The Avada Kedavra Syndrome: Accidental Magic (Keshava Guha)

For a life long Harry Potter and JK Rowling fan, when you hear that there is a book that brings the love for HP and loneliness together, you know that you have to read it!  The silver scar on the cover, the acid-trip font for the title, and the bright sunshine yellow of the spine all invite you in for a world of magic and nostalgia for those Potter days. Guha calls it Accidental Magic but you know he knows that he has you hooked already.
4 lives. Harry Potter. And the old days of internet chat rooms and fan fiction. Set among 2 continents and much like 6 characters in search of an author, Rebecca, Curtis, Malathi and Kannan are in search of meaning to their disjointed lives through the Potter stories. While Rebecca uses the books to get over her broken relationship, Curtis uses it to find new friendships. Kannan, the oh so familiar figure of bullied middle class sons who live their life in prescriptions of being an engineer, earning the right kind of salary and being dead inside finds magic as the only avenue where he can choose for himself: even if the choice is about whether Harry-Hermione or Ron-Hermione make a better couple.

Set between chatrooms in the last decade of the last century, Boston and snippets of Bangalore, Accidental Magic does capture a loneliness that its millennial readers will connect to. Instead of Twitter and Tinder, the connecting spaces here are the chatrooms where you swipe right to the most innovative names from the fandom, instead of catchy "about you" you start chat threads and you do Deathmarch marathons. The relationships in the story are sketchy and don't let you invest in them. Kannan and Curtis are unlikely friends whose friendship is made to mirror that of Dumbledore and Harry but unlike the Potter match, this is a relationship which only skims on the surface and is hard to truly root for. Kannan's own confusion about what he wants out of life while trying to follow the module that all good Indian sons are given right at their birth is one of the most interesting parts of the story and captures beautifully the suffocating barrenness of the displaced Indian engineer, the cliche of success used for decades by Indian parents as a module of good parenting. Kannan and his bare house, his refusal to take responsibility for his actions and his burden of fulfilling expectations makes him much like a Draco Malfoy, a character who is woefully ignored in this homage to the Potter series. 

You know Accidental Magic is a man's book in the way the women characters feature in the story. Both Rebecca and Malathi are characters who have been shamelessly relegated to the periphery of this story even though they both are much more interesting and layered than either Curtis or Kannan. Somewhere in the middle of the book I genuinely thought Guha had either forgotten that he had introduced a character called Malathi or had misplaced his notes as she vanishes from the story-line only to randomly surface as cliches. She deserves her own story much like a Hermione does.    Rebecca and her fight between parents who expect her to be the "right kind of feminist" and her own struggle of being an empath and struggling between her expectations of her self and what her actions do is a story that should have got more possibilities. However, much like the singular selfish focus of Kannan, Guha seems to be more comfortable with the intricacies of the male displaced Indian than that of the women.

The flow of the story also sometimes make you question whether there were two authors involved, as the first part is much more stunted and with words which don't fit into the narrative form while the second half is much more lilting and free-flowing and finally lets you embrace the story. But I did learn two new words, so not everything is lost.

Is it a book for Potter fans? I would say a no, because it in no way does justice to the fandom. Any self-respecting Potter fan would take umbrage to the fact that the most discussed HP ideas in the story are teenage "ships" (short for relationships)! While it does take up questions of writing fan fiction, authenticity, plagiarism, fandom theories, but these are just ornamental to a story which really does no justice to them.

Don't pick Accidental Magic if you want to feed your nostalgia for those good old days of Potter magic. Pick it up if you want to read a new author, about the millennial relationship crisis and if you want to feel a little less alone in your loneliness.

Or better, go and re-read the boy who lived.