Adventures of Maya by Luis Fernandes - Graphic Novel Comic Review

Adventures of Maya

ADVENTURES OF MAYA is an engrossing story in COMICS format of a 12-year-old girl and her dog, Bangle. Maya is going home after buying medicines for her grandfather when she and the dog get magically transported to the Age of the Ramayana.

About the Book 

Maya comes face to face with Ravana’s brother, Kumbhakarna who is on a rampage because a splitting headache is preventing him from falling asleep. Maya gives him a couple of aspirins. He gets immediate relief and promptly falls asleep.

Kumbhakarna’s personal physician, Dr Kala Miri is impressed by Maya’s medical skills. He invites her to his house, hoping to persuade her to reveal some of her medicinal formulas. But no sooner have they reached his house than the Queen’s soldiers burst in and take custody of the girl.

Queen Mandodari has a magic mirror in which she can see all that is happening in her kingdom. She saw Maya bring Kumbhakarna under control and wants to talk to her as her own husband, Ravana, is having bouts of insomnia.

Dr Kala Miri helps Maya escape from the soldiers but then she is captured by an evil sorceress, the White Witch. The White Witch has witnessed the arrival of Maya in Lanka through her crystal ball. She knows that Maya has come from the future and wants to find out from her the outcome of the war that is looming over Lanka.

A chase develops in which Maya is pursued by Dr Kala Miri, the Queen’s soldiers and the White Witch’s pet python, Warra-Warra. Dodging all of them, Maya finally arrives in the capital, at the time that Hanuman is setting fire to the city.

The comics are illustrated by Gajoo Tayde who is known for his clean line and tidy, uncluttered artworks. The writer, Luis Fernandes is author of ‘Guest who Came to Dinner’ published by Ratna Sagar and several several Amar Chitra Katha titles and former editor of India’s only comics magazine, Tinkle.

The Review

I bumped into Adventures of Maya, while browsing through titles in Kindle. It caught my fancy as any story about the famous monkey god of India (Hanuman) and his adventures across territories would.

The Ramayana is one of the worlds oldest epic and is a story of a dutiful son, god incarnate who suffers on earth all that an average human suffers, and circumvents situation through his skill, knowledge and power. As god amongst men he is considered the foremost hence aka Purushottam. His adventures over the period of 14 years spans the entire country of India and flows down to Sri Lanka with action, fights, belief, love, friendship, loyalty among the myriad of emotions are encapsulated in it.

Hanuman is an important character from the beloved epic and plays a part in this story.

The best part of this story is the introduction of a current story into an age-old one with neither of the storylines changing from its existing path.

Maya our protagonist is a young girl who having learnt the epic Ramayana, from her grandfather has an Alice in Wonderland moment and instead of a rabbit hole she along with her beloved dog Bangles enters a cave and passes into another dimension that takes her to an alternate reality or rather into a time capsule of the distant past.

Alice is remembered once again when Maya and her pet consume fruits of a plant that alters the duo into miniature selves and chased by a rat they walk along with us in Cloud Cuckoo Land and end up in an unknown land where people are running around in terror.

We find that Kumbhakarna, a giant has a splitting headache and is running amok. 

(For the unversed, Kumbhakarna was a giant and brother of Ravana (King of Lanka) and the adversary of Rama in the Indian epic Ramayana. He was cursed with eternal sleep and would awake for a day every year. He was blessed with invincibility on that day.)

Maya offers Kumbhakarna some aspirin which stops his headache and he promptly falls asleep.

And Maya's worries start as a tussle starts between Kumbhakarna's personal physician (vaid) and the staff loyal to the Queen Mandodari, wife to Ravana, King of Lanka (present day Sri Lanka), the former to decipher the medicine/witchcraft/magic in the pills and the latter to know about the unknown person who has entered the kingdom. The Queens forces win the tussle and carry her in a flying vehicle (Pushpakvimana) from where she skyjumps and escapes. 

What follows is a series of escapades, some very slapstick, some quirky, with characters, witches, huge talking snakes (and no Parseltongue), talking in the same language in this much enjoyable romp in Lanka.

Drinking water from a pond changes them into water animals and consuming the mud changes them back. 

The Queen's forces keep catching them in their endeavor to take her to their mistress.

A powerful Witch sends her snake much like Nagini from the Harry Potter novels to bring  Maya to her. 

The witch tries to get her to do her work. They escape again.

The witch knows what the future holds for Lanka and she foresees the fall of the several Lankan warriors including Kumbhakarna by Lord Ram's monkey army and wants to know more hoping that Maya can share the future. She is able to see the sea bridge and the invasion and nothing much ahead.

Maya gives her the slip.

This time they fall in with a new species, the Mud people. 

The story is intertwined with the Ramayana happenings and this is the time when Hanuman (the Monkey God and greatest devotee of Lord Ram) has come to Lanka in search of Lord Ram's wife, Sita who has been kidnapped by Ravana.

We get some side stories like an experience of superstitious behaviour in the affair of the demon Ghantikarna, which turns out to be monkeys playing with a bell.

The story reaches a crescendo when the witch gives the news that Lord Hanuman, has set Lanka on fire as in the epic Ramayana. 

The story features Hanuman saving the trio of Maya, her dog and the Vaid from falling down from a building by getting tied in his tail while he was burning Lanka.

The constant tete-e-tete between this story of Maya and the epic is something that one who has read the epic or at least has a fair understanding of the flow of the epic will enjoy more than a common bystander who reads this as a standalone book.

The book has enough and does enough for ones with no understanding of the epic and can be read as a standalone book as a story close to Maya in Wonderland style with background of the historic Indian sub-continent especially that of the Vedic era or the era of Buddha, Mahavira which would place the developments in the BCE or the BC depending on the calendar era one is used to.

What I have loved about this book is the effort that Luis Fernandes and his team with a background of Amar Chitra Katha, Tinkle, etc. is their will in entering a space that in recent times is being explored in novels by Amish Tripathi in his Meluha trilogy of novels starting with The Immortals of Meluha, Anand Neelakantan in his beautiful Asura: Tale Of The Vanquished, The Story of Ravana and His People

which among many others like Ashwin Sanghi in his The Krishna Key, all in a quest to understand Bharatvarsha or the ancient India and its myriad of stories, colorful history, quests and simply the traditions that made the country's history unique in many ways. Tales, legends in numerous languages, dialects, sects, and a lot more.

Adventures of Maya has done the required groundwork for a playful read.

The book ends with a spin where the reader is caught unawares whether the entire episode was an actual experience or a wistful daydream quite like the Alice novel that it is inspired by.

Recommend this as a light reading and all 5* 's for the effort.

Please do not forget to post your comments. I am an equal opportunity person so would love to hear your love or your hate for the review or book in any order. Please write what you did not like or whether the book was an absolute disaster for you and why.

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https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4820155493