Michael Chacko Daniels (MSJ68)

In his foreword to the book, Deepak Dalal writes:

“Although Michael Chacko Daniels has lived and written for over five decades in the US, presently in San Francisco – a city at the cutting edge of technology – this little fable shows that his heart still lingers in his beloved India, where he grew up.

The story starts off about a change to vegetarianism and how a member of the Indian Christian community, who loves meat and everything non-vegetarian, must bid farewell to his meat-eating days. But the inner story within the outer story develops into what reads like an Indian folktale. The central characters – the crows, the parrot and sunbird, the people and their offerings made to inanimate deities, and the transcendent transfiguration at the end – evoke the very essence of India.

Adrija Ghosh’s illustrations are of a uniformly high quality, the most appealing of which are her depictions of crows, evocatively conveying the bird’s cunning and resourcefulness. Her work is a perfect accompaniment complementing Daniels’s narrative.”