To the Blue King’s Castle: Adventures in the Underground Forest

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One never knows where an escalator may lead! When Ritu goes shopping in an ordinary mall in an ordinary city on an ordinary day and takes a perfectly ordinary elevator to the lowest floor, the last thing she expects is to step out into the Underground Forest. Trapped in this gloomy Forest, Ritu meets the Resident Magician, Serendipitous, and his assistant, Blanc-Noir. They need her help to go to the Blue King’s Castle, for within the castle, locked away in Dodgson’s Box, lies the spirit of Happiness. But the journey is long and the perils many. The road to the Castle leads through the Outcasts’ Village, past Girnewala Falls, through Mediapolis, through the Bureaucrats’ Maze. There are liars and philosopher-robbers, rabid-seeming dogs with wings, and cars that run only on the high-octane emotions. And Ritu discovers, nothing is ordinary in this most extraordinary of adventure lands. This novel’s epic sweep, its humour and charm, its references to classic works like the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland, make it pure pleasure for those who enjoy language and wordplay, invention and adventure.

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Prasenjit Gupta is the author of A Brown Man and Other Stories as well as the critically acclaimed translation, Indian Errant: Short Stories by Nirmal Verma. Prasenjit was born in Calcutta, grew up in Delhi, and moved to the U.S. in the ’eighties; his own life has been full of experiences as different as Ritu’s adventures in the Underground Forest. He is a graduate of IIM Kolkata, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A former Fulbright scholar and NEA award winner, he writes fiction in English and translates fiction and poetry from Hindi and Bengali into English. Currently he serves as a diplomat for the U.S. Department of State. This is his first children’s book.