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For eleven stolen days, in the warm green dark at the edge of the world, a man and a woman who were each meant to be alone forever are simply, quietly, secretly happy. She has worn a thousand shapes and never wanted to keep a single one. He crossed a sea with nothing but a dream of her, having given everything else away, and arrived wanting only the woman the dream had promised. In the hours they steal together — talking late, laughing like fools, learning the shape of each other in the firelight — they find the one thing neither of them was ever built to survive: being truly known,
and not wanting to be anywhere else.
The Love Story Nobody Told: How a Research Grant Became My Debut Novel
It began as scholarship, not storytelling.
A few years ago, I was awarded a research project (book) by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts — India's premier institution for cultural research, under the Ministry of Culture — to study the ancient cultural links between India and Cambodia.
The project was academic in intent: to trace the threads of mythology, art, architecture, and civilisational exchange that connected these two worlds across centuries of maritime trade and cultural contact. The outcome of this research (book) will also come in late 2026.
What I did not expect was to find a love story.
Deep in my research into the founding myths of Cambodia, I encountered a legend preserved in 3rd-century Chinese chronicles and in Cambodian oral tradition: an Indian Brahmin named Kaundinya arrived by sea on the Cambodian coast. He carried a magic bow.
When a Naga princess named Soma — daughter of the king of the deep waters — paddled out to meet his vessel, he shot an arrow into her boat. She agreed to marry him. Her father, the Naga king, drank up the great waters and drained a swamp to give them a kingdom. Together, Kaundinya and Soma founded Funan — one of the earliest recorded kingdoms of the Mekong delta, the civilisation that preceded the Khmer and eventually gave rise to Angkor Wat.
Cambodia still remembers this as the origin story of the Khmer people. Cambodian children learn it. It is woven into their cultural identity, retold in temples and oral tradition, living in the country's memory as the moment of their civilisational beginning.
And yet — as I travelled deeper into my research, I made a discovery that astonished me.
This myth is almost entirely unknown in India. It was from this country that Kaundinya set sail. It was from this civilization's mythology that Cambodia obtained its founding story.
Most Indians have not heard of Funan; they know nothing about Kaundinya; and they are unfamiliar with Soma, the naga princess who stands at the root of Khmer identity. Outside of India and Cambodia, this legend has no significant presence—unknown in the West; lacking in the canon of world mythology; and never told as fiction in English.
A story so important, so lovely, so full of life to one country and so completely forgotten by another—it deserves a literary work that will give it the kind of exposure it should get.
As I continue to work with primary sources, I realize that the chronicles provide us with the foundation of the kingdom but do not provide us with the woman. Her name appears. Her lineage is listed. Her consent to marry is documented.
And then she disappears into the founding narrative which like so many other founding narratives, is really the story of the man who arrived, and the kingdom he created. She is the woman whose waters he entered; whose father's sea he drained; and whose land became the kingdom—her footnote in her own story.
I couldn't leave her there.
Soma is a naga princess. What does that mean? In Indian and Southeast Asian mythology it means someone extraordinary. Not a human woman playing a mythological role—she is a shapeshifter of deep waters.
A being capable of holding any shape you want her to take on and choosing none permanently. Ancient like rivers are ancient. Here is this yogi arriving from the Himalayas—a man who spent years mastering the art of wanting nothing—asking her to become one thing forever.
That tension between infinite freedom and singular love—is the novel.
I have written The Serpent's Longing": The Naga Princess And The Himalayan Yogi around my teaching schedule at my College in Delhi University. It is not invented—the mythology is real, documented, ancient. I just gave it a voice it has been missing.
What I didn't expect to find when I started reading the mythology against today was how much of a role it still plays today in Cambodia. It is not just history. The founding legend of Funan lives—today it is in temples and in conversations. This is a part of the cultural identity of people who have survived extreme devastation and yet remember where they come from.
The serpent's Longing reached #1 on Amazon India in Mythology & Folk Tales (for a short time above palace of illusions & Alchemist) with a 4.9-star readers' ratings. It also reached #3 on Amazon India in Fantasy. It is free on Kindle Unlimited. My next book will return to the same ancient Indian-Southeast Asian tradition.
To new writers, I would say this: sometimes the most important story you will ever tell will arrive disguised as a research question. Pay attention to these moments when scholarship becomes personal. If you think about that footnote every day—then probably that is the book you always intended to write.
Namita Kumari
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