The Demon of the Curry Powders
by Pieter Scholtz
(Struik)
The author of The Demon of the Curry Powders is an award-winning drama professor and playwright from Durban, and his understanding of and love for the city is apparent. The backdrop is a spice market, in which young Sammy and his long-suffering father — a banana vendor — labour under the spiteful lash of his mother-in-law’s tongue.
The stallholders are all named according to their wares, so the curry powder merchant is called Mr Garam, the vegetable seller is Mr Bhindi and so on.
Sammy is in love with the beautiful Kali, but her mother won’t allow her daughter to dally with a lower caste boy. Sammy is known as a dreamer and tries to win Kali over by revealing the magical world in which the spirits of the market come alive each night: poppadums turn into marching drums and sweetmeats into gaudily dressed temptresses. Then Mr Garam summons a demon out of the curry powders and the fearsome Thurkaari demands that Kali be given to him as a bride. The resourceful Sammy must devise a plan to foil the demon and save his beloved.
It is refreshing to read a children’s book set in a South African context — and so firmly rooted in culture and tradition. But the book is based on a play that Scholtz wrote in the 1960s and this makes it feel a little dated. The Demon of the Curry Powders left me wondering if kids in contemporary Durban would relate to it.
My Swordhand is Singing
by Marcus Sedgwick
(Orion Children’s Books)
Set in a village on the outskirts of a vast Eastern European forest in the 17th century, My Swordhand is Singing tells the story of teenager Peter and his alcoholic woodcutter father, Tomas.
Tomas is a man with a past, clearly on the run from something dark and dangerous, the clue to which is held in a wooden box that Peter is forbidden ever to touch. They survive as itinerant woodcutters, eking out a living as they drift between destitute hamlets at the forest’s edge.
Then villagers start dying in gruesomely unusual ways, only to rise from their graves in search of fresh victims. And a band of gypsies sweep into town on the trail of Tomas, who possesses a magical sword (a remnant of his glorious warrior past) that is capable of dispatching these vrykolakoi back to the soil for good.
Sedgwick throws in some boy-on-the-brink-of-manhood bits and a couple of pubescent romance scenes, but fails to give this rendering of the vampire legend any real heft. He has done some interesting research into folkloric remedies for dealing with the undead. So you will learn, for example, that the best way to deal with a zombie is to scatter millet around the perimeter of your house — the nosferatu will be compelled to pick up every single grain before coming after you, by which point hopefully the sun will have risen. But the book fails to build any real sense of dread or horror, and lacks the deft touch present in some of Sedgwick’s other novels.