Delve into the world of kings and spies

Vikrant Parmar

History is replete with stories for the fertile brain, but only a perspicacious mind can go a step further to fictionalise them and present tales that delight. Author Ravi Shankar Etteth has done precisely that in his novel, The Brahmin. Set in the times of the Maurayan Empire, with a young and restless Ashoka at the helm of things, the story is a gripping work of fiction laced with imaginative details. 

It is a world of intrigue, espionage, subterfuge, treachery and statecraft, where Ashoka, ‘whose wrath was terrible to watch’, is planning to wage a war against Kalinga, only to be rattled by the murder of one of his concubines inside the palace. It is a time when Buddhist monks are being tortured inside Patliputra prisons and Ashoka is not yet ‘the great’ king the subsequent generations would know him as. 

In comes his most trusted man, master spy, The Brahmin, who is not given a name for reasons best known to the author. Maybe he wanted him to be as faceless as his calling or to perk up the curiosity quotient for the reader. The Brahmin is presented as a veritable superhuman, who sees the invisible, hears the inaudible and achieves the impossible! He is always one step ahead of the adversaries and protects Ashoka with an iron will. On his part, Ashoka, ‘believes the worst of everyone but expects the best’ from The Brahmin.

‘Watching came easy to him’ and The Brahmin ‘was used to being hated; sometimes he even liked it’. He knew that ‘upon him rested the safety of the kingdom and its people, who were unaware of the endless war being fought in the shadows’, so he ‘defended his king with ruthless determination’. 

The Brahmin, ‘who terrified everyone’ in the kingdom, smells a deadly plot against Ashoka in the murder of the concubine and a few more that follow. The assassin leaves behind clues each time, something that makes the plot gripping and the story interesting. 

Ashoka’s queen, Asandhimitra, ‘with intelligent, lustrous eyes’, who ‘would not reveal anything she did not wish to’, is another intelligent soul who assists The Brahmin at each step of his quest for the elusive killer. She is the one ‘whose rage was as famous as her kindness’. Other characters, including Suma, Mur, Radhagupta and Hao, are equally well-crafted. 

The entire plot revolves around a secret that needs decoding and The Brahmin, much like in Chanakya’s mould, is eager to conjoin the missing links, which he eventually does. The action shifts from one city to another with amazing velocity, gathering sub-plots, one after the other, which is sometimes bemusing. However, the author neatly unwinds one knot after the other before the denouement. 

Etteth has studied history closely and sprinkled details from the Ashokan times at various places in the narrative quite deftly, such that they lend much credibility to the fictional tale. The imagery he uses is rich and the diction impeccable. The Brahmin impresses, for sure.