Hindu magical mystery tour

Anand, the 12-year-old hero of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s new novel for youthful readers, loves tales of magic and derring-do but doesn’t feel he should believe in them. Life in the teeming city of Kolkata, India, is too harsh. His father has left to work in the oil kingdom of Dubai, and he suddenly stops sending letters and money orders home. The family sinks into poverty. Anand’s sister, Meera, witnesses a gang murder and becomes mentally ill. To supplement his mother’s meager income, Anand quits school to work for the abusive owner of a street stall that sells tea to passersby.

Nonetheless, Anand feels “deep down inside ... that magic could happen. No, that it did happen. That it was happening all the time, all around them, except that most people didn’t know about it.” And this belief impels him, on a day of cold, hunger and despair, to send a wish out into the universe. “He could feel it speed across the sky, hot and bright, until it connected with something -- or someone. The sense of contact was so strong that Anand’s body jerked backward from the impact.”

The recipient of his wish -- who first appears in the guise of an old beggar -- is Abhaydatta, a member of the Brotherhood of Healers, who transmit benign influences from a Shangri-La-like retreat in the Himalayas called the Silver Valley. The source of the Healers’ powers, a miraculous conch shell, was stolen by a member of the order, Surabhanu, who, like Darth Vader, has gone over to the dark side. Abhaydatta ventured into India and recovered the conch, but Surabhanu killed Abhaydatta’s companion. Now, with his powers failing and Surabhanu in pursuit, he needs help to bring the conch back. Anand’s faith in magic suggests that he may be the one to do it.

Divakaruni is perhaps best known for short-story collections and the novels “Sister of My Heart” and “The Vine of Desire,” which dealt realistically with the problems of immigrant Indian women adapting to life in the United States. Her previous youth novel, “Neela: Victory Song,” was based on India’s struggle for independence from the British. But her first novel, “The Mistress of Spices,” despite a contemporary Northern California setting, had plenty of magic in it -- and another secret society of healers, this one female, that did its good works with curry powder and cinnamon and turmeric.

In “The Conch Bearer,” Divakaruni again allows herself the freedom of the fairy tale. As Anand’s father’s job suggests, this is a story set in modern times but what we mostly see is the life of India’s poor, which has hardly changed in centuries. Divakaruni doesn’t encourage us to wonder how the Silver Valley avoided being mapped by U.S. spy satellites -- not that it would matter. Both the good Healers and the evil Surabhanu have shape-changing powers, and the conch’s power is beyond reckoning.

Divakaruni, a gifted storyteller, keeps the suspense taut for the first three-quarters of the novel. Anand, Abhaydatta and Nisha, a homeless girl who joins them, face daunting obstacles -- “the jagged, icy swords of the mountains,” rock slides, a raging river and a giant blood-colored cobra. The chief dangers, though, are spiritual. Surabhanu is able to insinuate himself into Anand’s mind and take advantage of the boy’s moments of envy, homesickness, pride and doubt. Only when the action ends -- a bit too long before the story does -- do we notice a lapse or two. A smell, for instance, reminds Nisha of the sea, and we expect this to be a clue to her unknown origins, but Divakaruni fails to follow it up.

However much “The Conch Bearer” may refer to Hindu folklore, we finish it convinced that Joseph Campbell and other students of comparative myth are right: The same stories crop up everywhere. The conch is a kind of Holy Grail, Anand’s journey a pilgrim’s progress; the many Christian tales in which Jesus appears in disguise are echoed when the hungry Anand gives his food to the seemingly destitute Abhaydatta. Though Divakaruni beguiles us with the sights and sounds of an exotic place, what she really does is make us feel at home. *