The Chaos Curse (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #3) - Sayantani DasGupta Page 0,95

plays a role in The Chaos Curse, as it is the time-traveling and otherwise protective object given by Albert Einstein-ji to Neel and Kiran. Although this book didn’t help me actually time travel when I was younger, the stories in it were magical to me and as such, I wanted to honor the collection in this way.

The rakkhosh figures Surpanakha and Ghatatkach in The Chaos Curse are not from Thakurmar Jhuli, but from Hindu epics. Surpanakha is the sister of Ravan, the main antagonist of the Ramayana. She’s attracted to the hero Ram, but when she approaches him, she is rebuffed by him. When she then tries the same tactics with his younger brother Laxshman, she is again rejected. Humiliated by the two heroic brothers, the demoness goes to attack Ram’s wife, Sita, but has her nose cut off by Laxshman instead. She runs to her brother Ravan to report this shameful event, and sets off the events of the epic, including Ravan’s kidnapping of Sita. I always thought that the Ramayana treated Surpanakha pretty unfairly, so I made her the headmistress of the rakkhosh academy in this book. Ghatatkach (after whom the made-up Academy of Murder and Mayhem is named) is a rakkhosh from another epic, the Mahabharata. The son of the second heroic Pandav brother Bhim and the rakkhoshi Hidimbi, enormously strong Ghatatkach fought alongside his father and Pandav uncles in the great war upon which the epic is based. Even though he was raised by his rakkhoshi mother, he was enormously loyal to his father and family and was an almost undefeatable warrior, so it made sense to me that he would have a rakkhosh school named after him!

Thakurmar Jhuli stories are still immensely popular in West Bengal and Bangladesh, and have inspired translations, films, television cartoons, comic books, and more. Rakkhosh are very popular as well—the demons everyone loves to hate—and appear not just in folk stories but also Hindu mythology. Images of bloodthirsty, long-fanged rakkhosh can be seen everywhere—even on the backs of colorful Indian auto rikshaws, as a warning to other drivers not to tailgate or drive too fast!

Tuntuni and Other Animal Friends

The wisecracking bird Tuntuni is a favorite, and recurrent, character of Bengali children’s folktales. Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury (also known as Upendrakishore Ray), collected a number of these stories starring the clever tailor bird Tuntuni in a 1910 book called Tuntunir Boi (The Tailor Bird’s Book).

Bengal tigers are of course an important animal of the region. I’m particularly fascinated by the swimming and human-eating tigers of the Sundarbans, who have smartly adapted to their mangrove-swamp environment (tigers in other places don’t know how to swim). Tiktikis, or geckos, are almost ubiquitous in Bengali homes, stickily clambering up walls and keeping mosquitoes and other pests at bay. As a child, I was super afraid of them, and still kind of have a love-hate relationship with the slimy lizards.

Bengali Nursery Rhymes and Poems

The story about an old woman who escapes a hungry fox by hiding in a rolling gourd is a popular Bengali folktale. The image of the doll wedding party accompanied by dancing insects, horses, and elephants is from several popular Bengali children’s poems.

Global Myths, Folktales, Novels, Movies, and Stories

Since The Chaos Curse is about the collapsing of the world’s stories into each other, there are many direct and indirect references to some of my favorite Euro-American stories, including J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, Rob Reiner’s film version of William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, and even A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh.

There are also references to both Greek and Norse myths in this book. Greek myths are primarily referenced in the form of Kiran’s Gorgon principal, Stheno (a snaky-haired sister of Medusa who didn’t have her propensity for turning people to stone) and the story of the Trojan horse, which was originally the way that the Greek army was able to sneak into Troy during the Trojan War. I drew from Norse myths to come up with the handsome dragon boy Ned Hogar, or Nidhoggr. Nidhoggr is of course the mythological dragon (sometimes considered a snake) who guards the base of Yggdrasil, the Norse tree of life that connects the various cosmic planes of existence. In this novel, Yggdrasil becomes transformed into a tree in the heart of Parsippany, New