Mad Sisters Of Esi: Tashan Mehta Weaves Fantasy Amid Sanity And Madness

Fables, dreams and myths come together in this masterful work of fantasy by author Tashan Mehta, sweeping across three landscapes, and featuring a museum of collective memory and a festival of madness. At its core, it asks: In the devastating chaos of this world, where all is in flux and the truth ever-changing, what will you choose to hold on to?

Myung and Laleh are keepers of the whale of babel. They roam within its cosmic chambers, speak folktales of themselves, and pray to an enigmatic figure they know only as 'Great Wisa'. To Laleh, this is everything. For Myung, it is not enough.

When Myung flees the whale, she stumbles into a new universe where shapeshifting islands and ancient maps hold sway. There, she sets off on an adventure that is both tragic and transformative, for her and Laleh. For at the heart of her quest lies a mystery that has confounded scholars for generations: the truth about the mad sisters of Esi.

Here's an excerpt from Tashan Mehta's Mad Sisters Of Esi 

Every child knows how to enter the museum of collective memory. You tap your tragus, that triangular bump in your ear, and you say khol. We know this instinctively, without being told. No matter how young you are, if you tap your ear and you say the word right, the museum comes to you.

‘Comes’, of course, is the wrong word. The museum is always there, invisible and waiting. Khol is not so much a summoning as it is a door. Poets have described the transition as a melting—your reality is swept away and replaced with the museum. It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting, standing or perched in the belly of a ship sailing through the black sea— when you whisper khol, you will find your feet on sandstone floors and when you look up, you will see you are in a corridor made for giants.

To truly understand the significance of the museum of collective memory, you have to imagine it. Visualize a corridor a hundred times your height. Silver-green ivy spills down walls, whispering and snaking. Here and there, through the foliage, you glimpse the twinkle of jewels— mosaics, you realize, of stories you don’t know and creatures you have never seen. They loom above you, watching.

Yet you are not afraid. There is something familiar and warm here, like sitting around a fire with your family on a crisp night or listening to your grandmother tell you a story she heard from her grandparents. It is not comforting; it doesn’t have the same feeling of enclosure. But you are not vulnerable either. You’re known.

Now imagine a thousand corridors like this. A hundred thousand. More. Each corridor has differently sized doors, and behind those doors are rooms so large you cannot see their end. These are packed with objects and records arranged in no discernible order. This is a museum that follows a pattern of its own making—one that is chaotic and, crucially, living.

So seamless is the transition from your location into the museum of collective memory and so bewitching is the experience that early visitors considered the museum an illusion, one of those hallucinations you get when you inhale too much pallé pollen. Most of these first visitors were sailors, who, when reminiscing of home, found themselves idly touching their tragus and whispering khol. They couldn’t explain the impulse to do so. Nor could they explain the museum itself, a network of corridors that intersected with no map.

But they found that if they simply walked, the museum would lead them towards where they needed to go.

One sailor discovered a mosaic of herself, crouching by a ship and hugging her mother; it was the moment she left for her first voyage. The vines parted to reveal it; now they settled gently on her shoulders. She saw the lines on her mother’s face, felt the warmth of her arms. She saw the necklace her mother slipped into her sailor pocket, a family heirloom believed to ward off evil. The likeness was uncanny.

She wept for days afterwards. ‘It was like finding yourself remembered,’ she said, ‘and knowing you always will be.’

Another found a record of an ancestor he didn’t know he had—a distant branch of a distant cousin, but the ears were unmistakable. He began studying this ancestor’s life to learn they shared the same soul, just reincarnated into a new time. The knowledge exhilarated him. Life had given him what it gives so few people: a dress rehearsal. Here was his chance to learn from his ancestor’s mistakes and shape a life that was perfect.

This is the magic of the museum. It ties you to a history that is vast and sprawling and tenderly you. It lets you wander through memories that have always been yours to keep, if only you remembered.

What you make of them is up to you. It has given back people reasons to live, helped others discover themselves, allowed still others to lose themselves.

Today, the museum is visited by everyone, although rarely do you cross paths with another person in its mammoth halls. We cannot imagine our lives without it. What family argument would be settled if we couldn’t tap our tragus and say khol? What homesickness would be cured if we couldn’t wander through its corridors to find our great-grandmother’s recipe? How would we grieve for the ones we lost if we couldn’t spend time with the objects they touched and loved, if we didn’t know we could find those objects always? The museum is our friend, our companion, and the quiet witness to the lives that came before us.

And yet we know almost nothing about its maker, Magali Kilta, or why she created it.

Extracted with permission from Tashan Mehta's Mad Sisters Of Esi; published by HarperCollins India

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