Sayridge Media

About the World Behind the Story

About SAYADRI

Sayadri is a real place, a long mountain chain running parallel to the western coast of the southern Indian subcontinent. Cloaked in rainforest, it is a wide “grand staircase” descending from the high Deccan Plateau to the sea. Monsoon winds sweeping in from the ocean stall over its peaks, releasing sustained rains that nourish one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth.

Within these mountains live ancient communities with enduring traditions, and landscapes that feel aware, almost alive. Rivers are much more than flowing waters, millennium-old trees are witnesses to history, and the boundary between the natural and the unseen is never entirely fixed.

Misty mountain landscape at sunrise evoking the world behind SAYADRI

Biodiversity Hotspot

A Landscape of Extraordinary Diversity

Part of one of the world’s great biodiversity hotspots, the Sayadri remains a place of hidden life, including species still being documented by science. For the region’s Indigenous communities, these forests are long known, their rhythms understood and their balance carefully held. Alongside tigers, elephants, and gaur, the mountains shelter more elusive residents such as dancing frogs, flying lizards, and black panthers—quiet expressions of a deeper natural order.

Black panther
Dancing frog
Flying lizard

A Note from the Author

What does it mean to belong to a place?

What if the world we inhabit is not a mere backdrop, but a sentient force that sees, remembers, and responds?

In Sayadri, Angelie’s journey is shaped by movement: the act of leaving, the weight of returning, and the tension held between the two. Navigating cultures separated by distance and time, she confronts what it means to belong to more than one. While the disparate worlds at first divide her loyalties, they come to deepen her obligations and ultimately transform her.

She also comes to understand that acts of care for the world beyond herself can soothe the pain of loss, kindling a healing that begins outside and grows inward.

While Sayadri is a work of fantasy, it is grounded in real-world questions of identity, responsibility, and ecology. It offers no simple answers, but invites reflection on the complexity of what it means to be home.

About the Author

SD Gowda

SD Gowda draws on childhood years spent in the rainforested mountains of southwestern India, where place, folklore, and memory often felt intertwined.

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