Blue-Skinned Gods
S.J. Sindu
Soho Press, 2021
Review by Marcie McCauley
In Blue-Skinned Gods, S.J. Sindu presents a narrative designed to challenge readers’ understanding of truth and trust, belonging and belief. “I had hoped for a story,” Kalki muses, but “instead here was a man calling my whole life a lie.”
Kalki’s childhood unfolds on an ashram, bordered by rice paddies, about ten kilometres from a village in Tamil Nadu. There, he is received as the tenth incarnation of Vishnu—evidenced by his blue-coloured skin—and his youthful experiences comprise the novel’s core. “You weren’t just a godsend,” his mother tells young Kalki: “You are Vishnu himself. Don’t ever doubt that.”
When the novel begins, the cast is small—his Amma and Ayya, with his mother’s sister and her husband, and their son, Kalki’s cousin Lakshman—reflecting the boy’s limited experience of the world, in a Brahminic family. Kalki and Lakshman’s relationship at the ashram is close. When Kalki is not preoccupied by his duties, the two boys love eating candied jackfruit and play-acting scenes from the Mahabharata; over time, however, their bond is strained by Kalki’s status.
For years, even in their childhood games, Kalki has played the role of god, while Lakshman acted the hero. When Lakshman moves to America with his family, Kalki feels unmoored, but he remains responsible for healing those who suffer and answering their pleas for intervention.
Later in the novel, when the boys reconnect as young adults, their perspectives have broadened. Blue-Skinned Gods is presented as reflection, so readers witness Kalki’s knowledge and insight growing. “The sky, I’d learned from my thin science book, wasn’t blue,” he remarks, for instance: “It looked blue to us because of the way the light broke apart in the dusty air.”
The gap between appearance and reality shifts dramatically for Kalki, when he learns that Krishna—the eighth incarnation of Vishnu—“wasn’t blue either. Not like me. He was so dark—his skin so black—that he was described as the color of a rain-dark cloud. And Indians had just been so obsessed with light skin that they took their dark-skinned gods and turned them blue.” This raises fundamental questions for Kalki and for readers: when is blue not blue, and if colour does not connote divinity, then what does? Kalki’s story also explores aspects of identity in relationship to prejudices that intersect with colourism and classism: “My gender and sexuality were always ancillary to my divinity. Most gods and goddesses could shift in and out of their genders and attractions.”
If the indicator of privilege and status is something internal, then how do worshippers recognise the divine? Which comes first: worship or belief? Are belief and disbelief disparate states, or is there a spectrum between them? One of the Western visitors to the ashram serves to probe some of these philosophical questions directly: “‘But do you believe you’re helping them?” she asked [Kalki], dragging out the word believe like it was an accusation.”
How readers express the word “believe”—whether in a tone of accusation or of exultation—will influence their response to Blue-Skinned Gods. What Kalki views as an accusatory statement is uttered by a character named for another Hindu divinity—Sita—but even when he’s young, Kalki himself has doubts. He wonders: “If the rest of the world was as wild and different from us as Sita’s books and Kalyani’s stories led me to believe, could I really better the lives of people who lived so wildly and differently?”
Kalki’s mother admits to putting indigo pigment in Kalki’s bath—to enhance his natural divinity—after he turns ten and passes the three tests that his father has promised would fully exhibit his divinity to onlookers; intensifying his paler-blue skin colour is expected to intensify people’s belief. With this awareness, Kalki’s identity is challenged to the core before he has the vocabulary to articulate his insecurities.
Readers see Kalki’s perspective on his younger self’s emotional struggles. He remembers his nightmares about external threats, “awful things…standing on small islands, facing tsunami waves, being swallowed up by the ocean,” and his internal, psychological burdens: “Shame ate at me.” The novel is structured to present Kalki at different ages, but we remain distanced throughout—Sindu arouses curiosity by dramatically shifting scenes to involve and engage readers in assembling the timeline. Characters in Blue-Skinned Gods challenge some binary systems, like sexuality and religion, while at the same time embracing others. Questions of agency are presented as dichotomous; some people possess and wield power, and others have power wielded against them—not always recognizing their own agency.
In one sense, this seems fitting. In Sindu’s first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies (2017), she writes: “Tamils believe that fate is written on top of our heads, immutable, our future stories scratched into our scalps with permanent ink, birth to death.” In this context, one is fated to be the god, and the other, the hero. In another sense, Sindu’s fiction seems dedicated to up-ending expectations, as seen in her debut: “I could pray, but here’s the truth: even if the gods are real. I don’t think they can liberate us.”
Like some of the characters in Blue-Skinned Gods, the characters in Marriage of a Thousand Lies (which was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award and won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Debut Fiction Award) believe they have been manipulated, coerced even, by a greater force. “We’re all puppets,” one says: “That’s all we are.” Sindu’s previous novel views narrative as a powerful instrument: “In every story there’s what is written for you, and then there’s what you write.” But, alongside this caveat: “The real story lies in between the pigments.”
Readers must peer closely to navigate the space between pigments in Blue-Skinned Gods, just as Kalki wonders whether someone could “teach me how to find the loopholes between this book’s world and my own.” Many of Sindu’s readers will be carried away by the story, but the loopholes hold even more interesting possibilities.
Marcie McCauley reads, writes, and lives in Toronto (which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples––including the Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg and the Wendat––land still inhabited by their descendants). Her writing has been published in American, British, and Canadian magazines and journals, in print and online.