The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar by Indra Das
Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on June 30, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.
The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar is a novella by Indian science fiction/fantasy author Indra Das and marks a return for him to long fiction after his debut 2016 novel "The Devourers". The Devourers was a masterpiece, a queer fantasy horror/historical fiction novel (although I don't think those genre classifications are necessarily adequate) that dealt ostensibly with shapehshifters/werewolves in modern day and 17th century history and questions of identity, love and transformation (using serious and often brutal themes like rape here). So it was with great anticipation that I requested this second piece of long fiction (Das has written plenty of short fiction since The Devourers) from NetGalley as soon as it was posted up there.
And as expected, The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar is a fascinating novella, that itself defies classification, and is really interesting. The story follows a boy Reuel, as he grows up in a family that seems to come from nowhere, who makes him constantly a tea that forces him to forget whenever he learns something about their true history, and yet still he has glimpses of memories of his family dealing with the impossible - dragons and dragonflesh. Its the story of a child of immigrants from another world who want that child to grow up in this world, rather than their own one, and the struggles that child feels when his family can't escape their feelings and memories towards that old world and can't quite understand at the same time this own new one. And it's the story about faith and memory and believing, and keeping history alive, told in beautiful fascinating prose, and I think it really works.
Quick Plot Summary: Reuel grows up in Calcutta along with his family - a family full of people who claim to have no history, and come from nowhere, and thus can't be easily classified. To the kids at his elementary school Reuel appears like he might be Chinese, but he is not, even if his family's premises abut the Chen Family's Chinese Restaurant. But Reuel has always wondered who his family was, and has occasional memory fragments of times in his past when they told him and showed him, stories of being from another world and caring for and dealing with dragons - impossible creatures that couldn't exist. Yet Reuel's family makes sure that he drinks the Tea of Forgetfulness, preventing any of these memories from taking root.
And so Reuel grows up, first all alone, and then alongside the Chen's daughter Alice, who takes an interest in this boy with the mysterious past, the boy who looks like a girl and doesn't mind that, the boy whose family wishes for him to be a part of this world even as they find themselves unable to let go of their own ties to their old ones....
Thoughts: This novella doesn't have a plot arc per se - which is why that plot summary above doesn't really promise one. Instead the story jumps back and forth in time, with it largely telling the story of Reuel's growing up amidst his family, and his growing friendship with Alice, all the while interspersing its narrative (itself not fully linear) with Reuel's memories of his family and dragons (memories that he has been made to forget). It's a fascinating novella, written with really great descriptive prose, as it metaphorically and directly tells the story of a child of immigrants (Reuel) whose family wants him to be a child of his new country even without any understanding of how to pull that off or what that means (it isn't helped by them essentially being illegal immigrants without papers). Reuel struggles because without a family putting the current world into context, and without himself able to put his relation to the new world into context, he can't really fit in with other people his age in this new place. And yet at the same time, he can't help but feel ties to the old place, a place he has never known, which in his case is this fantastical parallel land his family fled along with dragons, even despite his family's attempts to keep that place from him. Indeed, in the end, Das posits that Reuel will keep that old world alive in this new place by taking up his family's beliefs in dragons, by taking up their spirits and cultures, and it is in that connection where he finds something happy to finally share with someone else.
I'm seizing here only upon one theme by the way, as there's other stuff Das is doing here which works real, for example - this a story that is very queer (Reuel's family features a trans grandparent and adheres not at all to the gender binary, while Alice, Reuel's friend, is Bi and possibly queer herself as she finds Reuel's girl-like features to be fascinating) and its queerness is a prominent feature and theme I didn't get into above. Really recommended for you to check out, and a successful return to long fiction for Das.
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