Reading Embracing the Winds feels like listening to an elder narrate a family story by lantern light. Sunith Puthur’s prose flows like a river through memory — sometimes calm, sometimes turbulent, but always purposeful. It’s a story of lineage and longing, of people who live close to the soil and to each other, and of how silence can sometimes tell more than speech ever could.
The narrative unfolds through Kesu’s eyes, a boy whose childhood in a Kerala village is filled with songs, rituals, and encounters that blur the line between reality and myth. His world is alive with sensory detail: the smell of tamarind and wet earth, the creak of bullock carts, the whistle of a distant train. Through these, Puthur captures the essence of a vanishing rural consciousness — one that finds meaning not in progress but in presence.
What makes the novel special is its emotional authenticity. When Kesu loses his mother, the scene unfolds with a stillness that mirrors real grief — no dramatics, only the truth of quiet despair. Puthur understands that human emotion is most powerful when it is least explained. The rhythm of his storytelling is meditative, like prayer.
The book is also a tribute to oral tradition — the way stories travel through generations, reshaped by each retelling. The characters — Karuppan, Muthu Rowther, Jahanara, and Kallu — feel like echoes of archetypes, yet wholly alive. Each represents a fragment of India’s cultural mosaic — Hindu, Muslim, and Persian influences blend seamlessly, revealing a shared heritage often forgotten in modern narratives.
Thematically, Embracing the Winds explores continuity — how the past breathes within the present. Every ritual, every song, every train whistle becomes a thread in a vast tapestry of belonging. Even when Kesu’s journey takes him beyond the familiar, the wind that once brushed his childhood fields continues to follow him — as memory, as destiny.
Sunith Puthur’s style is evocative without excess. His imagery lingers — neem leaves beside a sickbed, brass bells swinging from oxen, the hum of a purple bus called Jehan. These are not just descriptions but emblems of time’s passage.
Embracing the Winds is a novel to be read slowly — to be felt more than analyzed. It’s a love letter to place and people, to everything fragile and enduring in the human spirit. By the end, one realizes that the true protagonist is not Kesu, but the wind itself — restless, eternal, and forgiving.
Title: Embracing The Winds
Author: Sunith Puthur
Publisher: Evincepub Publishing