India, Oct. 25 -- This is the moving coming-of-age story of Ru (Reuel George), who stood out at St Lorenzo School of Boys in Calcutta because of his unusual name, his Chinese-Naga looks, and his inability to conform to an ethnicity or religion. His classmates called him "the snake from nowhere". Ru's parents find it difficult to dodge their son's questions regarding their identity. Their answer - that the Georges were "nomads" - does not help much. Ru continues to be a boy from "nowhere". His mother tells him to remember that he is an "Indian"; his father, a one-time novelist, emphasises that names do not belong to religions and that they are descendants of St George, who once slew a dragon. The St George connection is empowering and after punching an Anglo-Indian boy in school for hurling racial slurs at him, Ru announces that his family came from a line of dragon-killers. This is his "currency for respect" at 11. Just then, his parents decide to pull him out of school. He settles into home tutoring, still wanting to understand the mysterious origins of his family, who speak the "fire tongue", have no relatives or visitors, and keep some rooms, in their old large house in Bowbazaar, locked. When he persists, his parents tell him that even if they shared their origins, Ru would not believe them. Meanwhile, they carry on with secretive activities at home, such as maintaining huge aquariums with sleek black dragons. There is also the time he sees his mother take a mouthful of kerosene and lick a drake with her glowing tongue of fire. When he witnesses such events, Ru is made to have "halahala", the Tea of Forgetfulness. He challenges his mother once, "Why won't you let me remember?" Her reply: "You deserve to be real in this world. It's not an easy thing to be stuck between worlds." Nevertheless, Ru is badly stuck, till Alice is invited to his 13th birthday. Alice's parents, the Chens, who lived in Chinatown, run the Crystal Dragon restaurant from the ground floor of the George family's sprawling home. Alice and Ru bond over being othered at school for having "narrow eyes". Alice shows him Calcutta's cafes and bookstores. In her company, Ru drops his pretences, allows her to see the family's treasures, and ponders over his nowhereness. He also lets her read the half-charred copy of The Dragoner's Daughter, written by his father, which contains important clues to who the Georges were and where they came from, and gifts her a dragon tooth pendant, which his grandmother once got in exchange for a hundred drops of her blood. When Alice mistakes Ru's grandfather's portrait for his grandmother's and tells him that Ru (with his long hair, which she once tied up in a scrunchie) would be a "totally pretty girl", he isn't offended. ".there wasn't much difference between men and women in our culture. They would just be the same, and sometimes men were pretty, and women were handsome or had beards." he explains. The book's queer undertones are unmissable: Ru's grandmother, Didima, tells him that his grandfather was a girl when they first met. "The serpent knows no gender.," she says, as she coaxes him to drink the Tea of Forgetfulness. The concoction does not make Ru forget. On the contrary, he remembers every detail, such as his trip to another dimension, sandwiched between his parents when he was about four years old. Other experiences return as visions. "How much halahala courses through my veins, churned by serpents in our garage? How much forgetfulness have I drunk at my parents' behest, to protect me from our impossibility?" an adult Ru wonders as he struggles to make peace with the gnawing awareness of his complex origins. My favourite sentence in the book is: "It hurt the eye to look at the egg - a fractal shimmer gave it a spiralling depth, as if it held an infinite curling staircase within its spherical shape, an unhatched Fibonacci spiral hiding gelatinously within its shell".. Wonderfully haunting,The Dragoners of Bowbazaar, which won Indra Das the British Fantasy Award for best novella, is a highly recommended read....