Book Review: The Tree, the Well & the Drag Queen

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I have finished Salini Vineeth's The Tree, the Well & the Drag Queen in one day. No kidding! I had been watching a few movies, and one day I just picked up this book and thought about reading. As a child, I loved to read fantasy stories, like " Thakumar Jhuli" by Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar, in Bengali. This story took me back to those times. I will tell you how.


About the book:

Nina, a Mumbai-based drag queen who unwillingly returns to their ancestral home to break a curse of a demonic jackfruit tree, enters an almost trans-like world of fantasy, reality, lost identity, trauma, and healing. Through his eyes, we go into an unexplored world of existential crisis, of a woman trapped in a woman's body and the humiliation they have to undergo.

About Salini Vineeth:

Salini has been a fiction writer and translator since 2019. Her other works include stories such as Lost Edges, Magic Square, and Everyday People, as well as travel guides to Hampi and Badami.

Review of The Tree, the Well & the Drag Queen

I have so many books to read, but this one immediately caught my fancy because of its unique name. And my fancy led me to a strange yet complex world of fantasy, rural lore, and a boy's shaking confidence amid an identity crisis, in a brutal society that has always been unkind to "the different". This existing burden, compounded by the curse of an inherited jackfruit tree, creates complexities in life. 

At the beginning, I compared the story's narration to the Bengali book "Thakumar Jhuli" because of the transition of humans into various animals after death. But there is much more to its significance. The dual life led by the protagonist, to make a living, that of a man in the day, and of a drag queen at night, leads to their complete acceptance of their identity, which has been stitched to perfection. While mentions of torture and abuses show the society's cruel side, people like Dhamini and the bar-owner give hope that kindness still exists.

The Tree, the Well & the Drag Queen is a wonderful read, that gets the reader hooked into a world, less talked about, mostly due to the woven detailing of a human being's transformation - physically, mentally and metaphorically to ultimate freedom.


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