By: Team Literary Yard

(‘The Roar at Twilight’ is a poetry collection written by Mahathi (Mydavolu Venkata Satyanarayana)).

The Roar at Twilight is an ambitious undertaking: a 108-sonnet retelling, in English, of the Puranic legend of Hiranyakashipu, his devout son Prahlada, and the fierce man-lion incarnation of Vishnu, Lord Narasimha. The number itself is a devotional gesture — 108 being the count sacred to Vaishnava chanting — and the author tells us in his prologue that he set out to write exactly that many sonnets as an offering, and that the story obliged him by finishing precisely there. That anecdote sets the tone for the whole book: this is less a literary exercise than an act of worship that happens to take the shape of poetry.

Structure

The collection follows the myth in strict chronological order across eleven subsections — from the sage Kashyapa’s fateful union with Diti, through the birth and rampage of the demon Hiranyaksha, the tapas and conquests of his brother Hiranyakashipu, the birth and persecution of Prahlada, a run of “teaching” sonnets in Prahlada’s voice, and finally the emergence of Narasimha from the palace pillar and the demon’s death at twilight. Each sonnet holds to the Shakespearean form — three quatrains and a closing couplet — with real discipline; the rhyme scheme is maintained throughout even when it visibly strains the syntax to do so. The couplets in particular are used the way the tradition intends them: as a hinge that either delivers a moral, a punchline, or a jolt of narrative momentum into the next poem. The book opens with blessings from two religious figures (His Holiness Chinna Jeeyar Swamy and Swami Tejomayananda Saraswathi) and several prose forewords, and closes with two essays — one connecting the Narasimha legend to the deity Sudarshana Alwar, another on the nature of “true devotion” — plus a section of reader feedback. It reads, structurally, as much like a devotional compendium as a poetry collection.

Voice and theme

The dominant register is bhakti — surrender, praise, and moral instruction. The strongest stretch of the book is the “Prahlada’s Divine Teachings” section, where the boy-devotee addresses his friends directly: he tells them that a human birth is a rare privilege not to be wasted waiting for old age to turn to God, that the pleasures earned through past karma are transient and eventually sour, that family and money quietly enslave a person’s attention for a whole lifetime, and that God cannot be confined to temples or shrines because he is present in every soul. This last idea is the poem’s real hinge: when Prahlada tells his enraged father that the Lord is present even in a pillar, and Hiranyakashipu smashes it in fury, the emergence of Narasimha becomes a literalization of the book’s central theological claim — that divinity is genuinely everywhere, including in the last place a tyrant would look.

The climactic sequence, where Narasimha appears from the shattered pillar, is the collection’s most vivid writing: a hybrid, monstrous, thousand-armed figure with emerald eyes and a mane that raises a duststorm, whose combat with Hiranyakashipu escalates from a failed grapple to an aerial chase to the final disembowelment at the twilit threshold — neither day nor night, neither inside the house nor outside it, satisfying the letter of the demon’s boons while destroying him anyway. The author clearly relishes this material, and the violence is rendered with an almost cinematic sense of scale — collapsing mountains, fleeing wildlife, trembling earth.

One section is likely to give some readers pause: the early sonnets depicting Diti’s desire for the sage Kashyapa are written in an explicitly sensual register — her body, her breathing, her physical yearning are described in some detail before Kashyapa reluctantly yields to her at the inauspicious hour that (per the legend) is what produces the demon sons in the first place. It’s faithful to the Puranic source, where the timing and manner of that conception is precisely the point, but the tonal gap between that opening and the devotional piety of the rest of the book is real, and a reader coming to this as straightforwardly devotional poetry may find the contrast jarring.

Craft

Technically, the book is uneven. The commitment to strict rhyme and meter frequently forces inverted or archaic syntax (“body her turned hot,” “strength is He”) and occasional strained diction to hit a rhyme. Some images land with real force — the demon’s rampage measured in collapsing oceans and overflowing canals, Narasimha’s nostrils described as caves waiting to consume — while others feel filled in for the meter’s sake rather than the image’s. The forewords, written by more practiced hands, actually diagnose this quality generously: one contributor frames the poem’s occasional roughness as evidence of unmediated, trance-like composition, casting the poet as a “Drashta” or visionary transcribing what he witnessed rather than a craftsman revising for polish. Whether or not one accepts that framing, it’s an accurate description of the reading experience — this is verse written with more devotion than deliberation, and it asks to be read that way.

Verdict

The Roar at Twilight will appeal most to readers already invested in the Narasimha legend, Vaishnava devotional literature, or the practice of English-language religious poetry from India, for whom the sincerity of the undertaking and the completeness of the retelling will matter more than metrical polish. As a piece of narrative devotion — 108 sonnets offered, by the author’s own account, almost as an act of prayer — it succeeds on its own terms. As conventional literary poetry, judged by the standards of the sonnet form it borrows, it’s rougher going: the rhymes are sometimes purchased at the cost of natural syntax, and the register shifts (particularly in the opening section) sit uneasily against the book’s devotional aims. Readers should come to it for the story and the sincerity, not for formal elegance.