SHASTRI Akella’s poised, elegant debut, The Sea Elephants, is a bildungsroman of a young man who joins a street theater group in India after fleeing his father’s violent disapproval, the death of his twin sisters, and his mother’s unfathomable grief. It is a story about queer desire, the comfortable lies families tell themselves to survive, and art’s power to say the unsayable, to help us win back ourselves from the shame and self-disgust that society often deploys to control us.
In India queerhas received so far, both on the Indian subcontinent and abroad.
