Rafflesia the banished princess

All fairy tales on the book cover are not exactly the fairy tales that you find inside the book. The latest one is Rafflesia the banished princess. This is a book which rather focuses on the human side of life which is absolutely on our own prerogative that what we make out of it. Author Gautam conveys us the same message through his wonderful and almost allegorical novel which features the story of Appu and his friend Rahul…

The reader who starts reading Rafflesia: the banished princess, might get baffled at the beginning. It happened to me too. When I started reading the novel I felt that the title given to the story is not apt. The reason being there was no mention of any princess held captive by some demon. I had gone as far as around 50-60pages. Later, however, when the story unfolds, the reader begins to understand the connection. The protagonist Appu is a victim of life. He is a simple man who has to face tough realities of life. He is calm and composed totally in contrast to his friend Rahul who is social and confident. Their friendship adds flavor to the novel. Moreover, as the novel has so many of characters bound to a single plot, the reader might face a slight of the difficulty in handling all those in his or her readers’ cache…

Nevertheless, the gradual development of the plot makes it easy for the readers to move and flow with the story. Appu takes his time and realise that life is a journey worth travelling rather than sitting ashore and waiting for the ‘tide to ebb’. The story turns out to be a development in the character of Appu who weavers, a little unusually, his life’s threads. In momentum and in slow, in sorrows and in happiness, he lives his life and at last, understands all the things. Towards the end, when he hands over his belongings to the kid he meets on the beach, he perhaps understands the allegorical meaning of life by the example of hydrogen-filled balloons which always tend to ‘go up’. Life is to be lived and to be lived only…

Depending on the reader’s abilities, the novel Rafflesia the banished princess might entertain. This is one of those novels which demand patience on the reader’s part and also skills to decipher and apprehend. I have liked this novel the way it unfolds gradually and the way it rises and the way it falls back to become a plane line… Let’s give that a read, readers!