The Becoming
There was in a dense and vast forest a sweet and beautiful young lioness. She loved to hunt with her mother, Gāyatrī, the golden huntress. One day a great storm began, and she became separated from her pride.
Some books are read. Some are told. Some are carried.
This one was written to be all three.
Siṃhī: The Becoming is the story of a young lioness who loses her mother in a storm and finds shelter in a cave — where a wise serpent, knowing she is afraid, begins to tell her a story. And in that story, there is another story. And in that one, another still.
What begins as a fable at the mouth of a cave opens, across thirteen books, into something larger: a literary novel about becoming, composed in the old Indian tradition of nested wisdom stories.
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Each book meets Siṃhī at a different threshold. She walks beside a tortoise who knows what patience costs. She meets a serpent larger than the world. She speaks with a warrior who has learned to carry his own strength without becoming cruel. She sits with a woman walking beside Death. She rides through the dust behind a charioteer who sees the shape of the whole field.
Siṃhī meets figures who carry the oldest questions. What is innocence, and what ends it. What is power, and whether it belongs to the one who holds it. What a mother gives a daughter before the world can reach her. What is left when everything has been taken, and still the story goes on.
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This is not a soft book, though it is a tender one. Grief is met, not avoided. Loss is real. The old stories do what old stories do — hold, across generations, the things no single life can hold alone.
For readers of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea, Richard Adams's Watership Down, Sue Monk Kidd's The Book of Longings, Clarissa Pinkola Estés's Women Who Run With the Wolves, and the old Indian fables themselves.
For the parent reading aloud. For the seeker reading alone. For the child who has known a cave. For the adult who remembers one.
This is Siṃhī's becoming. In following hers, you may find yourself remembering your own.
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First Edition, 2026 · Published by Embody Healing Center LLC, Ashland, Oregon
ISBN: 9798252046259 · Available in hardcover and Kindle