The Storytelling Animal

But at the same time, this doesn’t mean that the worlds of make-believe are all rainbows and sunshine. Actually, they are far from this. Explaining this, Mr. Jonathan says,
"Grown-ups have a tendency to remember the land of make-believe as a heavenly, sun-kissed bunny land. But the land of make-believe is less like heaven and more like hell. Children’s play is not escapist. It confronts the problem of the human condition, head on.
Pretend play is deadly serious fun. Every day children enter a world where they must confront dark forces, fleeing and fighting for their lives...
This play is the work of children." 
- The Storytelling Animal

#7 Stories DOMINATE OUR LIFE
Story’s role in human life extends far beyond conventional novels or films. Story, and a variety of storylike activities, dominates human life. From the skills we learn to the conversations we have with people, stories dominate nearly every aspect of our life. And its not only the writers and the storytellers and the filmmakers who tell stories but everybody including archaeologists, business executives, political commentators, and all.

"We are soaked to the bone in story. Human mind was shaped for story, so that it could be shaped by story." - The Storytelling Animal

The reason for this, could be, that stories universally focus on the great predicaments of human condition. Story is where people go to practice the key skills of human social life. They help us with real-world problem solving. And "Like a flight simulator, fiction projects us into simulations of problems that run parallel to those we face in reality. And like a flight simulator the main virtue of fiction is that we have a rich experience and don’t die at the end.We get to simulate what it’d be like to confront a dangerous man or seduce someone’s spouse, for instance, and the hero of the story dies in our stead." - The Storytelling Animal

"Story = Character + Predicament + Attempted Extrication" - The Storytelling Animal

#8 Stories & REPETITION
Repetition of fictional problem solving enhances the skill of real life problem solving too.

#9 Hell is story-friendly
Mr. Jonathan points out a brilliant insight pertaining to stories. That is, there is a huge difference in desirability between what we desire in real life and what is desired in stories.

He writes,
"There is a yawning canyon between what is desirable in life (an uneventful trip to the grocery store) and what is desirable in fiction (a catastrophic trip). In this gap, I believe, lies an important clue to the evolutionary riddle of fiction." - The Storytelling Animal

While in real world, we may not like to face conflicts and dilemmas and troubles, in the matter of storytelling, conflicts, dilemmas & troubles make the bread-and-jam of stories.

"In life, conflict often carries a negative connotation. yet in fiction, be it comic or tragic, dramatic conflict is fundamental because in literature, only trouble is interesting. Only trouble is interesting. This is not so in life. As Charles Baxter puts it in another book of fiction, 'Hell is story-friendly'." - The Storytelling Animal

However, this doesn’t at all imply that fiction is absolutely an escapist entertainment. An escapist entertainment is meant to be pleasant, on the flip side, a good fiction is far than pleasant. Instead, it is webbed with the tentacles of conflict and drama.

"If fiction offers an escape, it is a bizarre form of escape. Our various fictional worlds, are, on the whole – horrorscapes. Fiction may temporarily free us from our troubles, but it does so by ensnaring us in new sets of troubles – in imaginary worlds of struggle and stress and mortal woe." - The Storytelling Animal
"Stories of pure wish fulfillment don’t tempt us but what about stories that show us life as it is actually lived?" - The Storytelling Animal
"Trouble is the fat red thread that ties together the fantasies of pretend play, fiction and dreams, and trouble provides a possible clue to a function they all share: giving us practice in dealing with the big dilemmas of human life." - The Storytelling Animal
.
#10 Practical People, Story people & The Riddle of Fiction
The book mentions the metaphor of two groups of people - Practical People and Story People.

Story people fill their leisure time with rest, gossip and stories but practical people don’t waste their time on stories – they keep on working for their bellies – the story people prevail more often than the practical people – and this is the great riddle of fiction.

#11 Even Music Tells stories!
"Of course, not all music tells a story. There are also symphonies, fugues and avant-garde soundscapes blending wind chimes and bunny screams. But the most popular brand of music tells stories about protagonists struggling to get what they want – most often a boy or a girl. Singers might work in meter & rhyme, and alongside guitarists & drummers, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the singer is telling a story, it only disguises it." - The Storytelling Animal

#12 Daydreaming, Fantasies & Imagination – The Witchery of Life
"Daydreams are hard to study, scientically, but if you tune into your stream of consciousness, you’ll discover that daydreaming is mind’s default state." - The Storytelling Animal
"We spend half of our waking hours – one-third of our lives on earth – spinning fantasies. We daydream about the past: things we should have said or done, working through our victories and failures. We daydream about mundane stuff such as different ways of handling conflict at work. But we also daydream in a much more intense, storylike way. We screen films with happy endings – in our minds, where all our wishes – vain, aggressive, dirty – come true. And we screen little horror films, too, in which our worst fears are realized.
Imagination is an awesome mental tool. While our bodies are always locked in a specific here and now, our imagination frees us to roam space-time. Like powerful sorcerers, all humans can see the future – not a clear & determined future, but a murky, probabilistic one." - The Storytelling Animal

#13 CHARACTER CREATION IS A NATURAL TALENT
Good fiction means skillfully-crafted characters. Mr. Jonathan writes that, character creation is an innate process that we begin learning while we are still a kiddo.

"2-year olds begin learning how to develop a character. When playing the king, they pitch their voices differently than when they’re playing the queen or the meowing cat." - The Storytelling Animal

#14 STORY STRUCTURE IS THE BONY SKELETON & THE UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Mr. Jonathan says in the book that stories, nearly all stories, follow a pattern of structures. Every story is confined to this structural pattern.

"Think of this structure as a bony skeleton that we rarely notice beneath its padding of flesh and colorful garments. This skeleton is somewhat cartilaginous – there is a flex in it. But the flex is limited and the skeleton dictates that stories can be told in a limited number of ways." - The Storytelling Animal

This, however, at first, may appear to be a limitation in the way of a writer or storyteller, but these structural constraints actually free the writer or the storyteller to tell their stories more expressively.

"The idea that stories slavishly obey deep structural patterns seems at first vaguely depressing. But it shouldn’t be. Think of the human face. The fact that all faces are very much alike doesn’t make the face boring or mean that particular faces can’t startle in with their beauty or distinctiveness. As William James wrote, “There is a very little difference between one man and another, but what little there is, it is very important. The same is true for stories." - The Storytelling Animal

Patterns of complications, crisis & resolution, a universal grammar, a deep pattern...

#15 Human Brain AND fiction
How does the human brain respond to the stimulus of fiction? Well, to understand this, we’d need to understand the basics of the mind design. How our brain is designed? There are neurons firing information and linking with each other to form connections. Then, there are certain type of neurons called as the mirror neurons.

When we read or watch a work of fiction, these mirror neurons cause our brain to respond to it as if the fiction was happening in real life.

"Knowing that fiction is fiction doesn’t stop our emotional brain from processing it as real.
When we see something scary or dangerous in a film, our brain lights up as though that thing were happening to us, not just to a cinematic figment." - The Storytelling Animal

We feel what the protagonist is feeling.

And that is stupendous, isn’t it?

Well, moving on…

#16 DREAMS – NIGHT STORIES & Alternate Dimension of Reality
Driven by the rule of fight or flight, the dreaming consciousness is a form of nature’s storytelling. In the book, Mr. Jonathan writes that dreams are the night stories with their own plot, setting, scenes, point of view, characters, perspective and theme. Dreams are encrypted messages from the spirit or in Freudian terms, from the Id.

"While the body lies dormant, the restless brain improvises original drama in the theater of our minds." - The Storytelling Animal

#17 Ink People – they change the world
Using the metaphor of Ink People for storytellers, Mr. Jonathan says in the book,

"The characters in fiction are just wiggles of ink on paper. They are ink people. They live in ink houses inside ink towns. They work at ink jobs. They have inky problems. They sweat ink and they cry ink and when they’re cut, they bleed ink. And yet ink people press effortlessly through the porous membrane separating their inky worlds from ours. They move through our flesh-and-blood world and wield real power to it. They shape our behaviours and our customs, and in doing so, they transform societies and histories." - The Storytelling Animal

#18 Story is the glue of the world
"Story is the grease and glue of society. Story is the center without which the rest cannot hold." - The Storytelling Animal

Taking the example of a movie, Mr. Jonathan explains that if the movie is good, people watch it as a single organism. They laugh together. They gasp together. They react to the movie together as if, in a psychic unity. And this way, story ends up binding people together.

"Fiction writers mix the powder of a message with the sugary jam of storytelling. People bolt down the sweet jam of storytelling and don't even notice the undertaste of the powder." - The Storytelling Animal

In a nutshell, whether you are a writer or a storyteller or just an avid reader, I hope that you love stories. Because, I do and you should too!

Thank you! 🙂✍️💟

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Book Review: Digital Fortress by Dan Brown | Human Mind is the Greatest Supercomputer!

Digital Fortress by Dan Brown

Human Mind is the Greatest Supercomputer!

In the material nature, which is composed of five elements, anything and everything is a mortal entity. Never immortal. The elemental energy, as it moves through the dimension of time-space, it changes several forms along the way. And therefore, each form is but only a transitory and mortal entity. The duration for which a particular form lasts, may vary from one form to the other, but there is a certain truth about every material form. That is, at one point in time, it is going to disintegrate, collapse and dissolve into its breakdown.

This fact about the world of material objects carries a 100% probability.

Now, what about the world of non-material objects? Objects, such as, thoughts…

Even these appearances we call as our ‘thoughts’ are nothing more than wavelets arising out of an ocean of gigantic memory – a memory which gets programmed in our human system, as we navigate a variety of experiences throughout lifetime. Even these thoughts, bubbling and falling all the time, have an expiry date. Even though, perhaps the cassette tape of these thoughts might never seem to come to a halt, however, over time, the content of these thoughts seem to break, dissipate and transform, especially if we pay attention to them.

This entity we call as the brain, is a magnanimously-intelligent computer, that churns out thoughts, bringing them to the light of our attention, wherein, the thought forms deconstruct and ultimately self-destruct themselves, settling back into the ocean from where they first emerged.

Alright.

Moving on and further, shall we ask, what about the world of technology? What about the program codes written in the memory of an actual computer, in order to facilitate its functioning?

Typically, in the community of hackers, cryptographers and programmers, the programs and codes are seen with the viewpoint of their ‘breakability’. That is, how easy or complex it is, for them, to break a certain code.

Above everything else, this pops up a series of questions for the one trying to break a piece of code. Questions such as,

“How easy or difficult it is to break this code?”
“Is there an unbreakable code?”
“If there exists an unbreakable code, then, what implications it can have, if it gets into the hands of someone with evil intentions?”

Well, this novel, titled Digital Fortress by Dan Brown is a techno-thriller that unfolds a story musing over scenarios like these in a twisty sequence of events packed and embedded cleverly into the story.

The story is mainly set in a location comprising of the handsome premises of a setting of tech-powered buildings which belong to the largest intelligence security agency of United States, named as NSA (National Security Agency). The job that NSA does is likely to the metaphor of the Big Brother. Which means that they have access to all the information belonging to the public as well as to the government. All this information, along with all the details of the encryption algorithms, is stored inside their gazillion-sized gigantic data banks. In short, the job of NSA is to be an invisible eye for securing the information from unethical access, as well as keeping a careful watch on the dangerous information exchanges from groups such as terrorist organizations, dark web communities, fraudulent activities, and so on…
They are the one who guard the guards of the national intelligence.

Top-of-the-line code-breakers and some of the most brilliant minds in cryptography work for NSA.

Well, above and beyond all this, NSA has created something which they are proud of, the most. NSA has a supercomputer called TRANSLTR. According to the commander of NSA, the TRANSLTR is the greatest and the most efficient supercomputer that can break any code.

Yet, one day, this computer encounters a code that it doesn’t seem to be able to break. The code keeps running and running in a loop. Which, not only wastes a large amount of their computer’s electrical power. but also blocks it from processing other codes pending in their queue. Worried, the commander of NSA, Trevor Strathmore calls their head cryptographer Susan Fletcher to check up on what was happening.

To their dismay, Strathmore and Susan discover that NSA is being held a hostage by this code which its creator calls as the ‘Digital Fortress’. The code was written by a former NSA employee Ensei Tankado, who had a personal enemity with NSA because he thought that they were doing an inethical job by keeping an intrusive eye on the personal information of the people of America. Being a genius cryptographer and almost a cult icon among hackers, Tankado warned NSA that they must reveal their intrusion to the public or either lose their supercomputer TRANSLTR to Digital Fortress, a code which he told them, was unbreakable. Besides, he warned them that if they were unable to reveal the truth to the public in a given span of time, he would release the unbreakable code worldwide, which would destroy NSA’s reputation, by giving access to NSA’s data bank to even a three-year old, forget about the terrorists, criminals and other secret communities. It was NSA’s job after all, to encrypt and protect the information of the government and its people.

Susan Fletcher, though the head cryptographer and a brilliant mathematician, was unable to crack this code. But at the same time, she couldn’t believe that there could be an unbreakable code. In cryptography, an unbreakable code is a mathematical impossibility.

Their only hope, if they had one, was to find a passkey, as quick as possible, which could stop this loopy code from running on TRANSLTR, and also prevent Tankado from releasing this unbreakable code to the public.

However, to multiply their trouble, they find that Tankado, the 32-year old cryptographer has died a sudden death in Spain. The NSA commander Strathmore sends David Becker to retrieve the passkey, which, according to their information, was lettered and engraved on a gold ring worn by Tankado. David, a professor who taught Linguistics and Modern Languages, was not directly connected to NSA, but being the fiancee of Susan Fletcher, was the only trustworthy person Strathmore could entrust with this secret.

Arriving in Spain, David finds that he has not only lost the ring from Tankado’s body, but he was being pursued by an unknown man whose name was Hulohot. Entrapped in a cat-and-mouse chase with Hulohot, each clue that David stumbles upon, makes him feel as if he is moving further and away from where the ring could be found.

On the other side, every moment running short of time, NSA’s Cryptography Division witnesses an unusual commotion. While Strathmore and Susan Fletcher are unable to arrive either at a conclusion or a decision, the rest of the employees, began to sense something strange going on. One of the employees, Phil Chartrukian, thinking that a bug has seeped into TRANSLTR, rushes to power off the computer, only to get burned in the power room.

As Susan pours her attention over and over to the Digital Fortress as well as to all the clues, startling reality is revealed, sending shivers down her spine, and breaking her heart to the core. Concluding that she cannot trust anybody, not even the NSA Commander Strathmore, she decides to escape from the Crypto as quick as possible, but finds herself locked inside the building which is completely automated by computers and technology.

Meanwhile, the departments in other buildings of NSA are also beginning to sense something suspicious going on in the Crypto division. But before they can do anything about it, the employees watch from the windows, as the domed metallic crypto building is fuming with volcanoes of molten metal and splinters of metallic chips fireworking like discolights through the entire Crypto building.

Nearly all the employees of the Crypto department present inside the building are burned to ashes. Susan Fletcher is able to escape.

Together with the NSA Director named Fontaine, Susan and some other employees of NSA, and David who is found half-unconscious in Spain, they are able to crack the passkey just in the last moment, which also freezes them into a stunning revelation.

Digital Fortress was nothing but a deception, a ghost. There was no such algorithm. Tankado had lured them to an illusion and NSA had taken the bait by believing that there actually was an algorithm with an unbreakable code. Lured, frightened and taken into his trap, NSA’s Commander Strathmore had bypassed the security virus filters and had unconsciously participated in allowing this Digital Fortress algorithm to run on their supercomputer. While Tankado had simply written a delusory code, and fearing the unbreakability, NSA had bypassed their security checks, letting the Digital Fortress to disrupt the functioning of their own supercomputer (TRANSLTR).

Though, in the end, the passkey they find is able to prevent their data banks from getting leaked into the public, and secure their supercomputer.

All in all, the book is an intruiging and immersive work of fiction, mainly relating to the themes of mystery, suspense, technological thriller, government surveillance, adventure fiction and science fiction.

The scenes are written and depicted in a way that not only keeps the reader’s attention immersed and gripped, but also enables the experience of a curious tension building up over time, as we flip through the chapters. No wonder, the storyline is a magnetic tangle of plot twists, but at the same time, it is quite insightful and thought-provoking too, especially when we talk about the present day, in the age when the digital transformation is rapidly taking over the globe…

Wrapping it all up, Digital Fortress is a brilliant work of fiction that leaves us with an imprint worthy of deep reflection…that is,
Great supercomputers appear and disappear. But human mind is the greatest supercomputer, the greatest of all, the most mysterious of all. So, operate wisely!

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Animated Book Review: Paper Towns by John Green

As the name suggests, a Paper Town is a non-existent, phantom and fake town, as if made of paper.

The literal meaning of the term ‘Paper Town’ refers to a metaphorical name given to a fake place that has been embedded in a map by the map’s creator, in order to protect the copyright for their map. Sometimes these are called as the ‘copyright traps’. People and companies that create or design maps, typically insert one or multiple Paper Towns in their maps, so that if someone steals, copies or plagiarizes their map, they will be instantly caught, because, a Paper Town has no real existence after all.

This novel, Paper Towns by John Green, brings into action, an animating storyscape set forth in a town zigzagging along the city streets of Florida and featuring a bunch of interesting characters, primarily a batch of school-going teenyboppers studying in Winter Park High School and about to finish their school years.

The novel is an invigorating work of fiction, mainly combining the themes of mystery, young adulthood, romance and Bildungsroman, which refers to ‘a progressive spiritual transformation or a series of major internal shifts in a character’.

In this case, this character is Quentin. The novel pronounces itself with a series of events that occur in the life of the protagonist character named Quentin, thereby, bringing out this transformative inner shift within him.

This boy, named Quentin Jacobsen, known by his buddies as ‘Q’, is a high-school going boy who seems to have an infatuating crush on a girl named Margo Roth Speigelman.

Quentin loved all-things Margo, and Margo loved all things adventures and mysteries.

However, Margo, who loved adventures and mysteries, one day disappeared all of a sudden, turning into a mystery herself, as she left a series of clues for Quentin to be able to solve the mystery and discover her. And Quentin devoted himself to solving this mystery, the mystery of the lost paper girl.

The trove of clues included a book of Walt Whitman’s poetry collection Leaves of Grass with lines of the poem The Song of Myself, highlighted with a coloured highlighter.

The character of Quentin is seen in the novel to be clutching the book of poetry with him at all times, hunched and steeped over the collected clues, wandering his way through the city streets and abandoned ruins, jutting the best of his brains studying maps and browsing a reference encyclopedia managed by his friend and classmate Radar.

In addition to Radar, the circle of his closest friends included a boy named Ben and a girl named Lacey.
The three of them left no stone unturned to decipher the clues left by Margo, and by the end, this happens!

Together with Ben, Radar and Lacey, Quentin sped off in his minivan, driving to a paper town named Agloe, in the most unusual and strange manner, on the day of their school’s graduation and farewell ceremony.

However, not until the end of this search was he able to realize that he wasn’t actually searching her, rather all this time he had been searching an idea, the idea he thought was her, but it wasn’t.

Apparently, the image he had for her was as fake as the idea of a paper town,
and the moment this image was shattered, his attraction and fascination for Margo eventually began to evaporate and fall away, collapsing and crumbling like balls of crumpled paper, an illusory fallacy breaking apart…It was not the love that was breaking apart but rather what he thought and understood to be the concept of ‘love’.

Another interesting scenario that the book depicts, is how seeking to discover his dear friend Margo, Quentin immersed himself in reading over and over the highlighted passages of Walt Whitman’s poetry, deciphering, interpreting and trying to make sense, of what possible clue was Margo leaving, while highlighting these lines of poetry.

But as he realized in the end, all the interpretations still and all, were about who he was and how he thought, more than who Margo was and what she thought. Learning which, he is depicted in the book to be pondering over this insight: That, the way we think about the other person reveals more about who we are than about who the other person is.

The novel is divided into three main parts, which are titled as The Strings, The Grass and The Vessel respectively, each containing a number of chapters.

While the storyline begins with notes scurrying with a jovial nostalgia and plenty of cornball humour, by the end, it dissolves into an outpouring torrent of emotions, streaming, welling and shining with intense spiritual exuberance, leaving the readers with some profound insights to ponder and dwell into.

One such insight being the discrimination between an idea and the reality. Another being a realization, that not until we get to have something that we thought we desperately wanted, is that we come to know that we didn’t really want it in the first place. We wanted something else.
It was never the destination that mattered, it was the journey of the search. The journey is the way. The search is the finding. The means is the end.

The character of Quentin Jacobsen has been depicted to arrive at these understandings while navigating the span of this storyline…

By losing himself in the search of her, he ended up losing her but finding himself.

In the same spirit, when we lose ourselves to something which is greater than our personal identity, our limited paper towns, only then the journey itself marks the thrill of experience.

Wrapping up the review with a small poem…

 

This life is a great paper town,
and we, we are these little-little paper humans,
crumpled and crinkled,
waddling and fluttering,
amidst these paper towns,
trying to navigate through,
constantly getting pulled by invisible strings,
as if some teeny-tiny puppets,
relishing the bright golden sunlight of the golden green meadows,
desiring for a dream to last forever,
locked inside our own vessels,
but soon enough discovering our vessels cracking open,
and the illusion of our fallacies fading away…
which leaves us questioning and wondering,
the purpose of all of this, of all this seeking and running,
losing and finding, finding and losing it again,
wanting something and then all of a sudden not
wanting it anymore,
losing something, finding it and then wanting to lose it all over again
Life is a paper town and we are paper humans…
How fragile, how vulnerable,
and at the same time, how powerful, how impeccable
How illogical and disorderly,
and at the same time, how perfect, how mathematical!

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Book Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Every mystery has a beginning and an end.
And every mystery leads to the end of some or the other search.
While some mysteries lead to the hunt of a treasure or a secret, some others lead to an understanding or a realization, an insight or an observation.
In the same vein, some mysteries lead to the unfolding and revelation of something which causes us to wonder and wish, that it’d have been better if the pandora’s box of this mystery would have remained locked shut forever…because to glare at the revealed discovery, is probably too astronomical an appearance to assimilate all at once.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larrson too is one of those mysteries that is as spine-chilling as intensely appaling.

It is a heart-thumping jigsaw puzzle sketched from a labyrinthine storyline of several interlinked mysteries, revolving mainly around the lives of the characters Mikael Blomkvist (a journalist and part editor of Millenium magazine), Lisbeth Salander (a clever hacker and a star-rated freelance researcher who works for a security company) and Vanger family consisting of hundreds of family members, who occupy the entire estate of Hedeby Island in Sweden.

The mystery number one reveals itself when Mikael writes and publishes an article about the financial corruption of a top-spot business empire owned by Wennerström. Followed by the release of this article in public, Mikael is sued with several false allegations that could be equally damaging to his reputation as to the sales of Millenium magazine which is partly owned by him. Like an abrupt flip-flop of events, Mikael gets himself embrolled and entangled in a lawsuit against the CEO of Wennerström business empire.

The mystery number two presents itself to Mikael in the form of a phone call. A phone call from a person named Dirch Frode, who is the official lawyer of an eighty-year old man named Henrik Vanger. Henrik Vanger is the owner of Vanger Corporation, which is one of the wealthiest and another top-spot business empires.

Henrik Vanger has been looking to hire Mikael for the job of solving two mysteries for him. These mysteries were linked to a series of events which occurred nearly forty years ago. One event concerned the strange disappearance of Henrik’s granddaughter Harriet, who was sixteen year old at the time when she disappeared all of a sudden 40 years ago.

Apparently, the mystery of her disappearance seemed to be interconnected with yet another mystery, which was the ‘The Case of The Pressed Flowers’. The 80-year old Henrik Vanger told Blomkvist that it was only his grandniece Harriet who used to gift him these framed flowers each year on his birthday. And so, receiving these flowers every year after her disappearance was a sign that indicated that someone knew this secret about Harriet and that someone was trying to torment him with these flowers - these flowers framed in portraits, wrapped as his birthday gifts and sent to him from various places and from an unknown sender....

He further told Mikael that it was his anticipation that Harriet didn’t only disappear just like that, but rather she was murdered, and that too by one of the members of the Vanger family. And he was almost certain of this suspicion.

And so, Mikael was hired for the job of solving these mysteries for Mister Vanger, in return of which, he’d be paid a mammoth sum, as well as provided some good evidence against Wennerström, which could help him drop out of the lawsuit.

This was meant to be a cold case, for which Mikael would stay away from the town, in a cottage in Hedeby Island for an year, in order to carry out a thorough research of all the members of Vanger family, concerning the mystery. Though, reluctant at first, Mikael agreed to take up the job on the thought that solving these cases would help him save his reputation and get him out of the Wennerström lawsuit.

As he began his research, Mikael discovered that most if not all the members of the Vanger family turned out to be somewhat strange, weird, unusually freaky, bizarre and aloof to the point of stirring his curious idiosyncrasy.

Overwhelmed by the information of his research, soon enough, he also hired an assistant to work with him on this mystery. The assistant was Lisbeth Salander. Lisbeth was a freelance researcher who worked for Dragan Armansky, the CEO of Milton Security, a company which offered a variety of security-related products and services. Though seemingly introverted, socially-absent, hard-nosed, emotionally unresponsive and almost psychopathic as she appeared to be, but according to Armansky, she was one of the most brilliant, and gifted investigative researchers he had ever come across. This girl with a dragon tattoo perched in glaze on her shoulder…

Guess what, she was a genius hacker too…

Even Mikael, during their work, was surprised to notice her sharp photographic memory and her excellent research reports, that he couldn’t deny but only appreciate her brains even more.

However only, Lisbeth’s sharp brains hadn’t prevented her from getting labeled by the law as ‘psychologically disordered’ personality, the consequence of which was that her life was taken under the control of a guardianship agency, where, paradoxically, the guardian would exploit her dependance and reputation for their personal interests.

Lisbeth liked working with Mikael, because according to her, he was one of those persons who treated her like a human. She dedicated days and weeks and months to tracing the archives and researching the internet, trying to sew together the scattered clumps of mystery one way or the other…

Followed by a gigantic research work and a few startling clues, Mikael and Lisbeth arrive at a baffling discovery. A cruel reality of sadism, victimhood, cult superstition and criminal activity resulting from these tendencies.

As it turned out in the end, the criminal behind Harriet’s disappearance revealed to be none other than a member of Vanger’s family. Harriet’s own brother, Martin Vanger.

Martin was years ago initiated by their father Gottfried Vanger, who was possessed by a sadistic tendency to torture and murder women. Gottfried, who was Henrik’s brother’s son, was a man who hated women. And he in turn taught his son to hate women. This, led to a series of murders which Lisbeth and Mikael discovered while researching the mystery…

Martin is revealed to be a seriel murderer and criminal, who even had a private torture chamber where he tortured women, slaughtering and murdering them to bits and pieces.

But this is not all. The story cascades into a series of more stunning secrets and collapsing realities that unfold gradually.

The novel is a chilling psychological thriller that combines a murder mystery, the psychopathology of cultish sadism and plenty of financial tidbits. But it is also a story of one-sided love – the love that Lisbeth feels for Mikael but that which is an impossibility.

The novel is
not only entertaining
but absolutely thrilling
and more than anything else, whackingly heartbreaking.

The book was published posthumously in 2005 after author’s death in 2004, and was an instant bestseller internationally, This particular edition is an English-translated version, but the original novel was penned in Swedish language, the original title for which is ‘Men Who Hate Women’.

A drastic depiction of the horrible reality of a world sooted with pathological tendencies innate of human organism. The storyline also hits at the ugly consequences that result from twisted misinterpretations of religious scriptures. From a creative writer’s perspective, the book features a regular third-person narrative, with descriptions neither too bland nor too verbose. The dialogues are painted with a writing style that crisply highlights character-specific voice expressions, which seems to add a dramatic and immersive effect for the reader.

All in all, the book is one of the most intriguing works of crime fiction and psychological thrillers.

Thank you,
Neha
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Book Review: The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Death.
Imagine what if death was a person. And this person could speak.
Imagine if you could hear it speak, and all of a sudden, it opened its mouth and began narrating to you, a story about a girl;
a girl who was a thief, a thief who stole books…

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, is a historical fiction novel. The novel is written in a third-person narrative. But even more interesting an aspect about this narrative is its narrator. The narrator here, is not a human. Rather, the narrator is ‘death’.

Yes!
In this novel, the narrator is none other than the character of Death.

Death narrates the story of a girl named Liesel Meminger. But the story is not only about this girl who relishes words and steals books. The story is also about a small street called Himmel Street, in a small town of Germany, precisely during the rule of Adolf Hitler, the Führer. The story is also about the people and the children and the families living in the boxlike houses sewn into the muddy snow blanketing this street. And the story is also about the tiny pockets of people who were like the subtle splashes of colours on the otherwise gloomy field smattered with ashy charcoal sky of dystopia and chalky-powder mountains of the rubble of war, these were the people who despite the terror blanching the veins of their hearts, liked to see people as people, transcending the boundary that was scribbled under the dictatorship of Hitler.

In simple words, the story features the setting of Nazi Germany, and it revolves around the time period of history when Adolf Hitler triggered the World War II between Nazis and Jews, upon the invasion of Poland.

The book comprises of eighty-eight chapters, divided in chunks among a prologue, an epilogue and ten central story parts.

Another noteworthy highlight of the book is that, it doesn’t only uses the common storytelling technique ‘story-within-a-story’, but also employs an intriguing approach called the ‘books-within-a-book’. Tucked within the chapters of the novel are two little story-sketchbooks, named as ‘The Standover Man’ and ‘The Word Shaker’ respectively.

In a writing style that is thoroughly poetic, almost musical and songlike, the author has embroidered into the book, the emotional gems of friendship, attachment, pain, separation, angst, fury, little joys, family, love, tragedy and above all these, the greatest law of life, that is mortality.

After witnessing her young brother die in her arms, Liesel was abandoned by her mother to a couple named Hans Hubermann and Rosa Hubermann, who would be her new foster parents. Hubermanns lived in a house located in a location named Himmel Street which nestled in a small town of Germany called Molching.

Hans was a painter and accordionist, whereas Rosa did the ironing of clothes for people living nearby. Liesel went to school, played soccer with the neighbourhood gang of kids, ate bread & peasoup that her mother cooked, helped her mother with the delivery of ironed clothes, strolled with her best friend Rudy and in the meantime, she engaged herself with reading the books that she had stolen.

She stole books from ice and fire, and sat in the basement of her house, unraveling the mysterious words printed in the rectangular-square lodgings of old paper.

The first book that she stole was The Grave-digger’s Handbook. She had stolen this black-and-silver pocket book from the ground of the graveyard while the grave-diggers were digging her brother’s grave. To Liesel, the book was not only a stolen treasure, but the last memory of her brother she could cherish, as well.

While this was but only a coincidence, her curiosity for deciphering words led her to steal some more, sometimes from the library of the mayor’s wife, who lived in a house on a slopey hilltop and sometimes, even from the fire set in the town square to commemorate Hitler’s birthday celebration. Yes! In those times, these German people liked to host their celebrations by burning books and papers in the bonfire!

While in her house, Liesel had still not forgotten the dead body of her brother slinging from her arms. Every time she slept, the nightmares of it shook her up and awake from her sleep. And so, to cure this, every day, her father began to teach her to read. They read from the books she had stolen. Often times she wondered that she learned more about words, reading and books from his father than her school where she was taught by an obnoxious Sister Maria who didn’t seem to believe that Liesel could ever read an alphabet. On special occasions, her father brought her books by trading some old used cigarette rolls with a gypsy in the city who took these in return for some money.

Liesel was having the good time of her childhood life.

Until one day, when her life took an unexpected turn…yes, yet another one…

A boy named Max, the son of his father’s old friend from army and a Jew knocked the door of their house to seek a shelter amidst all the outer atmosphere tussled with smoke, rubble and bloodshed of World War II. Hans and Rosa received Max with an open-hearted generosity, despite the heavy terror culminating in their hearts. As time went by, Liesel began to see in Max, her dead brother, only except that he was an elder one and that he was still alive.

Quite soon enough, Liesel grew fond of Max. While he remained in the frozen cold of their basement, camouflaged by several dropsheets and paint buckets, Liesel would often bring to him presents that would enable him to know about the external world, about what was going on in the nature outside. Presents like trashed newspapers with blank crosswords, fallen feathers, leaves, old buttons, candy wrappers, tiny stones and pinecones, of course in addition to her detailed descriptions about where she had discovered these items, and storylike descriptions of the sky, the weather outside…what people were doing, what was air like….things like that…

During this period of time, there was yet another thing going on, besides the various wars initiated by Hitler, and the parades of Jew prisoners. In the town where Liesel lived, there were air-raids, in which several tin-can planes would fire bombs in their street, and the people living there had to hide themselves in some deep underground basement if they were to save themselves.

During these air-raids, Liesel, along with her parents as well as with their neighbours, all the people would snuggle inside the basement of a house owned by a common neighbour Fiedlers.

It was during these times that Liesel began to read stories from the books she had stolen. The stories seemed to distract the people’s minds from extreme fear, misery and sorrow.

Liesel read to people during these times, she read to a neighbour Holtzapfel every day, she read to Max more often than not, and Max gave her the story sketchbooks he had created during all the time he had to remain in the dark basement.

Above and beyond all, Liesel was beginning to heal from her nightmares. The more she saw of Max, the more she realized that there was so much in common to both of them. And so, he kept creating sketchbooks and Liesel kept reading the stolen books.

But it is not for no other struggle that a struggle ends…it seems.

for, in one sudden gash of a moment, Death hovered above the street, loosened and extracted the souls, and took nearly everyone away….

but there was a girl who was left
alive
because when death arrived, it couldn’t find her
because at that time
the girl had been sitting in the basement
busy reading from a book
she had stolen

Death was puzzled,
it grinned and went away
wondering
until the right time then…

In the end, the book signs off with a reedy note that is a mixture of a sensation that is dreadfully numbingly terrorizing and warmly soothingly comforting.

The story is not exactly the one that will cause you to cry. The story is not either the one that will make you smile. Rather, the story is a bittersweet lyric rustling between the scales of melancholy and merriment, rolling between the gloom of terror and the glee of compassion, looming between the shadows of “mortal certainty of death” and “immortal uncertainty of life”.

A soupy swirl of feelings like these…
Life, what is life, it says!

And death, it watches a life named Liesel, it watches her as she falls in love with the thing called ‘words’, and then she hates this thing called ‘words’, and somewhere between this love and hate, she begins to write, because how after all, could she describe this contradictory bittersweetness of love and hate without this thing called words.

Words!

Signing off with a note, here are some words from the book uttered by death.

Death says,

“A small but noteworthy note. I've seen so many young men over the years who think they're running at other young men. They are not. They are running at me.”

True enough!

Well, thank you!

Neha

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Animated Book Review: The Mistress of Spices

The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Swaying and pulsating with pipey-hot spice descriptions, syrupy-emotive narrative, portrait-worthy characters and beautiful storytelling, The Mistress of Spices is a novel by Chitra Banerjee Divakurni, the Indian-American writer and poet. Tantalizing, enchanting, charming and bewitching, the novel is a work of fiction, most-appropriately falling into the category of magic realism fiction.

But apart from all things magic, the book also ripples with romance, and croons with the fragrance of feelings like courage, intuition and following one’s heart.

The novel, fundamentally is rooted in the connection that plays between human mind and the psychological healing power embodied in different Indian spices.

The Mistress of Spices is a novel depicting the story of a young woman who is born gifted with certain magical powers. The story takes the reader through a spectacular journey of how she navigates the discovery of her magical powers, stumbling and tripping into the rollercoaster of emotions that her gift brings to her, both pleasures and pitfalls.

The woman’s name is Tilo.

As a child, Tilo was kidnapped by a pirate gang, who destroyed her village and took her away in their ship. They thought that her magical power would bring them good luck.

Unaware still of her true magical power, Tilo escaped the ship when the pirates were asleep, and discovered herself on the shore of some mysterious land.

As she was lying half-unconscious on the sandy ground, she noticed that a motherly woman was examining her hand with utter curiosity.

Later on, she came to discover that this place was ‘The Island of Spices’ and this motherly woman was called by the names of ‘the Old One’ and ‘the First Mother’. The First Mother was a powerful witch who knew everything about the magical power of different spices. On this island, she taught and trained her students the craft of harnessing magic and how to cast spells with the magical power of spices.

Every spice has a meaning. Every spice can be used to cast a certain spell. Every spice carries a secret magical power which can be used to trigger both healing and destruction.

As time goes on, Tilo turned out to be one of the most intelligent students of the First Mother. The First Mother seemed happy about her, but at the same time she cautioned her for her future. Upon examining Tilo’s hands that day, the First Mother had told her that her hands were singing with spices, but they were also singing with danger and destruction. And Tilo must never deviate from the rules if she was to prevent this destruction from happening.

At the end of their training, the First Mother asked her students that now they’d need to pass a test. Each student would have to step into the Shampati’s fire. The fire would not burn them, but only take them to their respective destinies. In their new lives, they’d lose their youthful beauty and each student would be called as ‘The Mistress of Spices’.

She told them that a Mistress of Spices shall only use their magic to help other people, and never for themselves. They must never look at their reflection in a mirror. And they must always follow all these rules, or else, they’d lose their magical power.

The First Mother warned Tilo that even though she was as brilliant as a diamond, but she was a diamond with a crack, and it would be hard for her to resist the temptations of her desire. And following her desires would only bring her destruction.

Also, the First Mother told her a tale about her name’s origin, which features in the book as a story-within-a-story.

This is what she tells her.

The name ‘Tilo’ is based on the Hindi name (til) which refers to the sesame seed spice.

Furthermore, the spice name ‘til’ is derived from a Sanskrit word Tilottama. Tilottama was the name of a goddess in Indian mythology. Tilottama goddess was bejewelled with an enchanting, rapturous beauty. However, she was cursed that she could never fall in love. But once, she did fall in love. And true to her curse, her body became bent and twisted. Her beauty turned into ugliness. And she was evicted from the heaven of gods.

The First Mother warned Tilo, that just like Tilottama, a Mistress of Spice could not desire or fall in love, or else she’d lose her magical powers and bring great destruction to the world. She told her that,

“When a mistress of spices loves someone she should not love, then all the people she loves will be destroyed.”

Promising her that she’d follow all the rules of her magic training, Tilo stepped into the Shampati’s fire. Soon enough, her body was swallowed into the ocean of fire lolling with tongues of blazing flames.

The fire took Tilo to her destiny. In this new life, she found herself in the city of Oakland. She had lost her youthful beauty and now resembled a middle-aged woman, her face creased with wrinkles, even though in her heart she was still as young as before. Here she was a businesswoman operating a store named ‘Spice Bazaar’.

In her store, she sold an assortment of spice powders, pickles, tea powders, spice herbs, spice mixes and Indian spice snacks.

But this was no ordinary spice store. In every packet she packed for her customers, she also whispered words of magical healing spells.

Her purpose was to use the magical power of spices to help people. Throughout the day, many customers visited her store. They purchased spices, some of them got their palms read by her and others talked about their everyday life.

Among all these people, some of them were the regular shoppers in her store.

For instance,

One of her most regular customers was Lalita. Lalita was a middle-aged woman who had an abusive husband. Tilo gave her the spice packets of turmeric (haldi) for love and fennel (saunf) to strengthen her mind.

Her second regular customer was Haroun. Haroun was a taxi driver but he was often attacked by local Americans for his nationality. Tilo packed for him black cumin (kalo jiro) for protection against evil.

Kwesi, an African-American was another of the regular shoppers in her store. Kwesi ran a martial arts school and he would often visit Spice Bazaar store to buy packets of spice mixes to cook delicious Indian pakoras for his girlfriend.

Jagjit, a school boy, was another of the shoppers. Jagjit often visited her store alongwith his mother to buy sabu papads and other things. Jagjit was a traumatized child who was bullied at school and ignored by his parents. Tilo gave him a packet of cinnamon (dalchini) for friendship. However, a literal twist to her spell, he became friends but with a mischevous gang of violent drug-addicted boys in his school. To help and save him from bad company, Tilo gave him the spice packet of Indian Madder (manjishtha). She believed that this spice would bring calmness of mind to him. She also offered him a poster of Kwesi’s martial arts school, suggesting that there he’d be much better off with his friendships.

Besides these, another elderly man was the most frequent shopper in her store. He was the grandfather of a young woman named Geeta. While he visited the store to buy some spices, he told Tilo that his family was going through a disturbing scenario. His granddaughter Geeta wanted to marry a Mexican man but her parents Raamu and Sheela were against their marriage. And so, Geeta had left the home to live on her own.

Tilo gave his grandfather one of the most powerful spices – the thorn-herb (kantak) mixed with golden honey.

This is how Tilo spent the days of her life helping people with the magical power of spices she had learned.

After having helped many of these people by solving their problems and healing their sorrows, Tilo found herself slipping into the valley of forbidden love, as a young American man named Raven, also a frequent shopper, stepped into the store.

Raven seemed to display more interest towards Tilo than towards the spices he was there to buy. Tilo wanted to avoid him at any cost. At first, she thought of giving him a spice packet of asafetida (hing), which was the antidote for love. But all she could offer him was a packet of spicy papad snacks, spiced with black peppercorn (kalo mirch). The magical power of peppercorn spice caused Raven to feel open-hearted, candid and frank. Instead of running away from the shop, he started sharing his life-story with Tilo.

When she couldn’t muster the will to resist her desire for him, she set herself on the verge of breaking all the rules of her magic training, one after the other.

At first, she stepped out of the store to meet Geeta. Breaking the rule that a Mistress of Spice could not leave her spice store.

Next she broke the rule by using the magic of spice to get back her youthful beauty. She used the King of Spices (makaradwaj) to conquer time.

She even ordered a mirror for her store to look at her reflection.

But most of all, what happened was that, she made a packet of red chilli powder to deliver to Haroun, as he had been attacked by some Americans in a terrible accident. But red chilli was the ‘Spice of Anger’, ‘The Spice of Destruction’. The moment she realized this, she threw away the spice into an ocean but she knew that since a spell was already cast, it was too late.

That night, the ghost of the First Mother appeared and in a haunting appearance enraged at her that since she had broken the rules, she would now have to bear the punishment for the same and Shampati’s fire would soon arrive and take back Tilo to the Island of Spices. She ordered Tilo to close the store and to get ready for stepping into the fire.

As per the instructions of the First Mother, Tilo put up a heavy sale in her store, selling everything at big discounts and closing her store forever.

That night, she gathered all the leftover remains of the spices in her store, arranged them in a heap, whispered the prayers, and sat there waiting for the fire to take her back to the island.

The next morning, as she woke up, there was an earthquake in the city. Strangely enough, the fire had not taken her back.

Raven came to save her. Together they were about to leave the city which was in a massive rubble, and go in search of their paradise, Suddenly, Tilo stopped. And said to him that she had decided that she wouldn’t go. She would rather rebuild her spice store and help the people of the city. This, she told him, was the real paradise!

The story dances with a medley of spices, spices which are metaphors representating emotions…

Feelings and emotions are temporary,

just like the motley of spices

and just like the unique flavours they seem to exude as their effect;

All the magical power that may reside

in either these spices or the emotions that they trigger,

is fleeting too,

but the magic that resides, springs and bubbles within our hearts

is imperishable independent of the ingredients of our everyday life!

The story of Tilo is a flavoursome reminder that the real magic is within our heart. So, follow your heart and be magical!

Thank you & Wonderful day!

Neha

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