The Little Book of Hindu Deities

This was Sanjay Patel’s first book, four years before Ramayana: Divine Loophole. It is the small, dense, illustrated reference work that gave him the visual language he later scaled up to a full epic. Every page features one or two gods in his crisp geometric style, with a paragraph of plain-prose explanation: who they are, what they do, what their attributes mean, how they fit the larger story.

The reason to own it alongside Divine Loophole is that the Ramayana retelling moves fast, and a child reading along inevitably hits a name they don’t recognize. This book is the lookup. It also expands beyond the Ramayana cast — Krishna, Saraswati, Lakshmi, Durga, Kali, the river goddesses, the guardian demons — so it doubles as a primer for reading any Mahabharata abridgement, any Puranic tale, or just a school project on Diwali.

Patel writes with a light, generous touch. He doesn’t oversell the gods, he doesn’t apologize for them, and he occasionally lets himself enjoy them (“Hanuman: probably the best monkey ever”). It’s an unusual register for a reference book and it works.

The format is small — paperback, roughly the size of a Penguin pocket classic. Easy to keep on a child’s nightstand, easy to hand to a slightly older child who asks “but who’s Indra again?” while a parent is reading something else aloud.

The shorter, sturdier companion to Divine Loophole. Get the picture book first; get this when the child starts asking questions.