Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera, a revelatory new fantasy novel that sets the high drama of divine revolutionaries and transcendent cults against the mundane struggles of modern life. Available now from Tordotcom Publishing, The Saint of Bright Doors also includes a brief foreword from the author—reprinted below along with the excerpt.
Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy.
He walked among invisible powers: devils and anti-gods that mock the mortal form. He learned a lethal catechism, lost his shadow, and gained a habit for secrecy. After a blood-soaked childhood, Fetter escaped his rural hometown for the big city, and fell into a broader world where divine destinies are a dime a dozen.
Everything in Luriat is more than it seems. Group therapy is recruitment for a revolutionary cadre. Junk email hints at the arrival of a god. Every door is laden with potential, and once closed may never open again. The city is scattered with Bright Doors, looming portals through which a cold wind blows. In this unknowable metropolis, Fetter will discover what kind of man he is, and his discovery will rewrite the world.
Dear Reader,
You might have seen Sri Lanka in the news in 2022: a dictatorial president fleeing the country by night while ordinary people breached the barricades to occupy his office and residence, a city seething with revolt and violent repression, goondas thrown into lakes, magical battles between protestor witches and the president’s evil soothsayer. No, this isn’t the book, this was just the news. Last year, I was walking through this city in upheaval and—pausing to feel the heat from a burning car on my face—thought, I wrote this two years ago. Then something in the fire popped loudly, and I backed away in case the car blew up like they do in the movies. (It did not.)
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The Saint of Bright Doors
When I finished The Saint of Bright Doors in the early months of the pandemic, a rather different crisis, when I wrote about crisis and upheaval and fire in the street, I wasn’t thinking of the all-too-imminent future that I could never have predicted, but of decades of Sri Lankan political violence and unrest, and beyond that, the similarly unrestful long weird histories of South Asia that recede into epic but can come snarling back out in the dark. Deep time has long claws; in politics, history is a jump scare. Our gods and kings, our bloody-handed politicians with their wars and crimes against humanity, our demons and monsters—I tried to write the truths that are not the facts. I was never trying for authenticity, but for a fantastical inauthenticity. Not something from the headlines, not what might go into a history or ethnography, which is one way for something to be real, but this is the other way.
I wanted to say that I feel this place on me like a weight on the back of my neck, like ghosts at my hand and behind my eyes. I wanted to write what it feels like to be a fragile, damaged human body gasping for breath in the chin-high floods of politics and histories, of love and lore and family. I wanted to see histories twisted, the mythic mangled, devils made visible. Everything here is made up, stem to stern, and you don’t need to know a single thing about Sri Lanka or South Asia to read it, but it feels true to me. And I hope it feels true to you too—true, but strange. Thank you for sharing my hauntings.
Vajra Chandrasekera
Colombo, Sri Lanka.
November 2022
2
Fetter’s teenage years pass rough and jagged, full of cold nights and hunger and blisters on his feet. He learns to follow his luck, to listen to the roiling in his gut, and it keeps him alive. He learns mysteries and gains scars. His hair grows out long and curly. Eventually, his beard grows out too. He is no longer quite so small.
3
Looking back as an adult in the city—and having so painfully become an adult, he thinks, in an occulted process of total destruction and reconstruction, like the secret of what happens inside the chrysalis—he prefers not to talk about or consciously recall that time of his life.
When he makes conversation, on a third date like this one with Hejmen, for instance, he does his best to be open and vulnerable. It’s easier to open up while they sit at an outdoor café in the darkening evening, lit by the smouldering canopy of the flame trees above. He’ll talk about his childhood at length, but not about his teens.
Of course, he can’t talk about the murders here in the city, but he can talk around them. He has learned how to describe them in emotional terms while leaving out the blood. Family feuds and estrangements are not so strange, though for most the knives are figurative.
He can admit now, from the safe perch of his twenties, that his childhood was spent in the thrall of a toxic, abusive parent. He has put away childish things. His mad, violent childhood; the indoctrination; his training as a child soldier in his mother’s war against his father: these things, these people are in his past. He has grown up. He is making a new life for himself, all his own. His only purpose now is peace, he tells himself. To find some; to keep it; to age in grace; to never again raise his hand in violence.
He is, by his own best estimation, twenty-three years old, give or take a year or two. The dark brown territories of his skin, darkened further by the sun, are mapped by white traceries of scars, most of them faint. He doesn’t remember how he got his scars—knife and jagged scale and thorn, broken glass and human nails—but he’s sensitive about them. He wears his hair and beard thick and neatly trimmed, well-tamed with the city’s conditioners, sleeves long and collars high. This is enough to hide most of his scars, except for the thin line that bisects his left cheek as if marking the path of a hot iron tear. When his face is in repose, the line looks unnaturally straight, so he’s practiced a one-sided smile that hides it. The scars are only another thing that he doesn’t talk about.
He doesn’t mention, either, that his father is the Perfect and Kind, who is seen routinely on the TV talk show circuit and frequently quoted in the news, as a major regional religious figure and opinionator. Being related to him wouldn’t be attractive, merely freakish. He does mention an absent father, so as not to seem overly obsessed with his mother. That, he has discovered, is not attractive either.
Hejmen is older than him and has a luxurious, chest-length beard, black shot through with grey. They met on a dating app and have been on three dates in two weeks, so things are going surprisingly well.
Hejmen noticed the absence of his shadow—that happened after the second date, when they went out for breakfast in the bright morning sun—but he took it in stride. Luriatis are like that. It’s one of the reasons Fetter decided to live there. When he first came in sight of the city a few years ago, its towers of stone and glass golden in the sun, the white cranes in their arc across the skyline like a sheaf of arrows fired at once from a god’s bow, he felt drawn to Luriat before he even knew the city’s name. The air was wet, almost liquid, soft and healing on his skin. The city told him he was done wandering, done with his mother’s quest. Now he is starting to feel like he belongs there. So many people come to the city from somewhere else that it’s easy to feel at home. Fetter isn’t even the only feral child of a messiah in his social network. There’s a support group for unchosen ones, which was recommended to him by the therapist he’s been seeing ever since he learned what a therapist was. He attends those support group meetings religiously, every Haruday at sundown. He hasn’t told Hej about any of that yet, but he doesn’t feel like he’s hiding anything. It’s early days, and he feels like he has time. He luxuriates in that feeling, stretching out in it like a cat in the sun. He supposes this is what happiness feels like. It’s an effort to stay grounded in it.
***
“What do you want to do with your days?” It’s a question they ask every week at the support group for the unchosen, the almost-chosen, the chosen-proximate. Answers vary. Most people mumble or joke. It takes a long time, the veteran of the group remarks, for people in this group to start taking their own lives seriously. The only person newer to the group than Fetter retorts that maybe people need that time to recover.
“It’s like floating,” Fetter says. People nod and say yeah, though they can’t understand what he means. He doesn’t talk about the floating; he practices it sometimes, in the hope of turning it into a skill rather than a circumstance, but only when alone and unobserved. He doesn’t talk much at group. There are maybe a dozen people who come and go, the unchosen detritus of as many religions. Today is a typical day, in that about half the group is present.
Of course the room is full of invisible powers. They fill him with an old fear that is almost comforting: Luriat is not as full of such beings and creatures as Acusdab was, but there are enough, and they crowd the meetings as if drawn to the support group’s particular oddity. He is not sure how many of the others can see them. Perhaps none, judging by their failure to react. Or perhaps they have each decided, like him, that the only way to lessen the horror is to look away and never speak of it. He does not dare breach that silent agreement, if it exists; he has never stopped being sure, in his heart, that it would go badly for him if he ever allowed the invisible powers to know he can see them. So he unfocuses his eyes and allows his gaze to skim past their horrible shapes, their strange limbs, their implied multiplied eyes. They remain in the background. His head aches from the effort, but he has grown used to the pain of this unseeing. The room is dimly lit, which helps. It also obscures the absence of his shadow.
The group veteran is Koel, a woman in her late forties or early fifties. There are laugh lines around her eyes, but she rarely laughs. “The sooner you realize you’ve got lives of your own to live, the easier it’ll be. All I’m saying,” she says. She’s told them before about her mother, who was supposedly the prophet of the Walking, a god that Fetter doesn’t know. The mantle of prophet was passed on to her younger brother when her mother retired, and Koel found herself with all the training but no authority, no voice of god in her ear. Now, as far as Fetter knows, she is some sort of pamphleteer. She has an illegal press where she writes and prints her own seditious literature, which she then leaves in public places for people to read and distribute. She’s supposedly also a playwright and independent filmmaker. He hasn’t seen any of her films or plays, but he has seen her pamphlets being used to wrap loaves of bread, for children to make paper planes. She publishes regardless. She speaks of all this too freely. Any of them could betray her to the police. Devils, perhaps she is daring them to do it. No, perhaps she is only trusting them. Perhaps it is unconsidered faith, in the way of someone who grew up expecting her every wish would be as the word of god.
“I want to work on the bright doors,” says the newcomer, and the whole group groans at this. Even Fetter groans, because he once tried to get a job working on the doors himself and knows how long the waiting list is. The newcomer is a young neutrois person named Ulpe with long, uneasy fingers. They’ve been at group for a few weeks but haven’t yet shared much about their story of being unchosen except that it involves a man on fire, though whether literally or figuratively is unclear. Fetter and the others don’t yet know if the Man in the Fire, which is the only way that Ulpe will refer to him, set himself on fire or survived a fire or merely lit a metaphorical flame of belief. They don’t even know Ulpe’s relationship to this man. But whatever that relationship was, it is so clearly of recent rupture that the groans are good-natured, even solicitous.
“You know it’s never going to happen, don’t you?” Koel is of course the one to say this, and her mock-severity is so full of mockery that it approaches true severity. “They’ll especially not let one of us do it.”
This is news to Fetter. “Why not us in particular?”
Koel shrugs. “Incompatibilities,” she says, which Fetter doesn’t understand at all. Some of the others are nodding— Ulpe looks blank, but they’re new to the city and the group and so often look blank that it doesn’t count—so Fetter doesn’t pursue it for fear of once again playing the uneducated provincial.
***
The bright doors of Luriat give the city its historic identity without intruding on its daily life. For his first year living in the city, there is too much to see and the brightly painted doors scattered around the city seem unremarkable. After a while, he notices how they are always closed, and how often there is somebody working on these doors—repainting them, always in bright, primary colours; testing, oiling, repairing the hinges, the locks, the knobs; filling in gouges or scars with putty, varnishing, polishing, wiping away stains, lighting incense, leading circles of prayer before them; shining ultraviolet flashlights, taking carefully flaked samples of the wood, the paint; leaving flowers, leaving small offerings of neatly sliced fruit and joss sticks with their thready smoke. The bright doors are distinct from ordinary doors, which don’t receive such attentions and which are often, Fetter notices eventually, not doors at all. There are plenty of simple unobstructed openings in walls; arches and curtains of cloth or beads or translucent plastic sheeting; glass doors of varying degrees of translucency; half-doors or doors with inset windows; screens of netting, metal gates or grates, bars like cages. An ordinary Luriati door is always partly open or partly transparent, even if imperfectly. Only the bright doors are fully closed and opaque. From this Fetter gathers that it is the lack of transparency, the closing of doors, the unknowability of an other side, that differentiates the bright doors from mere entrances.
One day, unable to resist curiosity, he approaches a bright door on the street. He was walking the city, following nothing but his luck, when he happened across a rare unattended bright door. Nobody is fussing around it or keeping an eye on it. There are no police or witnesses. It’s set in the wall of an unremarkable building which otherwise seems to house nothing but a luxury jeweller’s shop. The entrance to the shop itself is an ordinary glass door set into the shop front, as far away from the bright door as possible. It’s early in the morning and the shop is closed and the street deserted. He feels that familiar sensation in his gut: the sickening, queasy tugging that he has always thought of as his luck, his instinct, some deep sensitivity to the world that senses where he needs to go, what he needs to do, long before he can even articulate it. When it bubbles up in him, there is always something he needs to do, even if he doesn’t know it yet.
He walks up to the door and tries the knob. It’s locked. The wood is painted a cheerful orange, and up close he can see that the paint is thick and inexpert, with too many layers and stray brushstrokes and clumps. There are no signs or writing on or near it indicating danger or warning people away. He rattles the knob and becomes conscious of cold air seeping through the gaps where the door meets its frame. It’s not the even chill of air-conditioning or refrigeration: it’s the rustling whisper of a cold wind carrying an unfamiliar, bitter smell. The more conscious Fetter grows of the cold wind, the stronger and louder it seems, as if there is a gusting, howling wind behind the bright door, the kind of wind that might be funnelled through a mountain pass. At first he thinks it’s the cold that unsettles him, when in point of fact Luriat is a city at low elevation, bordering the ocean, where the air is always warm and occasionally temperate and the wind comes from the sea. But then he thinks it’s that smell he doesn’t recognize, the way it’s almost a taste on his tongue like ash. Or it’s the way the chill in that air feels like the outdoors even though it’s coming, by definition, from indoors, or at least from behind a door. If what’s behind the door is the outside, then does that make all of Luriat—all of the world—the inside? The wind from the other side seems to intensify, as if there is a storm being held back by nothing more than this thin, over-painted orange door. The knob is freezing cold in his hand, though he can’t tell if it was cold when he touched it. Perhaps it was, so cold that it numbed the skin of his palm. He lets the knob go, rubbing his palms together. When he takes a few steps away from the door, the gusts of cold wind recede, as does the sense of heavy weather on the other side. He has a headache squatting in the darkest corner of his temple, beating like an extra heart.
Excerpted from The Saint of Bright Doors, copyright © 2023 by Vajra Chandrasekera.
