Not Departed
Mad Sisters of Esi
By Tashan Mehta
22 Aug, 2025
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Tashan Mehta’s 20231 Mad Sisters of Esi is a stand-alone science fantasy novel.
The whale of babel is a baby universe inside our own2. Even a baby universe is very large. The whale of babel contains whole worlds, worlds whose inhabitants may well be ignorant of other worlds or the fact they live inside a vast, whale-shaped universe.
Myung and Laleh are well aware that they live inside the whale of babel, that they were created by the whale’s former lone companion Wisa when Wisa realized that the whale had grown too big for Wisa to comprehend on her own. For years, the sisters traveled together, exploring a small fraction of the realms inside the whale.
Laleh was content with the answers she had. Myung, on the other hand, was filled with questions she could not answer with the information on hand. Are Myung and Laleh the only two people in the whale? Who was Wisa, exactly?
Forced to choose between staying with her sister and remaining ignorant, or seeking out answers at the cost of leaving her sister behind, Myung chose the latter. One day, Laleh wakes to find herself alone. She does not see Myung again for eight thousand and sixty-two sleeps… and then only in a dream pointing Laleh to the island of Ojda.
Semi-mythical Ojda, domain of the notoriously mad Kilta family, is famous but little visited. Prudent travelers avoid it. Laleh seeks it out. This is either bold or unwise.
Among the rules that founder Mad Magali Kilta imposed on her unfortunate offspring is that just as the Kiltas should never leave Ojda, no visitor should be tolerated. The reason behind Mad Magali’s dictates?
That has to do with a different pair of estranged sisters.
~oOo~
Very early in the novel, an academic discussing the events of the book makes this interesting comment: “When we still believed in the dominance of logic (…)”. This implies the we to which the academic belongs no longer do3.
It goes without question that a brain that evolved primarily to optimize its ability to recognize brightly coloured fruit should be capable of comprehending the universe. As they say, the whole of natural law is basically a ripe banana4. However, even if we suppose for the moment there are aspects of existence fundamentally beyond human comprehension, I don’t know how one could be sure of that5 or what rejecting logic buys one.
Having reflected on the question, one thing rejecting logic can buy one is autocracy, as truth becomes whatever is most firmly asserted. I’d dismiss this as an intrusive thought due to the current circumstances, but actually, the situation in which the Kiltas find themselves is because they lack the tools to properly interrogate their founder’s dictates.
I called this science fantasy and it is. It’s very likely to be impossible to reconcile baby universes in the shape of a whale with reality as we know it — if only large turtles and elephants had been involved! — and the means of stepping between domains used herein is akin to fairy circles. On the other hand, there are references to conventional SF tropes such as stars and galaxies, so clearly it’s at least SF adjacent. I’ve seen less plausible worldbuilding in books with rockets-and-atoms on the spine.
Books can belong to more than one category. Another category to which this novel belongs is “Surely, therapy would have been cheaper?” Except not only is there very little evidence that therapists of any sort exist, there’s some evidence they do not, because making use of them is never mentioned as an option.
What there is, is families, adept at driving each other literally around the bend, and senior figures imposing on the young rules no reasonable person would impose and no mortal human could be expected to follow.
On the surface, this doesn’t seem to be my sort of thing, and I am sure there are aspects of this book that I didn’t really see. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the prose, and the characters.
Mad Sisters of Esi is available here (DAW), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).
I did not find Mad Sisters of Esi at Bookshop UK.
1: The DAW edition is 2025.
2: Or at least inside the narrator’s. I don’t know that any of the places referenced are Earth.
3: USA delenda est.
4: “They” being the United Fruit Company.
5: The whale of babel doesn’t seem particularly chaotic or incomprehensible. It’s not like it’s a narrative universe where reality shifts like sand from paragraph to paragraph. There are some very maladjusted characters in the novel, but that is not because the universe they exist in makes it impossible to be anything but maladjusted.