Siṃhī: The Becoming (सिंही — SIṂHĪ) Kindle Edition

Some books are read. Some are told. Some are carried.This one was written to be all three.✦ ✦ ✦Siṃhī: The Becoming is the story of a young lioness who loses her mother in a storm and finds shelter in a cave — where a wise serpent, knowing she is afraid, begins to tell her a story. And in that story, there is another story. And in that one, another still.What begins as a fable at the mouth of a cave opens, across thirteen books, into something larger: a literary novel about becoming, composed in the old Indian tradition of nested wisdom stories — a tradition that has passed from parent to child, teacher to student, around fires for thousands of years.✦ ✦ ✦At its heart, it is a book about a young creature who does not know where she came from, and the long slow discovery of what love leaves behind.Along the way, Siṃhī meets figures who carry the oldest questions. What is innocence, and what ends it. What is power, and whether it belongs to the one who holds it. What cannot be undone, and how a life is built anyway. Grief arrives. Injustice arrives. Loss arrives in forms the young lioness has no preparation for. And still she moves — not because the world becomes safe, but because something in her refuses to stop.This is not a soft book, though it is a tender one. Grief is met, not avoided. Loss is real. The old stories do what old stories do — hold wisdom across generations.✦ ✦ ✦For readers of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea, Richard Adams's Watership Down, Sue Monk Kidd's The Book of Longings, Clarissa Pinkola Estés's Women Who Run With the Wolves, and the old Indian fables themselves.A parent reading aloud. A seeker reading alone at night. A reader of the Indian tradition who wants to see it treated with the seriousness it deserves. A reader who comes for the lioness and stays for what the lioness comes to understand.This is Siṃhī's becoming. In following hers, you may find yourself remembering your own. Read more