The rakkhosh figures Surpanakha and Ghatatkach in The Chaos Curse are not from Thakurmar Jhuli, but from Hindu epics. Surpanakha is the sister of Ravan, the main antagonist of the Ramayana. She’s attracted to the hero Ram, but when she approaches him, she is rebuffed by him. When she then tries the same tactics with his younger brother Laxshman, she is again rejected. Humiliated by the two heroic brothers, the demoness goes to attack Ram’s wife, Sita, but has her nose cut off by Laxshman instead. She runs to her brother Ravan to report this shameful event, and sets off the events of the epic, including Ravan’s kidnapping of Sita. I always thought that the Ramayana treated Surpanakha pretty unfairly, so I made her the headmistress of the rakkhosh academy in this book. Ghatatkach (after whom the made-up Academy of Murder and Mayhem is named) is a rakkhosh from another epic, the Mahabharata. The son of the second heroic Pandav brother Bhim and the rakkhoshi Hidimbi, enormously strong Ghatatkach fought alongside his father and Pandav uncles in the great war upon which the epic is based. Even though he was raised by his rakkhoshi mother, he was enormously loyal to his father and family and was an almost undefeatable warrior, so it made sense to me that he would have a rakkhosh school named after him!
Thakurmar Jhuli stories are still immensely popular in West Bengal and Bangladesh, and have inspired translations, films, television cartoons, comic books, and more. Rakkhosh are very popular as well—the demons everyone loves to hate—and appear not just in folk stories but also Hindu mythology. Images of bloodthirsty, long-fanged rakkhosh can be seen everywhere—even on the backs of colorful Indian auto rikshaws, as a warning to other drivers not to tailgate or drive too fast!
Tuntuni and Other Animal Friends
The wisecracking bird Tuntuni is a favorite, and recurrent, character of Bengali children’s folktales. Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury (also known as Upendrakishore Ray), collected a number of these stories starring the clever tailor bird Tuntuni in a 1910 book called Tuntunir Boi (The Tailor Bird’s Book).
Bengal tigers are of course an important animal of the region. I’m particularly fascinated by the swimming and human-eating tigers of the Sundarbans, who have smartly adapted to their mangrove-swamp environment (tigers in other places don’t know how to swim). Tiktikis, or geckos, are almost ubiquitous in Bengali homes, stickily clambering up walls and keeping mosquitoes and other pests at bay. As a child, I was super afraid of them, and still kind of have a love-hate relationship with the slimy lizards.
Bengali Nursery Rhymes and Poems
The story about an old woman who escapes a hungry fox by hiding in a rolling gourd is a popular Bengali folktale. The image of the doll wedding party accompanied by dancing insects, horses, and elephants is from several popular Bengali children’s poems.
Global Myths, Folktales, Novels, Movies, and Stories
Since The Chaos Curse is about the collapsing of the world’s stories into each other, there are many direct and indirect references to some of my favorite Euro-American stories, including J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, Rob Reiner’s film version of William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, and even A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh.
There are also references to both Greek and Norse myths in this book. Greek myths are primarily referenced in the form of Kiran’s Gorgon principal, Stheno (a snaky-haired sister of Medusa who didn’t have her propensity for turning people to stone) and the story of the Trojan horse, which was originally the way that the Greek army was able to sneak into Troy during the Trojan War. I drew from Norse myths to come up with the handsome dragon boy Ned Hogar, or Nidhoggr. Nidhoggr is of course the mythological dragon (sometimes considered a snake) who guards the base of Yggdrasil, the Norse tree of life that connects the various cosmic planes of existence. In this novel, Yggdrasil becomes transformed into a tree in the heart of Parsippany, New Jersey, which is clearly not true to the original tale in the least!
Weddings
Like other South Asian weddings, Bengali weddings are usually grand, multiday affairs. Guests are invited by elaborate, hand-delivered wedding cards, although not usually with as mean-spirited messages as Sesha and Pinki’s card! I have included or referenced several pre-wedding events in this book, including engagement ceremonies, where the marrying couple usually asks elders for their blessings, and the gaye halud (“turmeric on the body”) ceremony, where everyone traditionally dresses in yellow and the groom and bride are (separately) purified with turmeric paste. In Bengali weddings, this is also the time that the two sides of the family often exchange gifts in the form of elaborately decorated “tottho”—trays of everything from fancy clothes to makeup to food that travel from one house to another. Bengali weddings don’t traditionally have a mehendi ceremony, where the bride has her hands and feet decorated with swirling henna designs, or a sangeet, where song-and-dance numbers are performed by and for guests, but these North Indian traditions have been adopted by many Bengali couples these days and so I include them here (although Bunty the tiger does comment on them not being traditional practices). Bengali brides usually wear red silk saris embroidered with silver or gold thread, gold jewelry, shola pith tiaras, and have their faces decorated with sandalwood paste designs. Bengali grooms usually wear white dhotis (cloth wrapped and folded around the waist) and kurtas (tops) along with shola pith topor, a pointed white hat, on their heads. The doll bridal party that Kiran sees during her search for her moon mother is dressed in these traditional ways, and the bride is riding in a palki, or small house-like palanquin carried by two or four bearers.
Astronomy
Like in The Serpent’s Secret and Game of Stars, there are many references to astronomy in this book, most notably the idea of string or membrane theory, that there may exist many universes in parallel to one another that are simply not aware of the other universes’ existences. This to me seemed very much in keeping with the immigrant experience—the idea that immigrant communities are universe-straddlers! In this novel, I also played with the idea of the big bang, or the beginning of the ever-expanding universe, and the potential of a big crunch, or the eventual collapsing of the universe as we know it. I connected this idea of an expanding universe to the need for many types of stories, and linked Sesha’s plan to collapse down diversity and smush stories together to the notion of the collapsing of the universe. I also was intrigued by the idea of a gravitational singularity in the center of a black hole, which contains a huge mass in an infinitely small space and where the known laws of physics cease to operate. The dragon boy Ned Hogar/Nidhoggr also refers to a theory called Laplace’s demon, an all-seeing entity which to me seemed like a very ominous and scary monster—which also fit with Sesha! Albert Einstein makes another appearance in this book and Stephen Hawking is also mentioned, but these characters have nothing to do with the real scientists—they are merely fictional imaginings of space scientists I admire!
Like in the previous two books in this series, rakkhosh in The Chaos Curse are the manifestation of black holes. Even though this pairing of folktales and cosmology may seem strange, I did so to tear down the stereotype that cultural stories are somehow unconnected to science. In fact, like in every culture, traditional Bengali stories are often infused with stories about the stars and planets. That said, please don’t take anything in this book as scientific fact, but rather use the story to inspire some more research about astronomy, astronomers and physicists, the big bang, singularities, and string theory!