Dharma by Vee Kumari
Paperback: 302 pages
Publisher: Great Life Press (March 2020)
ISBN-13: 978-1938394423
$4.99 Ebook
$14.95 Print
About the Book:
Rekha
Rao, a thirty-something Indian American professor of art history, is
disillusioned by academia and haunted by the murder of her father. She believes
police convicted the wrong person, and moves away from her match-making family.
She’s
focused on managing her PTSD and healing her heart, broken by an abusive
boyfriend. She gets entangled in a second murder, that of her mentor and father
figure. The murder weapon, an idol of the Hindu goddess Durga, is left behind
on the body. Detective Al Newton asks her to look into the relationship, if
any, between the meaning of the statue and the motive for the murder.
Rekha is
attracted to Al but steers clear of him because of her distaste for cops and
fear of a new relationship. The two constantly clash, starting a love-hate
relationship. Meanwhile, her family sets her up to meet a suitor, an Indian
attorney. When police arrest one of her students and accuse her mentor of idol
theft, Rekha is left with no other choice but to look for the killer on her
own.
Despite
admonitions from Al and bodily harm caused by an intruder, Rekha finds the
killer, and in the process, emerges from the cocoon of a protected upbringing
to taste the prospect of romance and discover her true identity.
Vee Kumari shares about her work
"How much research went into Dharma and how I went about it"
I had to do quite a bit of research to ensure the facts
presented are accurate. I
hope I haven’t erred by omission. As a former
neuroscientist, I was used to
research.
The story of the discovery of microliths, 35,000-year-old
stone tools in Jwalapuram in the state of Andhra Pradesh in central India, is
true and comes from an article I came across in the journal, Antiquity (
Volume
83,
Issue
320, June 2009, pp. 326-348), written by first author Chris Clarkson. I
wanted to connect Faust and Davidson with an excavation in India where the
Durga could be discovered.
Certainly, no idol was reported to have been unearthed among
the Jwalapuram finds, but I used my creative license to invent that. I wrote
and obtained permission from the first author to do this. Any reader who
notices the discrepancy in the timeline – excavation of the microliths
published in 2009 and the beginning of my story in 2017 – will hopefully
forgive me.
- The Durga as the Mahishasura Mardini
I knew the basics about this re-incarnation, and how Durga
herself was created from parts of the Trinity, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.
However, I checked the facts against known texts and made sure to depict the
battle between Durga and the buffalo demon, Mahishasura in accurate terms. Two
books by Carmel Berkson, “The Divine and The Demoniac, Mahisha’s Heroic
Struggle with Durga” published in 1995, and “Ellora Concepts and Style”
published in 1992 were most valuable resources.
Again, I’m unclear how I came up with the name Faust for the
murdered professor. But it provided a source for the verse that Neil’s mother
included in the book she left for him. I Googled the verse innumerable times to
make sure that it would bring up the original text and it did. The idea of
Neil’s mother leaving a cryptic message for him came from a less well-known
mystery novel by P.D. James, “An Unsuitable Job For A Woman”, in which a
private detective, Cordelia Gray, embarks on a journey to find the killer of
the son of a prominent scientist.
Contacts at Massachusetts Document Retrieval provided
information about the registration of births, adoptions and deaths by suicides
in Massachusetts. Harvard Archives Reference office helped me with
information on graduate student registration process in 1996-1997.
My Review
Couched within a murder mystery is a woman seeking self-identity
while maintaining her cultural heritage.
Rekha Rao, an art history professor, has been forced to redo
her life while in her early thirties when a poor choice of a boyfriend blew up,
and the ill-advised pursuit of a killer which cost her tenure-tract and
respect. Kind of a practice reincarnation. And that’s before this mystery opens
with the gruesome death of another loved one.
Professor Rao is tapped by the local police when a strange
artifact is involved in the murder of a beloved colleague. The circumstances
are bizarre, almost as if the victim had undergone a personality change, and Rao
is determined to understand why anyone would have cause to hate the gentle,
kind, and fair professor, a renowned archaeologist.
As the story unwinds, Rao reckons with her overly loving
family who tries to help her overcome her single status with a suitable suitor.
Trouble is, she’s attracted once again to the wrong sort—a detective
investigating the case. During the course of the story, Rao struggles with
belief in herself and others as she practices the gentle art of listening. As
she gets closer to the truth behind the professor’s murder, she learns more
about herself, and all the things that went wrong after her father’s murder
only a few years prior.
I enjoyed the bits of Indian culture, history, food,
fashion, and angst that Kumari weaves throughout this contemporary mystery set
in California academia.
About the Author
Vee
Kumari, Actor, Producer, and Author of
Dharma: A Rekha Rao Mystery, grew up in India. She loved to
read, and often used it to avoid her mother, who might want her to do a chore
or two. It was her mother who directed her to use the dictionary to learn the
meanings of new words and construct sentences with them. Vee wanted to become
an English professor but went to medical school instead.
Upon
coming to the US, Vee obtained a doctorate in anatomy. She became a faculty
member at the UC Davis Medical Center, where she worked for over 35 years, and
later worked for the Keck School of Medicine for five years. Teaching
neuroanatomy to medical students became her passion. She published many
scientific papers and won several teaching awards.
When she
retired in 2012, she took classes from The Gotham Writers' Workshop and UCLA
Writers Program. Dharma, A Rekha Rao Mystery is her debut fiction that
incorporates her observations on the lives of Indian immigrants and Indian
Americans in the US.
Vee lives
in Burbank and is also an actor who has appeared in TV shows, including Criminal
Minds and Glow, and produced and was the lead in a short film, Halwa, which
garnered the first prize in HBO's 2019 Asian Pacific American Visionaries
(APAV) contest.
She is at
work on her next novel about an Indian immigrant family whose American dream
shatters when one of their twin daughters goes missing. Author website: veekumari.com
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JoAnn Fastoff is an award-winning author of both fiction and
non-fiction books. She has written for numerous publications, has produced
three one-act plays Off-Off-Broadway in New York, and produced and directed Live
from the Warehouse, a jazz program for several PBS affiliates. Ms. Fastoff is
an environmental activist, the mother of two adult children and the grandmother
of Lia. She lives in Chicago. Visit her website at www.JoAnnFastoff.com
