Augusto Pinto
In a world where children barely read books, Beverly Mendonca published her first book The Queen Checkmates when she was just 17 years old.
A quick browse through The Queen Checkmates and it’s easy to see that author Mendonca is a voracious reader and her favourite genre is fantasy, for the story she has written has elements of the worlds of Gulliver’s Travels, Alice in Wonderland, The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series of books and she even alludes to Shakespeare’s comic fantasy plays.
Another inspiration comes from art, for Mendonca is herself a keen caricaturist who has illustrated the cover and crucial scenes from the story in her book. Music is yet another inspiration: she delights in parodying the lyrics of pop musicians in her story.
The principal protagonist of The Queen Checkmates is the wheelchair-bound Christine from Taleigao who suffers from low self-esteem as her family, including her mother, aren’t too empathetic towards her.
Christine’s story begins around the time she gets admitted into a middle school in Panaji where she encounters a rather nasty schoolmate named Amanda who seems determined to make her life a misery. However, she also meets a girl named Leah who becomes her friend and guide and who invites her to join their school chess team and even gets her to play in a tournament, although Christine has no idea about how to play chess!
There is another layer of the plot that revolves around the fantasy world of a group of animals and birds who have been shrunk from their natural size due to a mishap involving a scientist. While doing some experiments the scientist’s gas stove exploded and the shrinking liquid he was preparing soaked some animals reducing them in size. These talking animals include, among others, Genoveve the sheep, a pigeon named π-Geon, a cat and a vulture named Kyrie. The world of these fantasy animals and Christine intersect when the creatures magically drop into Christine’s bedroom after her first day in school and they begin conversing with each other. The animals end up inviting Christine to their fantasy world named Anizonia.
Now it so happens that the inhabitants of Anizonia are fascinated by the game of chess and as luck would have it a ‘Super Bowl’ (a chess match played inside a bowl of water) between Fishwanathan Anand and Bobby Fisher is about to begin. Without revealing too much of the plot one can say that it is in this animal fantasy world of Anizonia that Christine learns to play chess and this is a real help to her when she goes back to her own world of everyday reality, for she is now ready to play a chess tournament where the first prize is a new model computer laptop.
The passages where Christine learns chess and then goes on to play five tournament games are at the turning point of the story. Since Christine’s games are recorded, the ideal reader of The Queen Checkmates is one who knows how to read chess games. If the reader is a child who can’t read chess but has a parent who knows chess and can explain the moves of the games to her child, the book becomes a useful tool to introduce the child to both chess and reading.
But what about the child who does not know chess? Perhaps Beverly Mendonca wants such a reader to get curious about chess through the story, get tempted to learn the game and then come back and not only read the chess games in the book but even get hooked to the game. (Incidentally the tournament games that the heroine Christine plays have been selected by the author’s brother, the 14-year-old Goan grandmaster Leon Mendonca, who has also written the foreword to the book.)
The finale of both the fictional chess tournament and of the story itself is truly fantastic and it justifies the book’s subtitle – Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao aur Beti ko Rani Banao.
For a beginning author Mendonca has a number of charming idiosyncrasies: a fondness for alliteration – each of the 14 chapters begins with a title like ‘Feathers, Family and Football’ or ‘Safety, Sacrilege and Shakespeare’. Another is a penchant for puns and oddball jokes like: Q – what is the king’s favourite rock band: A – Queen! And yet another is the fondness for alluding to citizens of Anizonia who have names that are similar, but with an animal twist, to famous people of our world. Examples are J K Sowling, Enid Flyton, Chetan Bhagoat, Charles Chickens and Alexander Flamingo.