Who are you and where do you come from are often seen as fraught questions, but they are often inescapable. This is especially the case in India’s metropolises, which are inhabited by people of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and certainly they are questions which are rarely answered without using labels that mark one’s identity—labels of ethnicity, language, religion, caste, and so on.

The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar—written by Indra Das, himself an inhabitant of one of those Indian metropolises—chooses, however, to tell the story of a boy who possesses no such labels, at least not in the way people around him comprehend. His name is Reuel George. His surname is often seen as an indicator that he is Christian, but he and his family do not practice Christianity. Nor is he Hindu, or Muslim, or an adherent of any of the other religions that the people around him practice. He is often told he resembles a Chinese person, or a person from the North-East, but he cannot lay claim to those identity labels for himself. He also gets labeled “a snake from nowhere.” Of course, he is not actually from nowhere.

But when I asked my family who we were, where we were from, their vague answers essentially said nowhere too. We were the only family in Calcutta without any ethnicity. Of course, this isn’t possible. Everyone born on Earth has an ethnicity. It is, unfortunately, a signature left on our persons by God. (p. 7) 

Reuel’s parents tell him that they’re nomads, even though they don’t lead a nomadic lifestyle. When asked about their last name, his father—a man obsessed with myths and legends—tells him about the legend of St. George. However, his mother promptly denies that connection, insisting that their people don’t have anything to do with a Christian saint.

This mystery does not take long to be resolved. In case it was not obvious from the title of the book, Reuel’s people are dragoners. What being a dragoner entails, however, is left somewhat ambiguous. We see glimpses of dragons throughout the novella—in fact, the opening scene features Reuel’s grandmother showing Reuel how dragons grow on trees. But that is all we see: glimpses. The dragons serve as a mere backdrop for Reuel’s story, for his confusion and isolation from his peers. He is set apart from them by his association with a culture that hardly anyone knows about—a culture, indeed, that he barely understands himself.

He eventually finds a kindred spirit in Alice Chen, a Chinese-Indian girl whose parents run a restaurant. As a Chinese person who speaks Bangla and English better than her ancestral Hakka, she is no stranger to cultural confusion, and the two of them end up navigating that together as they come of age. With this novella, Indra Das also returns to the themes of queerness and gender fluidity he explored in his novel The Devourers, with the elusive culture of Reuel’s family expressing highly relaxed boundaries between genders. Alice initially mistakes a portrait of Reuel’s grandfather for one of his grandmother:

Maa and Baba told me that when my grandfather was young, there wasn’t much difference between men and women in our culture. They would just be the same, and sometimes, men were pretty, and women were handsome, or had beards. Or the other way wound. And it didn’t matter. (p. 33)

Also like The Devourers, The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar offers an unusual take on a common fantasy creature. Set in Kolkata, and going back and forth between present times and the time of the Mughal empire, The Devourers offered a unique take on werewolves which eschewed traditional fantasy tropes to explore both its characters and themes like sexuality, violence, and aggression. In both these books, worldbuilding and action play second fiddle in to entrancing prose, characters, and themes—but The Devourers offered a more expansive world than The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar eventually provides.

Indeed, on the face of it, this book seems like a strange addition to the category of fantasy literature involving dragons. For one, its dragons get very little page time. They are constantly there in the background, but, barring a few disjointed scenes, they rarely play a major role. There is an almost dreamlike sense of unreality to all the novella’s mentions of dragons, which makes the reader wonder if they are even meant to be real—or if they are instead some sort of elaborate metaphor. A potion called the Tea of Forgetfulness—also called halahala by Reuel’s father, after the legendary poison from Hindu mythology—is frequently administered to many characters including Reuel, heightening the sense of unreality by having Reuel question his own memories.

Oddly, however, what emerges is a tribute to older, more conventional works of fantasy. Writers like J. R. R Tolkein, Anne McCaffrey, and Ursula K. Le Guin are referenced in the book—in fact Reuel’s father is the author of a fantasy novel called The Dragoner’s Daughter, a work that gets compared with The Hobbit, as well as Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series. It is clear that this novella plays homage to those fantasy epics, without attempting to be one of them. Instead, within the trappings of the subgenre, Das instead weaves a nuanced tale about cultural identity and confusion, a tender coming-of-age story, a poignant reflection on culture and isolation. He does so through luminous, dreamlike prose:

I have a memory of my grandmother showing me the strange flowers of a tree quite unlike anything I’d known to be real. We were standing in a garden—a cloak of chill mist thrown over it and embroidered in the gold of the dawn sun. The tree—or bush—was quite small, low to the ground, and looked like it was dying in an autumnal wilt, its thin, curling branches bare except for desiccated brown seed pods that hung heavy in the hazy air. (p.1)

I initially felt frustrated with all this, because the novella seemed to tease the possibility of a more in-depth look at the world of the dragons without fully delivering on the promise. Throughout the book, I was waiting for the big reveal, where both Reuel and Das’s readers would get to find out all about that world, and how it works. Only, the reveal never comes.

But then I realized that was the point of this book. Indra Das might have created a world in which epic adventures and fantastical scenarios exist; but our point-of-view character exists on the fringes of that world. His view of that world is partial, and incomplete, yet it is all that he has. Through his eyes, we as readers also get a partial view of a fading world—and experience the beauty and sadness of connecting with it without ever really belonging there.