Author: Michael Chacko Daniels
Illustrator: Aaron Bass and Krittika Ramanujan
Pages: 364
Year of Publication: 2024
Price: ₹1000 / US$ 25
ISBN:
978-81-968192-3-1 (9788196819231)
 
About the Author
Michael Chacko Daniels lives and writes in San Francisco. He grew up in Bombay, where he attended St. Michael’s High School, Wilson College, and University of Bombay’s Department of Economics. He has a Master’s degree from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. His parents grew up in an ancient Syrian Christian community in the south Indian state of Kerala. In their middle years, in Bombay, they joined the local Baptist Church out of conviction. His adventures in the United States include five years as a Volunteer In Service To America (VISTA); four as editor/publisher of the New River Free Press of Grand Rapids, Michigan; four as assistant editor in San Francisco at The Asia Foundation; and sixteen at Berkeley’s Center for Independent Living. He helped start the Jobs for Homeless Consortium of Alameda County (California) in 1988, and to run it through mid-2004. He is a naturalized citizen of the United States.
 
About the Illustrator
Aaron Bass is an artist who primarily works in printmaking media. He has a Master’s in Fine Art from the University of New Mexico and is a Tamarind-certified professional lithographer. His prints have been exhibited in Japan, China, South Korea, Mexico, The U.K., India, Germany, and Pakistan, as well as across the U.S. Animism and folktales inspire his works. He lives in New Mexico and teaches printmaking at the University of New Mexico. Each of his illustrations starts as a traditional etching. The image is drawn through an acid-resistant film with a needle onto a copper plate. The plate is then submerged in acid, causing the needle-drawn lines to form grooves in the plate. Successive coating and submersion in acid at varying times create further detail and tones. The finished plate is then inked with oil-based printer’s ink and run through a hand-operated press.
 
Krittika Ramanujan is an artist, born in Chicago, now living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has an MFA in printmaking from the University of New Mexico. She has three main bodies of artwork on Dante’s Divine Comedy, mammal skeletons, and human rights. She has illustrated (with Aaron Bass) The Mendonca Mystery and Other Stories (2014) by Michael Chacko Daniels and provided the cover art for several of A.K. Ramanujan’s Oxford editions. For the current novel, which, along with its darker themes, has a wild, playful id-like quality, she looked at the late Victorian artist Aubrey Beardsley who had a genius for composing black and white patterns into striking images. The illustrations for this novel were roughly drawn with pen and ink on vellum paper, without Beardsley’s nibbed pen.
 
About the Book
In her foreword to the book, Naomi Rose writes:
“Michael Chacko Daniels, in his inimitable way, paints a wild, sensuous, explosive, and yearning picture of the collision between ideals and base motives, whether played out on a human-relational level or in society at large, and what “experience” at the hands of people with base motives can do to innocence—and what the path to love and resolution may be.
…And the language, frequently full of poetry and humor, frustration and transcendence, is a Daniel’s hallmark.”