Review: The Sea Elephants by Shastri Akella

Shastri Akella’s debut novel is a tumultuous account of the India of the 1980s and 1990s, when homosexuality was punishable by a 10-year prison term. At the centre of the story is 16-year-old Shagun Mathur, who has lost his best friends – his identical twin sisters, Mud and Milk, and his long-absent father, who has returned from London six months after the twins drowned in the Bay of Bengal.

371pp, ₹599; Penguin

Shagun is still trying to process the grief of Mud and Milk’s passing. He is sick with guilt as he believes “he had set in motion the sequence of steps that claimed” their lives. In contrast, his deeply traditional and rather cold father, who left the country 14 years ago, the year the twins were born and has now returned for their funeral dinner, doesn’t seem as affected by his daughters’ untimely deaths. His focus is on Shagun’s girly ways, and he is bent on policing his masculinity.

He even has sex with his wife on the day of his arrival, which infuriates Shagun: “How could a father come home six months after his daughters died, show no sign of grief, and seek instead his bodily pleasure? Even over dinner he seemed too preoccupied with his wife to mourn for his children.”

His father, a construction contractor in London, insists on being called “Pita-jee” as he doesn’t like the “Daddy-Papa business”. He takes pictures of Shagun squatting and peeing, and warns him – “I will iron you out…” Another time, he forces Shagun to sit on his lap and tells him, “Boys should like Hanuman… Hanuman makes you good at cricket and maths.”

His mother is quite taken in by her husband’s presence, and is not on Shagun’s side anymore. Her insistent your-father-loves-you fails to convince Shagun, who has no previous memory of his father. In any case, even when his father was away, she wore a bright cotton sari and pinned a string of fresh jasmine when the postman came home with the money order every month.

In his father’s absence, Shagun had an idyllic childhood, listening to Hindu folklore from his mother and play-acting it in a treehouse with his twin sisters, who were two years his junior. The children’s favourite story was the tale of sea elephants from the The Dravidian Books of Seas and Stargazing, Volume I: “Once upon a time, the gods took away the first ancestor of the sea elephants, coveting him for his exceptional beauty – tusks blue, body ivory… Only the soul of a drowned child makes their suffering manageable. So their patriarch comes ashore every so often, steals a child, and brings it back with him…”

After hearing this story, Mud and Milk had asked their mother if gods could behave like “spoiled brats”. The story-telling stopped after the twins were gobbled up by the sea elephants.

On his father’s return, Shagun learns that his sisters had been engaged as 14-year-olds to his hateful classmate Rusty’s older brothers. One bridegroom was 29, and the other 30. To Shagun’s horror, his father decides to give his “roka” too – the ritual of pledging a girl or boy in marriage.

To escape his father’s cruel and uncaring ways, Shagun applies to an all-boys boarding school and wins a full scholarship. He fares well at school despite the sadist bullying and sexual abuse, and then gives it all up to join a travelling theatre group. He makes a mark in the theatre group, and during a performance meets the love of his life – Marc Singer, a Jewish-American photographer. When Shagun’s father learns about his sexual preferences, he decides to “reform” him.

Shagun carries the story of the sea elephants to school and then to the theatre company he joins. Reluctantly accepted by the group, he performs the folklore he grew up hearing, and even accepts a teaching position. He evolves as a confident and fluid actor playing various characters – his favourite being Draupadi. Though he embraces his sexuality, the fear that his father will track him down and pack him off to a conversion therapy centre – “the Hanuman Male Fixing Center” – haunts him.

The Sea Elephants is a deeply moving, emotionally honest and intimate account of Shagun’s choices, his truth, and his frustrations at societal norms that have persisted over generations. He can’t fathom why his father worships Hanuman, who makes boys good at maths and cricket, while his mother prays to Krishna – the god of love. In the roughly eight-year period that this book covers, Shagun keeps returning to the book of sea elephants to understand Hindu mythology and its discrepancies.

Akella’s prose is brilliant with the pages studded with gems such as “daylight appears in place of an answer.” Shagun’s love and loss, his scars and fears are presented with exceptional finesse. What starts off as a seemingly simple story jolts the readers awake and give them a much-required view of a queer individual’s world.

At one point, Shagun reads out a sea elephant story from The Dravidian Book of Seas and Stargazing, Volume II: “Two generations of sea elephants come of age before their trauma heals. Their songs, thereafter, start to contain the full octave. All seven notes. The elephant songs now sound complete” Shagun reclaims his world by including queer narratives and making sure all seven notes, and not just five or fewer, are played.

Author Shastri Akella (Courtesy www.shastriakella.com)

In the author’s note, Akella mentions that though India decriminalised homosexuality in 2018, queer acceptance is still the exception than the norm. “Some variation of the reeducation centres described in these pages is the lived reality of many queer men,” he writes. The portions that deal with those centres are what stir the reader’s soul.

When Devan and Rahul are caught kissing in a conversion therapy centre, Rahul is asked to lash Devan 27 times: “Lash met flesh. The sound followed. Praise be to the masculine god Hanuman. A servant kept count on basil beads. On the last five lashes, flecks of blood stuck to the whip’s tail, sprinkled Rahul’s cheeks, his chest, his forehead.”

Akella holds an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He writes that he nearly got sent to a gay conversion therapy centre when his book got outed as a gay novel. The Sea Elephants is both a heart-warming and a harrowing read. It stabs the heart and yet it is a story of hope and triumph. This is a jewel of contemporary Indian queer literature.

Lamat R Hasan is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.

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