Indian fantasy is a genre born inside a holy text. The influence of mythology on the genre, especially that of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, is undeniable. They are always present, like gods. This presence can also be sensed in every moral posture of Indian society: how conflicts arise, how heroes are expected to suffer, how villains commit atrocities. It is obvious, then, that storytelling, especially the newest strands of Indian fantasy, would fall under the same spell. After all, the form is still young, still learning to walk, and hence it staggers toward the nearest familiar handrail: the mythological retelling.
But this is only one side of the story. The other is that India, for all its claims of modernity, still thinks of itself as fundamentally religious, fundamentally guided by gods. According to a 2021 Pew Research Centre survey, belief in god is universal among Indians (97%), with a small segment of Buddhists being the exception. God is the air with which narratives fill their lungs.
Even those who may not go to temples, and may not read the texts, still think in religious notions of fate, of destiny, of a cosmic hierarchy that determines who deserves to be happy and who doesn’t. So, when Indian fantasy materializes, it is already wearing the robes of the epics, already speaking in their tongue. The result is the genre of mythological retelling that has become synonymous with the fantasy genre itself.
The founding stone was laid over a decade ago by Amish Tripathi, whose The Immortals of Meluha (2010), the first in the Shiva trilogy, created a marketable brand out of myths. From that point on, the floodgates would open. New authors, from Kevin Missal to Anand Neelakantan, flocked to the same pantheon, each drawing from the same reservoir of familiar names and cosmic struggles. Even older authors like Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni found themselves in the spotlight of a newly reawakened myth‑hunger. Every publisher, watching the numbers roll in, happily greenlit one title after another, feeding a market that would never be satiated.
These books sell like cupcakes—or kachori‑samosas, to use an example closer to home. They’re like snacks you keep reaching for: greasy, briefly satisfying. Even outside India, the pattern remains intact. Rick Riordan, under his imprint Rick Riordan Presents, published the bestselling five‑part Pandava series (2018-2022), which capitalized on the very same formula of mythological retellings.
The Marathi author Gautamiputra Kamble, quoted in the Translator’s Note of his short-story collection The Seekers (2026), says it best: “The two epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, exert an immense influence on art and literature around us. Even if the epics aren’t referenced directly, art and literature is infused with a certain worldview that is shaped by these stories.”
It is in this context that Tashan Mehta’s Mad Sisters of Esi must be read. It is in this context that it must be deemed a glorious landmark in the world of Indian fantasy.
“The problem with circular stories is that it is difficult to know where to begin.” So starts the mad journey in the mad world of Mad Sisters of Esi. The line is a disclaimer, a warning that the reader is stepping into a story that won’t—can’t—move in a straight line. The story is a spiral, a loop, a twirling snake, a series of circles folding back into each other, the past always already the present, the future written in the cracks of the now. The very structure of the book echoes the way memory works, the way consciousness circles back on itself.
This is a story that rejects being neatly defined, rejects the idea of giving the reader the expected coordinates of a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, it offers an astral topography in which the reader is always mid‑ocean, the shores visible only in glimpses. The circle, then, is less of a narrative device and more of a way of being in the world, a way of moving through time, through memory.
Dear reader, it is at this point that I’ll gently nudge you to stop reading this piece and go pick up the book. Don’t read the blurb, don’t peek at the promotional material. The less you know, the more you’ll receive. I shall be waiting, as shall this piece.
Despite the circularity of this story—of its mind‑boggling time‑shifting, shape‑shifting, world‑shifting universe—it has a strange linearity to it, like the knitting of an elaborate cardigan in reverse. The threads may be tangled, the patterns irregular, but the line—bent, twisted—is there, all the same. The book may not respect the laws of cause and effect, but it does respect the logic of emotion, of memory.
Imagine it. Time as a fabric. Imagine silk gathered in your arms, satin slithering down them. Crêpe draped over your elbow. Long gossamer cloths of time hanging in the whale's chambers like the forgotten ornaments of an old era, like the curtains that tumble down the sides of enormous palaces to flutter against diamond chandeliers. Imagine gossamer cobwebs hung across vast spaces, swimming with the colours of a diffused rainbow. Imagine touching time. (p. 13)
At the heart of this novel are two sisters. Or rather, four sisters. Or rather, sisterhood itself. We begin our journey with the two sisters inside the whale of Babel—a mystic, cosmic creature swimming through space, with interconnected chambers and mini‑worlds within its skin. They are Myung and Laleh.
Have you ever been lonely and not realized it until your loneliness was sated? Do you remember seeing your reflection for the first time and the uncanny feeling that accompanied it—of standing both outside yourself and inside? That is what Myung was like to me. In the vastness of the whale, in a bounty of shapes and sizes, I had found someone shaped like me. (p. 15)
Their world, the whale, keeps growing new compartments and worlds, all for them to inhabit and explore. “In the beginning of beginnings, there was Great Wisa. She was born of the whale’s heart and she roamed through its belly, carving its insides with many marvels.” (p. 11) They have their own world, their own stories, their own mythologies, their own physics and chemistry and biology and geography. The whale is a universe in miniature, a place where the boundaries between worlds are porous, where the past and the future blur into each other.
But, while one wants to hold on, the other wants to leave. While one wants to settle down, the other wants to explore. While one is satiated by the boundlessness of their (not-so) little world, the other is invigorated by the concept of the boundlessness that awaits her outside. Which freedom do you choose? The freedom of staying, which feels like safety? Or the freedom of leaving, which feels like necessity? “Have you ever felt an impulse so strong you know it is correct, but you cannot understand it? Have you ever chased something, a tail end of a feeling, always whipping out of sight? And you run and you run, hoping to catch it.” (p. 91) That impulse is a type of compulsion, like a leaf following the wind or a moth following a flame it knows will burn. The question is not just Myung’s; it is the novel’s; it is yours.
And so, Myung flees, traveling through the mysteries and wonders of the universe. But how far can you go away from your home? How long can you leave your home? Can the desire-colored fire ever overpower the home-tinted hearth? The more she leaves, the more she brings with her; the more she escapes, the more she drags the whale—the whale’s song, the memory of the past, the memory of the sister she left behind—with her. “You wandered, trying to find the wonders you hoped for, but they were pale. And when you came back and you held your mother, you learnt a truth very few people are given: that home is a person.” (p. 117)
Searching for a way back home, a way back to her sister, Myung ultimately arrives at Ojda, a sentient, shape‑shifting island, the home to the Museum of Collective Memory. The island never stays the same, is always in the process of becoming, its geography alive and restless. The museum lives within this mutability, an expansive archive made of songs and echoes, a place where the past is sung, reshaped into other forms. The Museum of Collective Memory animates its stories, like memory does; like grief does.
The museum’s creator, too, is looking for her sister, or so the story goes. The entire island is a desperate plea, a beacon to hopefully one day catch the eye of a certain someone—someone who has spent centuries trying to leave.
On Ojda, Myung meets Blajine Kilta, the lonely, last living descendant of “Mad Magali” Kilta. She’s bound by her ancestors to never leave the island, to protect it and wait for Magali’s long‑lost sister to return. The island is as much a sanctuary as it is a sentence, a place where Blajine keeps an uncertain vigil, not knowing for how long, the weight of her waiting pressing into an ever-shifting earth.
For Myung and Laleh are not the only sisters of the story. They’re not the only ones tangled in the vagaries of human imagination, ambition, creation, love. Before the two sisters existed, there existed the mad sisters of Esi: Wisa and Magali. Before they would become the Great Wisa and the Mad Magali, before they would create the whale of Babel and the Museum of Collective Memory, they were two inseparable sisters.
Residing on the island of Esi—with its whalebone mountains, purple-emerald forests, red and white sands, black ice, and an ever‑shifting topography—the sisters are part of the Luddite colony, whose members shun the magic of the Esites, instead living in simple, crumbling cottages, their lives deliberately pared down to the bare minimum. The colony is a place where the world is expected to remain manageable and predictable, the same way we all too often try to keep our worlds—manageable and predictable.
But madness makes a home within Wisa, much to society’s fear and chagrin. It takes the shape of an inner restlessness that can’t and won’t be tamed, and will ultimately initiate the game of hide and seek—eternally searching for, losing, and finding each other, only to lose and search for it again—in which Myung eventually finds herself. “I said: sister is a special word; it’s a careful relationship. You have to be mad to love like that.” (p. 397)
Unlike traditional fantasy and sci-fi storytelling, with its tidy laws and ironclad rules, Mad Sisters thrives on chaos, flirts with the incoherent; it’s a dream you can’t wake up from. In this novel, sense and nonsense are two sides of the same handshake. It is governed by its emotions, its uncontainable desires. The contours of its universe defined and explored on those terms, around two sisters trying to find each other across time. “I find a new wonder,| we read: “in the face of the sublime, it is our humanness we hold close.” (p. 94) Our humanity, in this book, is not the lowest common denominator but the highest note. In fact, it is part of the very fabric of Tashan’s vision: islands, magical creatures, ghosts, all alive, all conscious. Heck, in her making, even time is alive and conscious.
But wait a minute. Did you not heed my advice earlier? To go pick up the book, to let the story find you first? Did you keep reading anyway? Your stubbornness is endearing. Does it all seem a bit too chaotic and overwhelming now? Too many strands, no cohesive direction? I did warn you! Be so it may, let Tashan’s writing itself address your predicament: “I cannot shake the feeling that gibberish is nothing but words ordered on a logic that’s beyond us, and I press my ears to my toddler’s lips as she gurgles the secrets of the universe.” (p. 356)
The more you try to iron the story out into a straight line, the more it curls back into itself. The book is not asking you to understand it. It is asking you to listen. “Everything is more powerful when you don’t understand it. When something is story-less, its mysteriousness makes it easier to accept. But when something has a story, it shrinks down to the same level at which you view the rest of your life. (p. 345)
This story-less, story-rich, story, with its mysteries and revelations, its boundless grief and love, then, is a story of ourselves—the way we, too, keep coming back to those same questions, those same losses. “Why do fairy tales fascinate us? Why do they stay by our side long after we hear them and become our little pieces of pleasure?” Tashan asks. Fairy tales are “more beloved than most” because they “are stories that let us stare at ourselves, the essential parts of our humanness, before we step through into a new world; before we become something more.” (p. 357)
The Mad Sisters of Esi is a story of community, of individuality. How do you separate the one from many, the I from the we? It’s a story of shaping your own words and worlds and being shaped by them, always, of hanging on to yourself in the middle of a world that keeps shifting its contours; of leaving, of waiting, of finding what you desire; of craving what you left behind, of searching, always, searching, searching, searching. It’s a story without neat endings.
Mad Sisters of Esi, in the end, is a story of uniqueness, the distinctness that lives in each of us, a single note revolting against the chorus. It is a story of our communal fear against that uniqueness, that madness. It is about finding each other, those other mad ones. It is about discovering your own madness—that which is not the loss of the self, but the best way to bring it home. In a genre that has long dissolved its individual voice into an inherited chorus, into the comfortable grammar of gods and heroes, it builds its own mythology. Mad Sisters of Esi does not stagger toward the nearest handrail; it leaps. It trusts the fall.