Today I’m honoured to be starting the blog tour for Dev Kothari’s Bringing Back Kay-Kay and middle grade contemporary drama that tells the tale of Lena, a young sister frustrated and at conflict with the world around her that she cannot seem to fit, she is too disorganised, too compulsive, too forthright, too adventurous and nothing like her ‘perfect’ academic and meticulous older brother who is idolised by her parents, who happens to go missing coming home from a summer educational camp.
Yet across Bringing Back Kay-Kay, Dev Kothari shows us that it is exactly Lena’s ‘misfit’ qualities that make her strong and capable and the only one who can find her brother rather than conforming to the behaviour expected and waiting. In Bringing Back Kay-Kay, Kothari reminds us that family, community and social expectations may give us grounding, support and shelter, shape our identity, experiences and tastes, but it should not limit our self worth nor the reach of our hopes and ambition, that there is room for balance and growth, for respect and self-belief.
Content awareness: Missing child, Police Ineptitude, Maternal mental health struggles including PND & Grief, Morgue viewing (off page), Child almost hit by car, Hospitals including Intensive Care. Two Jump scares with a homeless man.
Lena’s idolises her older brother Karthik, (Kay-Kay) but resents how he is the centre of their parents’ world. However, when he goes missing on the overnight train home from a summer camp in Goa her world falls apart. Leaving his backpack and no apparent clues, there is no sign of what happened in the night.
As her parents fall apart waiting for news, neighbours and aunties wring their hands ‘what can we do’, even his friends don’t really care and the police dismiss it as another runaway, Lena decides no grown up is going to do what needs to be done… to actually investigate herself and go and look for him.
Bringing Back Kay-Kay is set in India, filled with the daily rhythms, foods and community which will be familiar for some and will bring a delight of unfamiliar words and tastes to the mouths of others. Kothari evokes a sensory feast of summer in India, from the blistering noon to the plum-peach twilight as we wander between Lena’s outer and inner worlds.
Lena begins the story as the younger and misfit sibling to a beloved first born boy, it is a poignant beginning with her remarks on how the time her brother Karthik, affectionately known as Kay Kay, was at camp had been a good time for her as their parents took notice and paid attention to her for the first time without comparisons to her brother.
And like many sibling rivalries Lena wished that Kay-Kay had just stayed away a bit longer to extend this glorious feeling, of course when the reality sinks in he’s missing the guilt hits like a tonne of bricks. And now she’s even more invisible than before.
The sibling rivalry in Bringing Back Kay-Kay is presented realistically, far more complicated than the usual jealousy and estrangement, because Lena adores her brother but she hates being compared to him, not living up to him, his intelligence and discipline and even her achievements being attributed to his tutoring or help. Her hurt and anger at her father’s criticism of her inability to find studying and concentrating easy as her brother even leads her to push him away and even sabotage in spite. She feels they only love and have dreams for Kay-Kay not her especially when they don’t support her as she challenges the attitude of the police nor when a community mother is nasty when Lena uncovers that her son has been lying about Kay-Kay’s disappearance.
But she also comes to realise the reality of the experience her brother must have felt in contrast to her envy and resentment. The pressure and embarrassment of an entire ‘Glory Wall’ in the flat filled with his certificates and medals, and not just the way their father bragged constantly but had also chosen and mapped out Kay-Kay’s future to compensate for his own limited career with total disregard to Kay-Kay’s own dreams and ambitions. Further, as she investigates and reflects on memories, she realises how her brother tried to make up for the differences in how they were treated, including her, teaching her, taking the blame, helping her manage her anger and compulsivity without chastising, even encouraging her to adventure and rescuing her when she needed it.
Kothari asks the reader to consider reframing our perspectives, that whilst we can’t control how people treat us, we can choose how we act and present ourselves and react. That sometimes it’s as hard to be the golden child as it is to be the invisible one, but that those differences don’t have to mean distance.
“… we, too are made of fundamentally contradictory things. Its almost like we are two different people at the same time”…
A physics geek and poet… Happy and sad… Open and secretive.
Across Lena’s investigation she discovers just how little she knew of her brother’s true self, that in reality he had been withdrawn and stressed, fallen out with friends and was struggling with his sense of worth.
She finds in his backpack a copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran followed by a bag of his own poems under his bed that reveals his rich inner world and the truth that Karthik had wanted to become a writer but felt it impossible to share because of the lack of support & the pressure to conform from friends, family and the expectations of society.
Being a writer is not cool to sports and influencer obsessed teenagers but Kothari leans into the struggle that young people in developing (and even in many developed non G7) countries, such as India anything creative that has no secure wealthy career path is seen as impractical and to be actively avoided in favour of those that will lead to wealth and prestige such as engineering, law and medicine. For a father from these cultures who dreamed their son to be a doctor or engineer because he couldn’t rise himself, it would be a bitter pill to swallow that such an academic boy would ‘waste’ his mind on something like poetry, and a young man would be constantly reminded he must work harder to repay the backs that ‘broke to pave your way’ instead of messing about with poems.
Everything seemed to go your way, come easily to you. It never even occurred to me that you dream of doing something other than what Dad expects of you.
Whilst artistic careers, unless wildly famous and successful, are also often viewed with disdain in the West, the feeling of paying back a debt to the struggle of ancestors through using our opportunities towards accumulation of wealth and financial stability rather than personal satisfaction is a hard one for some of us in the West or Global North- West to understand. For many readers who do not have these heritages this disconnect is partly due to individualism and the decentering of family and ancestors, but mostly because of the privilege of growing up in a developed nation regardless of our individual financial situation. That even as bad as it gets under certain governments, there is somewhat of a safety net to catch at least children. The shock some readers may feel when Lena meets Stan, the homeless orphan boy selling chai at the train station and scared of his master, yet has not lost his kindness or empathy underlines just why some insist their children to work incessantly and put dreams aside to attain security unafforded to so many. That you would rather your child be miserable in a well paid job and secure home than miserable and struggling like that.
Whilst respecting this context, Kothari teases out the impact of such pressure and the cost of being miserable if your heart or brain isn’t wired for ‘socially accepted careers’, or indeed failing at them, and equally campaigns for the value of creativity, threaded throughout the book in many subtle references, we see the way that poetry, song, art and drama are central not just to Lena’s family’s daily life, but to the culture of India, and indeed to the universal human heart. The music that lifts us, the shows and films that make us laugh and cry, the lyrics that etch themselves on our souls to be able to sing without hesitation decades later, the poems that reach into our hearts smash down walls and put us back together again. The call to another heart that only comes through creativity, has value, and is not a waste of an intelligent mind.
There is an undercurrent throughout Bringing Back Kay-Kay pushing to look at breaking generational and cultural ‘curses’, to assess where we are hurting ourselves and others and instead to actively choose to strive for balance between social, familial and cultural expectations and to advocate for healthier minds and happier lives.
This may be through reframing what stability and success means, how to deal with mental health issues, or what a child needs from their family, and that maybe striving to live a life that is happy, kind and purposeful even if not ‘perfect’ is the greater thing we can do to truly thrive.
It’s been an honour to celebrate Bringing Back Kay Kay by Dev Kothari today. Please make sure to check out the rest of the tour.
Bringing Back Kay-Kay by Dev Kothari (£7.99, Walker Books) available now.
Lily and the Fae 
Good to see you back reviewing Lily. I hope that you are finding your feet again 😊
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