Vanara
Page 32
Mrudangam: A percussion instrument
Para drum: A tribal drum. Sometimes it is used during funerals in south India, though it is used in auspicious occasions also. We can see them in Tamil Nadu more.
Chenda: Another kind of drum, now mainly found in Kerala and coastal Karnataka.
Nagaswaram: A wind instrument, usually used in south Indian marriages for auspicious music.
Acknowledgements
This book is a tribute to the great storytelling tradition of India. From Valmiki, to Vyasa, to Kambar, to Ezhutachan, to Kritivasa, to modern-day masters: I owe everything I know to your works of genius. Your works tower before me like the Himalayas and I am a child standing in awe, wondering when I will be able to climb those peaks. I bow before the countless oral storytellers and masters who have taught the world how to tell stories.
I was writing the second book in the Bahubali series when the first book was picked up for a Netflix show and the book was pushed to be released the next year. I was writing the screenplay, but I was toying with the idea of writing a short story on Tara. I had already written short stories about Sita, Soorpanakha and Shanta, sister of Rama, and published them on Kindle. This would have been another short story in the series had I not met the ever-smiling, charming Milee Ashwarya of Penguin Random House. She encouraged me to turn this into a novel. I was scared whether I would be able to do justice to such a novel. It had taken me six years to write Asura and almost the same time for my Ajaya series. She pointed out that I had written The Rise of Sivagami in 109-odd days. Even then, I was scared to take up the work as I was working on screenplays of TV shows.
Milee stood behind me like a rock, chiding me, scolding me, pleading with me and prodding me to give my best. I will never forgive her for the many sleepless nights I spent punching furiously at my keyboard. I will never forget the encouragement she gave. No wonder the lady is heading the country’s largest and most respectable publishing group, Penguin Random House. Take a bow, Milee, for without your support Vanara would have just been a short story.
I should thank my copy editors, Pritsikha Anil and Saksham Garg, for the outstanding effort they put in to edit the book in such a short time. I salute their patience for dealing with a writer who kept harassing them every hour with a new rewrite. I thank my proofreader for doing the daunting task of sieving through almost 100,000 words and Ishani Bhattacharya for correcting the same in record time.
The stunning cover is a masterpiece. I thank the talented artist Mihir Joglekar, and designer Neelima Aryan. This one is a classic, lady, and I only hope my writing does justice to your art. I thank you, Mihir, for the illustrations.
Preeti Chaturvedi and Twinkle Yadav deserve a special mention for all the public relationship work they have done for me and arranged for some fascinating interviews. I am grateful to the press and TV journalists too for the extensive covering of the book.
Priyanka Sabarwal and her team, who handled the social media campaigns, deserve special thanks.
I am thankful to ace directors S.S. Rajamouli, Karan Johar, Vetrimaran, Ram and Rakyesh Omprakash Mehra for reading the book and talking about it. I am thankful to my friend and superstar actor Dhanush for his words of encouragement after reading the book. I thank my friend Sonali Bendra for taking out time to encourage me in not only this book but for my previous works too. I am proud to be a member of Sonali’s book club. I am thankful to Emraan Hashmi for his kind words of encouragement.
To you, my love, Aparna. What have I done to deserve you. You will soon get that Nobel prize for patience that my friends keep promising you for tolerating a cranky life partner for sixteen long years and counting. Thanks for being my first reader. My daughter Ananya, my greatest critic, avid reader, editor who always finds fault with my Malayali-accented English and teaches me diction, and my son Abhinav who loves football and who I hope will one day read some of my books. To my Jackie, the blackie, from whom the character Chemba was inspired. One day, I will learn to love the world as much as you love me.
My extended family have always stood with me, even when I wrote books that challenged their beliefs and convictions. They have been my source of inspiration since childhood. My siblings Lokanathan, Rajendran and Chandrika, my brother- and sisters-in-law, Parameswaran, Meenakshi and Radhika and my niece and nephews, Divya, Dileep and Rakhi, have always made our family get-togethers lively with many debates about the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
My neighbour Niteen Jakka and his daughter, Rucha Jakka, who gave the first feedback and criticism and made me rewrite a few chapters; Laksmi Nair, who was one of the first readers for Asura and now Vanara; my friends for more than three decades, Rajesh Rajan, Santosh Prabhu and Sujith Krishnan; other friends like Sidharth Bharatan and Anubhooti Panda, who were my beta readers for various drafts—all of you deserve special thanks for keeping me inspired. My Government Engineering College, Trichur batchmates of EEE 1996, especially Cina, Gayatri, Ganesh, Malathi, Maya and Balamurali who have read some of my works, and Mathew, Anjali, Brinda and Habeebulla Khan, who have never read and are never going to read any of my works but still encourage me to write, all deserve my heartfelt gratitude.
My special thanks to all the readers of my last four books. Your words of criticism, praise and suggestions have been my inspiration and the reason why I continue to write.
THE BEGINNING
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This collection published 2018
Copyright © Anand Neelakantan 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket images © Neelima P Aryan
ISBN: 978-0-143-44283-7
This digital edition published in 2018.
e-ISBN: 978-9-353-05366-6
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.