Chapter 6: Mumbai

I jumped the gun a bit in the last chapter by saying that it ended with Kelsey landing in Mumbai.  They actually land at the beginning of this chapter.  My bad.  In my defense, I really wanted to be done with it.

I'd also like to go into why I spent so much time talking about mythology and folklore last time.  One of those reasons is because there wasn't much else there, plot or otherwise, because most of the chapter was plane description.  Which means that this chapter was supposed to educate us, the readers, about "Indian" mythology as a primer to what we're going to experience in the rest of the story, where these legends actually happened.  This could have been effective foreshadowing, and, barring that, an interesting summary of mythology that most of the readers won't be familiar with.

It's not foreshadowing, because none of this stuff ever comes back.  Mr. Kadam could have told specific stories about Durga or Hanuman, who both play roles in the story later on.  But he doesn't, so I can only believe that this is meant to be educational for the reader.

And it most certainly isn't.  Aside from kind of lumping all Asian tiger myths under a single "Indian" or "Islamic" header, I'm not positive that a lot of them even exist.  Houck's descriptions are so vague that I can't find the specific stories she references (assuming they're accurate summaries in the first place).  They're also so vague that I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get out of hearing them, other than "tigers are pretty neat."

Another problem is that a lot of this stuff is part of a very widely practiced, living religion.  Series like Percy Jackson (and Riordan's other books) all have the benefit that the divine characters aren't widely believed in anymore, or at least in the way they are portrayed in the novels.  (Some neo-Pagan groups believe in Greek or Norse gods, but in a pretty significantly different way from the old civilizations.)  American Gods skirts the issue pretty well by 1) restricting the portrayal of gods and goddesses to American immigrant perspectives of those gods that have changed over time and 2) acknowledging the existence of the figures in major living religions, but not featuring them in the main cast of characters, with the exception of the minor character of Mama-ji (an incarnation of the Hindu goddess Kali, interestingly enough) but I think that's because Hinduism isn't that large demographically in America and because, as a war goddess, it would have been kind of weird for her not to be present at the war between old and new gods.

In 2011, almost eighty percent of the population of India practiced Hinduism, the next two highest being Islam (12-ish percent) and Christianity (six percent, but only when combined with Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, and other indigenous religions).  In 2015, about fifteen percent of the global population practiced Hinduism.  That's a whole lot of people!

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that if you're telling a story involving Hindu gods set in a country that has a lot of practitioners of that specific religion, you've got to be careful about being right about what you're saying.

(Also I think it's interesting. So there.)

Onto the chapter.

Chapter Six: Mumbai

This is a pretty short chapter, and I don't think it's all that bad.  It's my favorite chapter so far, even beating out the prologue (which I actually had some nice things to say about).

Kelsey is surprised that Mumbai is a modern city with, like, tall buildings and stuff.  I'll give her a tiny break on this one because I don't think she's ever put thought into anything, ever.  She reminds us that the plane is "sleek" as they land, in case you forgot that the plane is very fancy.  Ren seems unusually alert, and Kelsey is excited to be in a different country.  Mr. Kadam asks, "Miss Kelsey, are you ready to embark?"

I've been largely ignoring this until now because it's the most prominent issue with Mr. Kadam, and he's only really been present starting in the last chapter.  We're stuck with him now, though, so I'll get into this.  In almost every other sentence, Mr. Kadam addresses Kelsey directly, by name.  And then Kelsey responds to Mr. Kadam directly, by name.  It gets a bit ridiculous.  It sounds like this:


I'll try to avoid bringing it up unless it gets especially ridiculous, but be aware that this is happening constantly and it's really annoying.

It's overcast, which prompts Mr. Kadam to explain that it's monsoon season because Kelsey thought it was always sunny in the entire subcontinent of India.  Apparently she forgot that you need rain for jungles to exist.

Some guys make a mistake while unloaded Ren from the plane and pull on his chain too much, to which "[t]he tiger reacted fast."  That should be "quickly," but okay.  Ren swipes a paw at the guy who's yanking his chain, which understandably freaks him out.  Something makes Kelsey walk towards them.  Yes, "something." "Something" is just a crutch for not providing an explanation for why characters do the things they do.  Kelsey has a bond with Ren just Because.

Ren acts really differently when Kelsey takes control, and he's immediately very calm and protective of her.  Weird!!

Mr. Kadam doesn't seem shocked by this, almost as if he'd planned it.  Except, if you remember, he didn't plan it.  Kelsey is only there on recommendation from Matt's dad!  Mr. Kadam had no idea before he asked her to go with him!

Mr. Kadam hands Kelsey a backpack that he's packed for her trip to the tiger reserve with Ren, because, if you remember, he's just going to go off to do some of his own business and leave an American teenager alone in India for a few days.  The backpack has a wad of rupees, travel documentation, a compass and lighter, a map, and food and water.  Kelsey is rightfully confused about this, saying, "Hey, what's with all this extra stuff?"

Just kidding, that's how a normal human being would say it.  Instead, she says, "Um, Mr. Kadam, why did you include a compass and lighter in the bag, not to mention some of these other items?"

Look, I won't pretend that I'm great at writing dialogue.  But I can at least say I don't write dialogue like that.

Mr. Kadam gives a non-answer by essentially saying, "You never know what might happen!"  He also points out that she has a Hindi-English dictionary and tells her that her driver doesn't speak a lot of English.  Kelsey freaks out about this (understandably so, because this is criminally nuts) and compares the experience to starting high school because she doesn't know how things work.  Which sounds a bit dumb until you realize that she's only eighteen and has, like, zero real world experience.  So I give that comparison a pass, for once.

She makes a last-minute plea for Mr. Kadam to not completely abandon her, which he refuses because of the vague business he has to attend to.  Mr. Kadam winks at her and leaves.  That's pretty much all Mr. Kadam has done so far: be cryptic and then leave without answering any questions.

I looked at Ren.  "Well, kid, I guess it's just you and me."

This is either a reference to Casablanca ("Here's looking at you, kid.") or to the movie Just You and Me, Kid, which I've never heard of before, mostly because it came out in 1979.  Either reference is kind of pointless.

The next couple of pages are a description of how crazy the roads are in Mumbai.  "Hoards of people dressed in bright, vibrant colors moved in every direction past my window." [sic]  Yes, "hoards," not "hordes."  How the fuck did this book get published?  I'm fuming about this.  This is a simple mistake that should have been caught!  This book had two editors!  TWO!!!!!!!!

After a (thankfully) brief and admittedly pretty okay description of the crowded city, Kelsey and the truck driver make it to the highway.  "At last, I was able to relax my grip a bit--not because the driver was moving slower, in fact, he had sped up--but because the traffic had dropped off considerably." [sic]  There's another weird grammar bit with the commas around "in fact," which just turns this into a weirdly-phrased run-on sentence.  Kelsey tries to figure out where they are on the map Mr. Kadam gave her but she's having some trouble.  "One thing I did notice though was that the driver missed an important turn onto another freeway that would lead us up to the tiger reserve." [sic] Which sure is weird, and not only because of the missing commas around "though."

She tells the driver that they're going the wrong way by using her handy-dandy Hindi-English dictionary.  She uses the phrase "kharābī rāha," which means "wrong road" or "incorrect path."  Houck seems to have looked up the individual words in English and translated them to Hindi.  Kharābī ("खराबि") seems to translate as "fault" or "defect" rather than "incorrect," and rāha (राह) is closer to "progress" than "path."  Of course, I don't speak Hindi at all, so this might be wrong.  I suppose you could excuse this by saying that Kelsey doesn't speak Hindi, but the narration presents this as being the correct translation, and the driver completely understands what she's trying to say, so I think this is just a bad translation on Houck's part.

The diver says "Fast drive road" in response, so I guess he knows what he's doing. At least he doesn't speak English the same way Maurizio does. I don't know enough about Hindi grammar to tell if this is a plausible way to put that together or not.

The driver finally stops after about three hours in a village called Ramkola.  Kelsey notes that it is really tiny, with only five houses, a market, and a gas station.  Funnily enough, there are a couple of real villages called Ramkola, and only one of them is within driving distance of Mumbai (it's about an eight-hour trip).  It's not a huge village, but much larger than Kelsey says it is--it has a population of about 200, and there are about 300 houses there.  It also has a couple of schools, two hospitals, several supermarkets, and a temple.

If you need further proof that this is the same Ramkola, there's a sign outside of the village that says Yawal Wildlife Sanctuary is 4 km away.  The real Ramkola is about 10 km away from Yawal Wildlife Sanctuary.

So, yeah, details about the town AND how far away it is from their destination are both wrong.

I wouldn't have cared if she had just made up a tiny village.  This takes place in the real world, so you can't just change details with the excuse that it's fiction!

The driver gets out to fill the truck at the gas station and tells Kelsey to get something to eat.  I guess he's not hungry or something, since he doesn't seem interested in eating despite having been on the road for the same amount of time as Kelsey.

She enters the market and a woman asks her if she wants food.  Kelsey is surprised that she can speak English (even though it's a very common language to speak outside of English-speaking countries).  Kelsey eats dinner, and I'll spare you the details of yet another meal.  The only notable thing is that she somehow doesn't know what samosas are.

They hadn't brought any silverware, so I spooned up some of each dish with my fingers, remembering to use my right hand following Indian tradition.  Lucky Mr. Kadam had mentioned that on the plane.

Except, well, he didn't.  You spent twenty pages describing the plane and badly researched mythology.  You had plenty of time to talk about some other important stuff, and you didn't.  Which just means that even the book thinks that the last chapter was pointless.

As Kelsey is finishing up her meal, she sees a "very handsome young man dressed in white" talking to someone by the truck.  The other guy is older and Kelsey thinks he looks like Mr. Kadam.  But didn't Mr. Kadam say that he wouldn't be going with them?  Weird!  I actually mean it this time, though.  This is a decently written section, I'll admit.  Kelsey doesn't comment on how weird it is that Mr. Kadam would be here, because a reader can come to that conclusion on their own.  It's not subtle, per se, but it doesn't need to be.  It stands on its own as something being off about Mr. Kadam's story, and makes the reader wonder and actually care about what's going on.

It is kind of dumb, though, that she doesn't realize that it's Mr. Kadam right away since she can literally hear them talking from inside the market. She spent a really long time talking with Mr. Kadam, so she should know what his voice sounds like by this point.

The two men are arguing pretty loudly in Hindi, and she looks up some of the words that they keep repeating.  The older one says "nahi mahodaya" a lot, and the young hot one says "avashyak" a few times.  Kelsey looks them up in her dictionary and the older guy is saying "no way" or "no, sir," while the young one keeps saying "necessary" or "essential."  These seem to be correctly translated, but, again, I have no idea if that's right or not.

I'll touch on this in later chapters.  I like it, but not for the reasons that Houck thinks I should.

The younger man sees her creeping on them through the window and moves behind the truck so she can't see them.  Kelsey wants to find out if the older guy is Mr. Kadam, so she leaves the market to investigate, showing a surprising amount of agency compared to what we've seen of her so far.

I'm not sure why she isn't immediately sketched out at the possibility of the man actually being Mr. Kadam. If it is, he's been lying to her since they were in Oregon!  She never comments on this.

She leaves the market and snoops around the truck, but no one's there.  Then she remembers she hasn't paid for her food yet (oops) and goes back inside.  She owes a hundred rupees, but pays twice that, which makes the girl serving her happy.

She heads back outside and the truck is gone.  I'm not sure how she didn't hear it driving away, since she was able to hear two people talking outside earlier.  But it's not a bad cliffhanger at all.

Closing Thoughts

I actually don't hate this chapter.  Or, at least, the second half of the chapter.  Kelsey shows some surprising competence here, and most of the mistakes are from Houck's research and writing rather than plot or character.  Kelsey seems to work pretty well as a character when she's on her own.  It's when she has to talk to people that she gets really mean or dumb.

The intrigue is also written pretty decently in this chapter.  It doesn't try to beat you over the head with how weird things are like the earlier chapters did, and Kelsey doesn't constantly harp on a single question through the whole chapter.  If the whole book was written like this chapter (without the mistakes, I mean) it wouldn't be a great book, but I wouldn't be sporking it.

That's what's so frustrating about this book.  Every once in a while, there's a good (by comparison) section that's only there for a brief moment.  When Kelsey isn't talking to other people, she's actually an okay character--paying a hundred more rupees than she was asked for was a good touch, and shows characterization without telling it.  When we aren't in a single location for a long time, and we're being whisked through Mumbai at breakneck speed, when Kelsey doesn't have the time to over-describe everything, it actually sets up a--wait for it--tone!  We're seeing all of this stuff along with Kelsey for the first time, and it makes sense for the description to be brief and focusing on all the bright colors and people walking around and the crazy traffic.  It's a good way to dive into a new, overwhelming location.  I even like the bit at the end with the mysterious hot guy.  If the back of the book hadn't spoiled who it is, I think I would have actually been interested enough to read ahead to find out what was going on.

That's not something I can say for a lot of this book, but I really want to.  I want to like this book. The real tragedy here is that this story has potential.  I think the plot could have been really interesting.  The problem is that the characters and writing are so bad in places that it completely ruins anything good that I'd be able to say about it.

Next time, Chapter 7: The Jungle!

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