Brave new worldbuilding

Bramah’s Discovery
by Renée Sarojini Saklikar

Gibsons: Nightwood Editions, 2026
$26.95 / 9780889714946

Reviewed by Harold Rhenisch

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Bramah’s Discovery is the third in Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s Thot J Bap trilogy, a self-proclaimed hybrid of poetry, fantasy fiction, and epic that tells of an underground battle against social and climactic change. It is infused with riddles, dystopian landscapes, children’s literature, opera, and protest slogans.

Thot J Bap (ie, The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns) is also a comedy. Through magic and assistance by others marginalized by commercialized society, its heroine, Bramah, sets a broken Earth right.

To be clear, this is a pop culture world. It is not a novel in the tradition of Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina: realistic characters in physically recognizable settings. Saklikar’s goal is to create a new world. That world includes Pacifica, “the western shore of the continent formerly known as North America,” specifically the band west of the Coast and Cascade ranges, centred on the Salish Sea. This is a Metro book.

What’s more, that metropolitan ruin is not an Asian Lower Mainland recognizable on the streets of Surrey or Richmond. It is a symbolic portrait of the lived experience of it as a thousand silences within a decaying colonial civic and natural space. 

In other words, Brahma’s Discovery is a contemporary work of imagination. Story proceeds more often by personal inspiration and images than by any clash of characters, plot, and social manners. 

In terms of fusion, it is not a Western book. A Western worldview is by definition something believed in. It is built on Homer and Dante. Literary portrayals of folktale and magic are paralleled by very real levels of belief. 

It is also not an Eastern book. Saklikar’s symbolical portrait of one of the last surviving cities of the British Empire includes her ancestral East—to which she only partially belongs as well. In its between space, Homer and Dante are models to be filled with the rhythms of the mythic tales of the Mahabharatha, just as the British, then German, neighbourhoods of South Vancouver are now Asian.

The city she paints is ruled by what she calls a Consortium, filled with the thing the Consortium lacks: the marginalized people, children of a great global diaspora, who live outside its conceptions and are invisible to it. 

To retain human agency, a new world must be made of all of this estrangement. Saklikar’s solution is to inspire action from outsiders. The result is pattern, a tapestry to be studied, with motifs to be recognized with delight and the warmth of characters coming clear out of the carpet’s ground. This reliance on patterning and intellectual sharpness makes it a very twenty-first-century book.

It is not timeless, though, although it includes riddle, the most ancient literary form. (Rumpelstiltskin, for example, is far older even than Homer.) Saklikar’s riddling, however, is more modern and everyday: wise, playful word games drawn from fantasy literature (such as The Hobbit) and a love of bad rhyming poetry for children. I get that. At least two generations of children have been formed by this stuff, in 2-D cartoon worlds, but it’s still weak.

To her credit, North Vancouver author Saklikar (Children of Air India) intends its jarring sounds as a Brechtian breakage of the dramatic fourth wall, the illusion that actors on a stage are in a separate, aesthetic world. For his part, Brecht aimed to confront theatrical audiences with their complicity, demonstrating that art is one with street politics. Saklikar’s jarring rhymes are not a deeply nuanced reading of this Marxist resistance to the corporate world.

As an example of the riddling absent in Bramah’s Discovery, consider Rumpelstiltskin, retold as the young wife in the Icelandic movie Katla learning from a fantastical ogre how to stand by her husband’s side and run a farm while being haunted by living ghosts bending time. That story of feminine power is told from within a long tradition of belief, updated for by not replaced by sci-fi imaginations.

I make the comparison only to show that integrating the depths of Western culture is not Saklikar’s goal. For example, her father read T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets for the recognition it gave of India. She read it for the recognition it gave of him. For his part, Eliot was recasting Joseph Conrad’s Congo, the brutal colonial river that he saw flowing as a bloody Roman colonial Thames. In Eliot, it became an Indian god, the Ganges, updated as a problem for engineers. Throughout, Eliot saw time as eternal, hard to hold except in our truest moments. Saklikar sees the present as primary, with difficulties in one time complicated by magical interventions from others. Imagination solves what Eliot solves by faith. 

Saklikar’s fantasies are real, yet they are written in a language of surfaces, impressions gained by a child, now a woman, on the outside of dominant culture, drawing a map for others like her. With that map, they can replace that culture with one she has distilled from a reading of its literary forms.

It’s at this point that Thot J Bap becomes two narratives. The first is the great depth of all this intellectual patterning. The process makes Saklikar a guide, as Virgil was to Dante or Orpheus was to the poet Rilke(a story at the heart of Bramah’s Discovery.)  Orpheus went into the land of the dead to rescue his beloved Eurydice, under the warning not to look back. When he turned around to see if she was following him back to life, she was lost. 

Saklikar’s proclaimed guide through the mysteries of her epic is a character called Lord VishVerge (half Vishnu and half Vergil), but the real guide is Saklikar. She’s the one who has observed a world on the outside of belonging, taken in its forms, and made them new.

The second narrative is that the story made of all this intricate patterning is difficult to follow. It does have its delights, though. There are sonnets that are less sonnets than chanted carpets, with frayed edges instead of rhymes—punk rock sonnets. There is a lot of joyful Bollywood dancing. There is mythic sword-fighting and ferocious, cleansing violence, as if the goddess Kali were making herself known here. There is role-playing and game-playing, both as chess (a dominant motif) and games of gaining powers, step by step, to advance through a maze of adversaries. If you’re thinking of a fusion of Dungeons and Dragons and Super Mario, you’re close.

The result is that a lot of the action within Saklikar’s fusion is described rather than acted, and appears emblematically, after the fact, as if we were reading a sequence of lyrical, North American free verse poetry, the kind that ties itself up in Methodist images of spiritual, physical, and intellectual union that made twentieth-century poetry click. Saklikar’s characters and story, however, don’t fuse like that.

It’s similar for her approach to epic. In both East and West, epic is a mode of poetry—less story than how the story is told, luxuriously unfolding for those who know it already. Epics are built around delay. When you don’t know the story, you’re left with a summary, without all the directions you could have told yourself.

This gap makes Bramah’s Discovery more an update of the Ossetian folk tales or the Mahabharatha (collections of tales retold in a mythic register) and of Homer (a weaving of tales known to all who heard them,) than a novel. It is danced with both dramatic and intimate gestures, all beautiful, yet to read Bramah’s Discovery as poetry or novel leads to narrative gaps. 

On one hand, lyric doesn’t do well at length. Saklikar’s fix, to link poetic passages with the kind of prose explanation that often makes a poetry reading work better than a cold reading on the page, is heavy on reportage. On the other hand, any novel that replaces conflict with lyrical revelation risks floating away from attention.

Fortunately, Bramah’s Discovery and Thot J Bapas a whole is neither a novel, nor epic, nor purely poetry. It’s an opera. Opera is dramatic, fantastical, over-the-top, and told through appearance and surface given depth by music. A fusion in other words, an extension of lyrical song into narrative. I recommend reading this book with that structure in mind.

There’s more. The book handles surfaces and develops narratives and character with cinematic closeups, distance shots and people walking in and out of scenes. It has a lot of close camera work, and tight editing that uses the frames of scenes to add or subtract intensity. That’s a graphic novel. All that is missing is one more step: to draw it.

All in all, Bramah’s Discovery reads awkwardly with the classic tools of Western or Eastern literature. It really is a fusion, one most successfully read as a text written in an othered culture finding a voice by weaving the surfaces of lost or unattainable cultures together.

To this world, Saklikar is a brave and devoted guide. She has gone into the land of death, as epic heroes must. Unlike Orpheus, she does not look back but only forward. The past ends with her.

In its place is a sincere, brave, and at times awkward pop culture pilgrimage, a road trip, a luxurious opera, an as-yet-unillustrated graphic novel, a Bollywood dance, and occasionally those old ghosts—poetry, epic, and fiction.

Harold Rhenisch has written thirty-five books from the Southern Interior since 1974. He won the George Ryga Prize for a memoir, The Wolves at Evelyn. His other grasslands books are Tom Thompson’s Shack and Out of the Interior. He lived for fifteen years in the South Cariboo and worked closely with photographer Chris Harris on Spirit in the Grass, Motherstone, Cariboo Chilcotin Coast, and The Bowron Lakes; and he writes the blo Okanagan-Okanogan. Harold lives in an old Japanese orchard on unceded Syilx Territory above Canim Bay on Okanagan Lake. [Editor’s note: Harold has reviewed recent books by George Bowering, bill bissett, Garth Martens, Diana Hayes, Mary Dalton (ed.), Gary Geddes, and Tom McGauley for BCR. His newest volume, The Salmon Shanties, was reviewed by Steven Ross Smith.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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