Deepan Maitra's Reviews > Mohini: The Enchantress

“Mohini: The Enchantress” is imagination and magnificence materialized on paper. Anuja Chandramouli has delivered yet another masterpiece that will make you imbibe mythology, and encompass it within yourself as something very ancient yet recent, mysterious and shimmery, and yet so well understood.

I kept on imagining her writing style as this vast galaxy of moons and stars—with the spatial dusts of violets and magentas giving an exemplary show. The stars are the mythical fables which Mohini finds herself in, and Anuja places them on the universal canvas as if to make a constellation that gleams with new found expression. She then arranges them to craft a panorama of stories and experiences, of realties and falsities—until her whole creation has become nothing short of a vast and mellifluous galaxy. This galaxy makes you gawk in wonder, and think illustriously. It also makes you think you are a part of all this beauty—maybe a tiny speck of dust in the limitless infinite space but still there, existing. Mythology to me, is that feeling of longing and retrospection, and it makes me wonder that maybe even I was a part of the gods and demons that were fighting, of the dreams getting realized and promises getting broken and love getting unfurled. Maybe what I am today, is derived from what presumably happened then.

Mohini has always been seen as this epitome of deceit and enchanting beauty and as Anuja says, “she was perfection made possible”. But can an entity really be depicted by a set of adjectives and labels? Anuja makes me realize that the only way to know an entity better is through stories—large and small, mundane or essential, real or fantasy. But then again, what is real and what is fantasy? Anuja hasn’t shattered the boundaries between what is real and what could be real, she has expertly dissolved the demarcation between reality and fiction. She has swirled various colours and tinges without any cease, to give you a book that makes you question the contrast between truth and the untruth.

Mohini is the manifestation of the feminine energy of Vishnu, but is she just that? Is she only the luring enchantress that had tactically kept the asuras deprived of the nectar of immortality and kept them thirsty to drink in the vivid splendour of just her existence? Anuja makes sure the essence of Mohini isn’t attached to such a singleton story. She puts forward the other stories revolving around Mohini, where she might be sometimes hated for her allure, and sometimes be loved for her sense of unconditional affection. The stories, however intact or lost, is weaved into a garland that is the book—a garland threaded with the most fragrant of flowers in the form of experiences and perceptions, some of which might have wilted away. A garland that is bound by an underlying string of justice and folly, of chastity and betrayal…of many pluralities. A garland which wishes to be worn by someone who is willing to take it all—maybe both the poison and the amrita that came forth, without judgement or without benediction. We perhaps were aware of the beads, the legends and the myths…we could also have known about where the flowers were blooming and to what extents. But we couldn’t have stitched a garland as Anuja did.

Be it Mohini or Vishnu, Shiva or Indra, the devas or the asuras—never have they been cloaked with so much understanding and stigmas. We do not see the gods as we are forced to believe. We are not bound to see the asuras as what we’ve till now known them by. We are not supposed to read this book with our pre-conceived plethora of previous takeaways, we should read this book like jumping into the wild sea—not knowing how deep it is, not knowing what lurks beneath.

Anuja says: “If Vishnu was the tranquil storyline, Shiva embodied the untameable wildness and violence of the bottomless sea”. And if such is the philosophy of them individually, when Mohini and Shiva come together to combine the fragrance of Shiva and Vishnu (Hara and Hari), how less luminous could the result be? How less expressive could their progeny: The Harihara putra be? Be it Nara and Narayan, or maybe Indra and Vishnu, and Indra and Mahabali, or Sukra and Brihaspati, or Tara and Chandra, and of course Shiva and Mohini—this book certifies the co-existence of disparities, the harmony of differences. It rhythmizes magic and illusion, puts to play the fabric of time, and does not demarcate between the past, present and future. It makes us believe and have faith, and perhaps internalize mythology with its full-fledged worth.