Afterlife adventures – Leisure News

The newborn cooks of the lockdown learned an important lesson while sweating over their hot stoves: after a point in the cooking process, you need to put the gas on simmer, cover the pan and just let the ingredients meld for a while so what you finally eat is a unified dish rather than a collection of items in a pot.

Anita Roy might have profited from this learning when she wrote Gravepyres School for the Recently Deceased, a children’s book about Joseph ‘Jose’ Srinivas who finds himself in said school one day, and desperately wants to get back home.

At first read, there’s nothing wrong with the book. The subject may be a bit morbid, especially when Joseph remembers the sound his mother made when he ceased to breathe, but the story is a fine adventure in stunning settings. The writing is seriously excellent: you almost see what takes place as you read the words. The pace is a gallop. Certain characters, such as El Condor Pasa, chief of the vultures, and Ranjubaba, the sadhu who helps Jose and his friend Mishi on their quest for the ‘Seed of Hope’ that may get Jose home, are brilliantly drawn. And there’s humour that works for both kids and adults. All together, when the book ends, you’ve been on a thrilling ride.

Unfortunately, that’s when you start asking questions. Such as: why did Jose need to go to Gravepyres at all? Though Roy builds the world of the school over several chapters, she has not shown why the school exists and what it does other than vaguely resemble Hogwarts and prepare deceased kids for their exit-amination. And why do they need an exit-amination when they’re already dead? What do kids who don’t pass do?

Mishi, Jose’s only friend at Gravepyres, is similarly mysterious. Small, sweet, brave and giving, she forgets everything she is told within seconds of hearing it. But how come, whenever Jose is in a mess, Mishi’s memory is suddenly normal? And why do Ranjubaba and the school’s professors care for her so tenderly? The book offers not a clue.

Sure, death is a mystery and so is life. But all narratives need logic or they have no point. Gravepyres School for the Recently Deceased is good, but seems like a collection of separate ingredients. If Roy had let it simmer a while before publishing it, it might have been fabulous.