Over the next decade, his family unravels, and every relationship he relied on-father, mother, aunt, uncle, cousin-starts falling apart. While he seems to pass them, Kalki begins to question his divinity. In Kalki’s tenth year, he is confronted with three trials that will test his power and prove his divine status and, his father tells him, spread his fame worldwide. His father sets up an ashram, and the family makes a living off of the pilgrims who seek the child’s blessings and miracles, believing young Kalki to be the tenth human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. In Tamil Nadu, India, a boy is born with blue skin. (Nov.From the award-winning author of Marriage of a Thousand Lies comes a brilliantly written, globe-spanning novel about identity, faith, family, and sexuality. Sindu’s stunning effort more than delivers on her initial promise. Sindu juxtaposes the closed world of the ashram with Kalki’s vibrant experiences in New York, where he performs with Lakshman’s band, the Blue-Skinned Gods eats meat and “figures out who I was and who I was going to be.” The imagery is vivid-“my body a colony of ants puttering in all directions”-and the slow-burn narrative by the end becomes incandescent. After Lakshman leaves the ashram, Kalki travels to New York City as part of a “world healing tour” conceived by Ayya to promote Kalki, where the cousins unexpectedly reunite, and Kalki learns some news that breaks his life in two.

Kalki may be seen by strangers as a guru, but as a teen he is easily swayed by Ayya his cousin, Lakshman, who is his best friend and Roopa, whose condition eventually improves and with whom Kalki falls in love. After struggling to heal Roopa, a sick girl brought to the ashram, he doubts the prophecy about him. Kalki Sami has blue skin and black blood, and his father, Ayya, has built an ashram for the family to live in, where Kalki, on the eve of his 10th birthday, must undergo three tests, beginning with the performance of a miracle.

Sindu’s marvelous coming-of-age story (after Marriage of a Thousand Lies) features a young healer in Tamil Nadu, believed to be an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, who eventually breaks away from his domineering father.

Blue-Skinned Gods by S.J. Sindu