Godman Fiction: Why India Needs This Thriller

Reading Time: 3 minutes

He didn’t use force, he used faith. This is the line at the center of Cobra Orchard. Because it names something that Indian fiction in English has largely left alone. The godman. The self-appointed holy man.

He is the man in the ashram who accumulates followers the way other powerful men accumulate money, and who understands something that most people prefer not to examine:

That devotion, when it is desperate enough, is the most exploitable thing in the world.

India has always had godmen. It has always had the corrupt parading in the garb of the sacred. What is doesn’t have enough of, in its English-language fiction, is the godman as the engine of a psychological thriller. This is the gap Cobra Orchard fills.

The villainous guru in this book is not a caricature. He does not announce his wickedness. He does not need to. As he stands near a window in an ashram in Rishikesh, bald and draped in pink, he says almost nothing for most of the scene.

The air around him carries the ambrosial haze of opium. Two young women move around him like offerings.

When he finally speaks, he reveals information he should not possess, then he pronounces a young girl’s fate. Betrayal. Revenge. Death. Heartache. A bell chimes after each word.

He does not place a curse. He predicts one. And that is so much worse.

This is what godman fiction in India must reckon with honestly. The horror is not supernatural. It is psychological. The guru’s power does not come from any genuine spiritual force, but from his precise understanding of human fear. He plays on a mother’s fear.

His words are so specific and so certain that the fear he plants that evening travels through the next several decades of this mother’s and daughter’s lives. He does not need to follow them. The prediction does the work for him.

This is how the corrupt parade in the garb of faith. Not with dramatic violence. With language. With timing.

With the performance of knowledge that cannot be questioned because to question it is framed as a sin. The believers become the enforcers. The holy man keeps his hands clean. Writing him, I felt the full weight of how many real women this story belongs to.

India has lived through godman after godman, each one protected for years or decades by the devotion he cultivated, by communities who chose the comfort of belief over the evidence of their own eyes.

A godman fiction thriller that refuses to look at this directly is a thriller that has turned away from its own people.

Cobra Orchard does not turn away.

The guru in this book is not the only danger. He is the first danger, the one who sets the psychological damage in motion and then retreats from the main action. His prediction embeds itself in a family like a splinter that cannot be reached.

Thirty years later, three women are still living inside this damage. He needed only chance encounters. He needed only words.

This is what makes the godman the most dangerous of all thriller villains. Not his power. His patience. The understanding that fear, once planted inside a family, tends its own garden.

Cobra Orchard is available on Amazon Kindle. If you have ever been in a room with someone who everyone around you trusted and something in you did not, this book was written with that knowledge.

Why did a fast-paced thriller need the slow setting of a village? Find out here.

Want to know more about this godman fiction, explore Cobra Orchard to sink into the wicked drama.

Have you ever known someone who wasn’t worthy of trust? Comment below!

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