It all started with a laddoo. Not just any laddoo, but the sort that appears in puja trays, lovingly prepared by mothers with a no-touch-until-offering rule. The kind that calls to you across the room when no one’s looking.
And for Parvathy Venkatachalam, it also became the gateway to a story. A question sparked the beginning of what would become ‘Laddoo Mysteries: The Wrath of Krishna’ — a 30,000-word novel she began at age 12, and self-published with the support of her family two years later. “I was thinking, what if she catches me? And I was like, maybe she won’t. But what if god catches me?” she recalls.
Parvathy, a class 10 student at TI School, is not an established writer yet. Her book is a curious mix of mythological re-imaginings, sibling-style banter with Krishna, and the sweet pull of laddoos — all spun into a warm, mischievous tale. Her protagonist, Vaishu, shares a lot in common with her, but is not quite her. “It’s a weird relationship between me and my character,” she says. “I know it has parts of me, but I also know that it’s like my child.”
Penning down curiosity
The writing journey, much like the plot of her book, was not planned. “I thought it would be like a one-page, two-page thing, just putting down my thoughts and experiences. But it turned out to be more than 30,000 words,” says Parvathy. Her father, Venkatachalam Ramakrishnan encouraged her every step of the way — even reaching out to publishers and finally choosing to self-publish via Notion Press after facing several rejections. “That was a good experience for me to understand what rejection feels like,” she says. “Even if you get rejected 20 times, 30 times, it’s good to feel that way so you won’t get disappointed the next time it happens.”
Editing was, in Parvathy’s words, “gruelling but surreal.” The process took nearly six to seven months, over multiple revisions with her father. “I actually got massive imposter syndrome when writing this. I was like, this sounds like me, but it doesn’t feel like I wrote it,” she says. But each draft, each conversation helped. “My dad felt it’s good for it to be bad at the beginning so it will show your truth over time and over different books you will write.”
The result is a book that doesn’t just retell mythology — it questions who gets to be part of those stories. “In mainstream media, all these different mythological stories are usually in the perspective of more prevalent people,” she says. To challenge that, each chapter in her book features “three to four different retellings,” including tribal stories and regional interpretations she found deep in books and internet archives. “I wrote that to show that in mythology, nobody’s left out.”
And that includes her Krishna. “I always felt that Krishna was like a brother to me,” she says, envisioning the deity as a playful, familiar presence rather than a distant god. “I don’t really think it’s wrong. I think it’s quite fine for everybody to have a different perspective.”
In a publishing world that often prefers gods to be blue and characters to look a certain way, Parvathy insists on keeping Krishna as he was — dark-skinned and rooted in the meaning of his name. “I think that in most of the scriptures that I have read, he was always dark, from the place he had come from. In my book, mostly he is dark and mostly, it’s a true depiction of him.”
If all goes to plan, Laddoo Mysteries will expand into a quartet. “I actually finished the first draft of the second book about one month ago,” she says casually, almost as if she’s talking about homework. But Parvathy’s vision is clear — to write for kids like her who love mythology, who want to see different sides of it.