Siṃhī's Twelve Dreams: A Sanskrit Sentence Reader

A novel of twelve dreams — and the second book of the language

Some books teach you a language. This one lets you dream in it.

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After the alphabet, the sentence. After the sounds, the dream.

Siṃhī's Twelve Dreams picks up where Gāyatrī's Song ends. The cub has her sounds now, and her first words — and across twelve nights beneath the ancient tree she dreams. Twelve nights, twelve encounters: a snake, a tortoise, a mouse, a great serpent, a warrior, a small bird, a fierce mother, an archer, an eagle, a prince, the blue one, and a woman who walked back from the edge of death. Each one carries a word she has not yet been given.

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The Sanskrit arrives the way she receives it — inside the story, before any explanation. A sentence appears. You may not know it yet. That is not a gap in the teaching; it is the teaching. The carrying is the first fluency.

It is a graded reader, built so that nothing is ever given that has not been prepared. The first dream is the simplest — a subject, a verb, a handful of nouns. By the twelfth you are reading compound words, participles, whole conversations. And it is two halves of one room: the first a novel, the Sanskrit woven into the dreaming; the second the same sentences laid open in Devanāgarī, transliteration, English, vocabulary, and grammar — another door into the same room.

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These are not summary stories. They are encounters. Each being the cub meets in dream will return to her in waking life — each in their own full book — and she will know them, not because she remembers, but because she has been carrying them.

She was the sentence. The sentence was about to be told.

For readers of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea, Richard Adams's Watership Down, and the old Indian fables themselves — and for every student who has the sounds of Sanskrit and is ready, at last, to read.

For the learner ready for their first whole sentences, and for anyone who likes to be read to in a language they are only beginning to know. Read it aloud: the body of the language is its sound.

Written and illustrated by Mateo Rose.

The companion to Gāyatrī's Song, and the door to Sarpa and Siṃhī: Sanskrit Reader Book 1.

Forthcoming.