Her father was one of those who would sit down with even a telephone directory and read it. He passed on that love for books to Sangeeta Bahadur on nights when he read her bedtime stories. She would listen to them excitedly till there came a time when she could read on her own and picked up, as a girl of seven, mythology and adventure stories from around the world. By the time she was 12, she was reading all the classics and began writing short stories. They became intense romance stories that grew more complex as she grew older. Her classmates in school and college loved reading them but they just stayed handwritten stories inside the pages of notebooks, while she got busy moving on to a career, marriage and babies. The love for writing resurfaced years later when she got hooked on to reading science fiction.
Short stories about spirits and mythical creatures turned into an idea for a mythical trilogy, called Kaal. Jaal. The first came out three years ago and now Vikraal, the second is out. Sitting in her London home, Sangeeta says, “The genre seemed to offer the perfect outlet for all my pent-up creativity!” At first she just had the idea for Jaal and didn’t know how it was going to turn out. “I merely had the opening scene in my mind, and knew that my protagonist would be a superhero with a difference and would be called Arihant.”
The book, she says, that is no retelling of mythology but a world called Kaal she created, which then wrote itself. By the time Vikraal came, her husband and co-conceptualiser Yuresh and she drew a very skeletal outline. “But once again the story and the characters took over and led me down unforeseen paths. The beginning and the end went as per plan, but the journey between point A and B often took me by surprise. Similarly, although we have a fairly strong framework in mind for Mahakaal (the third of the trilogy), I’m sure the story will find a way to lure me into unexplored territories.”
Vikraal could be read independently, without Jaal, but then hearing the tale of Arihant from the beginning adds to the experience. “Jaal lays out the essential paradigm of the trilogy, introducing the reader to its vivid tapestry of history, geography, socio-political and strategic equations, and many of the major characters and their motivations. This is also where the reader first meets and often falls in love with Arihant, the Beloved of the Gods, as an adolescent just beginning to grow into his powers. However, Vikraal can definitely be read as an independent book. There are enough recaps woven into the ongoing story to give you an idea of what has gone before.”
Each book in the trilogy talks about a different phase in Arihant’s life. In Vikraal, for instance, the main protagonists are all older. “Their emotions, responses, motivations and actions have begun impacting the world around them on a much larger scale, evoking far more serious consequences and retaliations. Each book also explores the successive levels of Arihant’s personal evolution, to bring him to a stage where he becomes actually capable of confronting Aushij, the deluded but immortal Lord of Maya.”
Jaal used the concept of kayakalpa — metamorphosis and the siddhis, which she calls adbhaavas, to strip away his physical limitations. Vikraal, on the other hand, uses the idea of self-realisation to rid Arihant of conceptual limitations, taking him beyond the prison of the mind. In Mahakaal, Arihant will cross the final frontier — the limitations of the spirit itself.
