Book Review: Chintu Mintu & The Five Rings: The Fire Ring by Soumya Sinha

For a long time, the fantasy that Indian children grew up on came from somewhere else. The wizards were British, the enchanted forests were European, the children having the adventures had names no one in the house shared, and while none of that dimmed the pleasure of the reading, it did quietly suggest that magic happened elsewhere, to other people. That is changing, and one of the more heartening developments in Indian publishing over the last few years has been the arrival of writers who tell children stories that are properly, ambitiously fantastical, full of dragons and quests and villains, while keeping the warmth and texture of an Indian childhood at the centre of them. Soumya Sinha's Chintu Mintu & The Five Rings belongs to that welcome company.

The book began, as many of the best children's stories do, at bedtime. Sinha first told these tales to his own children in the dark before sleep, and only later did the bedtime ritual grow into something larger, a planned five-book universe of which this, The Fire Ring, is the first. That origin matters, because you can feel it in the shape of the thing. This is a story built to be read aloud, with the pacing and the small comic beats of a parent watching a child's face to see whether the next part should be frightening or funny.

The premise is satisfyingly direct. Two young brothers, Chintu and Mintu, stumble upon an ancient magical Fire Ring guarded by water dragons, and what begins as ordinary mischief tips, quickly, into a full quest across enchanted lands. Along the way they collect the sort of company that children remember long after the plot has faded, among them a splendidly grumpy detective called Uncle Grumpy Gums, and they come up against villains with names, Dr. Destruction chief among them, that are clearly designed to be said with relish. It is aimed at readers between six and twelve, which is a wide span, but a well-judged one, since it works as a read-aloud for the younger end and a chapter book that a slightly older child can disappear into alone.

What gives the book its particular character is the balance it strikes. The fantasy is global in scale and appetite, dragons, rings, enchanted realms, the full machinery of the genre, but the feeling underneath it is unmistakably that of an Indian family, the sibling squabbles and loyalties, the humour, the sense of a household just off the edge of the page. That combination is harder to pull off than it sounds, and it is exactly what a generation of Indian parents has been quietly hoping for, a story their child can lose themselves in that also feels like it belongs to them.

There is a great deal to be said for a book that a parent and child can share rather than merely hand over. The read-aloud is one of the small, disappearing rituals of family life, squeezed by screens and by tiredness and by the sheer speed of everything, and a book built deliberately for that half-hour before sleep is doing something more valuable than simply entertaining. It is giving a family a reason to sit together in the dark and follow the same story to the same place. Sinha's book, born from precisely that ritual, seems to understand it from the inside.

For parents building a shelf for a young reader, and especially for those who would like that shelf to reflect the world their child actually lives in, this is a warm and welcome addition, and the promise of four more books to come means that a child who takes to Chintu and Mintu will have their company for a good while yet. It is a fine thing, and increasingly a possible one, to hand an Indian child a book full of dragons and let them see something of home in it too.

Title: Chintu Mintu & The Five Rings: The Fire Ring Author: Soumya Sinha Available at Zorba Books, Amazon and Flipkart.  

Ages 6 to 12