Rafflesia – The Banished Princess

Many years ago, we used to read Nandan which used to be full of fairy tales when ‘Pari Katha Visheshank’ appeared. Do you still remember those golden days of our childhood? Oh yea, we are the 90s kids! However, with time, things kept changing and today we are in the contemporary age of fiction where fairy tales don’t necessarily mean the stories of prince and demons and a caged fairy… Yes, the modern fairy tales can well be about a common man suffering from different kind of problems – psychological, sociological and maybe philosophical… We are talking about a book that we recently read, Rafflesia – The Banished Princess authored by Gautam Choudhuri.

The novel which is around 400 pages tall revolves around a character named Appu and his activities. He is an aspiring child at the beginning and becomes a deserving youth at the middle and gets to turn out as an able man towards the end. The journey, however, isn’t that supportive and he has to face several hurdles on his way. From an unhappy and canning marriage to tough professional life, Appu tends to become a person who is more with himself than with anyone else. Constantly staggering between marriage and divorce, the novel becomes a well-documented story of a young man who is suffering perhaps the sin which wasn’t committed by him at all… Appu has a friend Rahul and they are always there securing each other. This friendship and some romantic escapades here and there (not typical Chetan Bhagat’s ‘Indian girl’ romance) make the novel praiseworthy and twisting. There are secrets in the novel; there is suffering in the novel; there is redemption in the novel…

Rafflesia – The Banished Princess is all about Appu, if we say so, that’d not be a wrong assumption. Any reader will surely empathise with Appu and would share his feelings… like we did. This kind of novel is a new experiment in Indian English writing and author Gautam has surely taken a bet up. Swinging amid past and present; India and Netherland… the novel is a perfect 3-day read for any reader who is interested in reading something unusual and striking. Yes, if you are wondering, you will surely find a detail of the princess Rafflesia in the novel. However, that comes only in an allegorical form to teach a lesson of much want to the hero of the novel Appu and he very well welcomes that lesson. The fairy Rafflesia passes through his inbox giving him the message to change his life and make him animated out of that rigid life form. There, you got to praise the skill of the novelist who could manage to pull in the readers to read his 400 pages…

Readers, this is the time you grab the copy and start reading into the life of a young man who is striving to survive at the first instance and then determining to live delightfully!