Simhi: The Becoming: A Novel Woven from Sanskrit, Mantra, and the Ancient Indian Wisdom Tradition
There was in a dense and vast forest a sweet and beautiful young lioness.
So the story begins - the way the old stories begin. What it opens onto is as deep as it is long.
A cub loses her mother in the tall grass and is driven by a storm into a cave, where a snake named Sarpa keeps the dark. He does not tell her it will be all right. He tells her a story. And inside his story is another story, and inside that one, another still - because that is how this tradition has always carried what matters: nested tellings, teller to listener, around fires, for thousands of years.
It is a novel about what a parent gives a child before leaving - and what a story can hold that a single life cannot.
What follows is her whole becoming. A tortoise older than the valley. A mouse who stops her mid-hunt with a single name. A bird with a broken wing and an unbroken vow. Fire, and the goddess who walks out of it. A charioteer's song on the morning of a war. Thirteen tellings, each complete in itself, each opening the next - carrying her from lost cub to the lioness the valley will one day tell stories about.
The old stories live inside it the way they have always lived - the churning of the ocean, Ekalavya's thumb, Garuda's vow, the Bhagavad Gita - met not as mythology but as medicine, given at the moment the listener needs them. Sanskrit mantras close many of the tellings, unexplained and unhurried, the way a fire is banked for morning: om bhur bhuvah svah...
Watership Down meets Siddhartha. For readers of Ursula K. Le Guin, of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, of the epics themselves.
Written and illustrated by Mateo Rose.
Simhi
Beginning - Becoming - Receiving - Carrying - Finding - Awakening
Each book complete on its own.
A story you can live in. A language you can keep.
Begin where you are.
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