Anand, a twelve-year-old boy living in a slum in modern-day Kolkata, meets Abhaydatta, an old man with mysterious powers. Abhaydatta turns out to be a member of the Brotherhood of Healers, a society that lives in the secret Silver Valley in the Himalayas, on a quest to retrieve the conch shell that is the source of the Brotherhood's magic. Abhaydatta wants Anand to carry the conch back to Silver Valley in order to throw off Surabhanu, an evil sorcerer who wants the conch's power for himself. Anand and Abhaydatta travel north through India, accompanied by Street Urchin Nisha, despite Surabhanu's repeated efforts to force or trick them into giving up the conch.
The books in the series:
- The Conch Bearer (September 5, 2003)
- The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming (September 1, 2005)
- Shadowland (March 31, 2009)
The Brotherhood of the Conch contains examples of:
- Agony Beam: In Shadowland, police officers in the city of Coal carry blue tubes as weapons that have no physical effects, but cause their victims to collapse in pain.
- Anti-Magic: In Coal, giant towers contain jammers, which emit radiation that disrupts any attempts at using magic and causes excruciating headaches for the magician.
- Big Guy Rodeo: In The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming, Kasim tries to stab Mahabet. Nisha jumps on his back, bites him, and scratches at his eyes.
- Cave Behind the Falls: In The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming, Anand is exploring Silver Valley when he finds a small, damp cave behind a waterfall. There, he has a vision of Abhaydatta with Raj-bhanu, the apprentice he took with him on a mission, who is injured. When Anand is unable to get help from the other Healers, he and Nisha decide to take matters into their own hands and go after them.
- Disappeared Dad: When Anand was ten, his father moved to Dubai in order to take a high-paying job and send money back to the family. But a few months later, the payments stopped. Anand doesn't know what happened to his father. He was framed for embezzlement, jailed, and not allowed to send letters. He is finally released and gets back to Kolkata only a few days after Anand leaves.
- Dumb Struck: Anand's younger sister Meera has been mute ever since she witnessed one man deliberately run another over with his car.
- Electric Torture: In Shadowland, anyone not part of the upper class is made to wear a collar that shocks them if they talk, to prevent anyone from plotting a rebellion.
- Evil-Detecting Dog: In The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming, the palace horses and elephants are all badly spooked by a Searcher, an invisible, soulless being created to capture and trap a specific person, and the only person who understands their reaction is Abhaydatta.
- Furniture Blockade: Mahabet pushes a divan in front of his door so he can have a private conversation with Anand and Nisha. His parents and their servants refuse to install a lock on his door for fear that assassins will lock him in, so this is the only way he can get any privacy.
- Gaia's Lament: In Coal which is really Kolkata several hundred years into the future, the seas have retreated, the rain has stopped, and the air is brown with pollution. The city is surrounded by miles and miles of uninhabitable wasteland where rebels are left to die.
- Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: In Shadowland, Anand and Nisha go into the magicians' hideout and are immediately hit by a charm that causes exhaustion and despair. Anand, who is much more strongly affected than Nisha, falls to his knees. Nisha shakes his shoulder, then slaps him in the face, which weakens the charm's effects enough that he can keep walking.
- Identity Amnesia: When Anand, Abhaydatta, Nisha, and Raj-bhanu land in Moghul India, the spells around the palace cause all of them to take on a different role - Anand is a servant boy, Abhaydatta is a mahout
, Raj-bhanu is an assistant mahout, and Nisha is Paribanou, the vizier's niece. Anand and Abhaydatta remember who they are, but Nisha and Raj-bhanu's memories are all replaced by Fake Memories of their new lives. - I Know Your True Name:
- The jinn from The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming needs to hear a person say their name out loud before he can eat their soul. Abhaydatta begins the process of recovering their spirits by whispering their names in their ears.
- The conch tells Anand its true name so they can combine their powers and banish Ifrit to the Great Void.
- Initiation Ceremony: Anand is initiated into the Brotherhood in a ceremony that involves having water poured over his head and donning the uniform of an apprentice healer.
- I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: In the Moghul era, Nisha falls in love with Mahabet. At first she agrees to stay in the past to marry him, but she eventually realizes that she could never be happy with life as his begum. With his encouragement, she leaves him and goes back with her friends to Silver Valley, where she was happy.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Abhaydatta deletes Meera's memory of the murder, allowing her to speak again. Later, he deletes Anand's family's memories of him so he can join the Brotherhood and cut off all family ties without causing any grief.
- Magic Mirror: In The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming, the titular handheld mirror serves as a portal to other places, time periods, or even dimensions.
- Money to Throw Away: In The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming, Anand watches a procession in which the young shahzada rides through town on an elephant, throwing fistfuls of silver coins into the grateful crowd. He starts throwing the coins in front of his elephant so the peasants will almost get trampled for his amusement. When he gets bored, he dumps out all the coins in a pile on the ground, causing a human stampede.
- Name Amnesia: Nisha came with her family to Kolkata when she was a young child. She was separated from them in the marketplace and never saw them again. She has long since forgotten whatever name they called her by. Instead, she was known for most of her childhood as Sweeper Girl, because she swept in front of a soda stall in exchange for being allowed to sleep under it. Abhaydatta gave her her new name.
- Never Learned to Read: When Nisha sees the piece of paper with her new name on it, Anand has to read it to her.
- Over-the-Shoulder Carry: On Surabhanu's orders, a group of ape-like creatures abduct Anand and Nisha and carry them over their shoulders while they climb up a cliff to the cave where they live.
- Post-Victory Collapse: In The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming, Anand and the conch use up almost all their energy banishing Ifrit to the Great Void. Afterwards, Anand faints, his hands and lips burned from the power released by the conch, while the conch becomes brown and cracked. The conch could heal itself once it got back to Silver Valley, but it chooses to keep the damage.
- Power Glows: Most people see the conch as an ordinary shell, but Anand sees it as breathtakingly beautiful and as glowing white.
- La Résistance: In the city of Coal, magic has been banned, and magical items are destroyed by machines that extract all the magic and convert it into electricity. Magicians live in scattered groups in the slums, occasionally attempting to break into the domes and destroy the technology that prevents them from using magic.
- Seers: Farseeing, one of the magical skills taught at Silver Valley, allows a person to see what's happening at the moment in a familiar but far away location. A small number of particularly skilled magic users can see even places they know nothing about.
- The Shangri-La: In Silver Valley, it's always summer, and plants that are extinct everywhere else flourish. The valley is full of magical objects that the Healers use to do their work.
- Shapeshifter Mode Lock: Abhaydatta expends all his magic turning into a mongoose in order to fight Surabhanu, who has turned into a snake. Unable to change back, he forgets that he was ever anything but a mongoose, until the Healers manage to transform him again.
- Shock and Awe: Ifrit strikes the nawab's pavilion with lightning, setting it on fire. People jump twenty feet down to escape, some of them breaking limbs in the process. Ifrit then fires lighting bolts into the panicked crowd, setting several people on fire.
- Speaks Fluent Animal: Anand's language lessons in Silver Valley include Mule, Elephant, and Goat in addition to human languages.
- Struggling Single Mother: Since Anand's father disappeared, his family had to move from their apartment into a one-room shack in a bad neighborhood. His mother works tirelessly to feed him and Meera, sometimes going without dinner in order to divide what little they have between the kids.
- Sucky School: In The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming, Anand visits the village of Sona Dighi. He is never forced to attend the area's one school, but his new friend Ramu tells him that the students hardly learn anything because the teacher spends more time thinking about ways to punish them than about the lessons. Sometimes he makes the students stand in front of the school balancing bricks on their heads until their necks ache. Other times he makes them stand on one leg until they fall over, and then hits them with his long cane.
- Sweet Polly Oliver: In The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming, Nisha disguises herself as a boy so she can attend the ceremony where Ifrit will kill Nawab.
- Tasty Gold: Kasim pays one of his workers with a gold coin. The worker bites the coin to make sure it's real.
- This Is Reality: Early in the first book, Anand wishes for a magic apple that could solve the family's many problems. His mother answers, "Those things happen only in storybooks, son. Don't you know that by now?"
- Too Unhappy to Be Hungry: On Anand's first day as an apprentice healer in The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming, he finds that he has no idea how to do things the other apprentices seem to grasp intuitively, like "seeing" pain and using magic to rise above it. During lunch, he pushes the food around on his plate as he wonders if he isn't cut out to be a healer after all.
- Tragic Dropout: When Anand's mother could no longer pay his school fees, he was forced to drop out and get a job.
- Urban Segregation: In Coal, the rich live in luxurious apartments in glittering bio-domes with virtual weather, while the poor live in polluted slums full of ruined buildings where the air quality is so bad that they have to wear breathing masks. Anand is reminded of life in Kolkata, where the rich throw lavish parties while the poor wait outside to eat leftovers out of the trash, but here it's even worse because the poor don't have access to the rich people's trash.
- You Are Number 6: In Coal, most people are known by serial numbers, like M-4372. Elites like Dr. S are allowed to have an initial, but only the rebels are known by actual names.
- Your Favorite: Surabhanu, disguised as a kindly old man, lures Anand into an empty train car and serves him a lavish feast of all his favorite foods. Nisha sees through the deception and warns Anand before he can eat any of it.
- Your Soul Is Mine!: In The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming, the jinn Ifrit eats the souls of workers who have been hired by the villain Kasim to search the ruins for the mirror, leaving his victims listless, withdrawn, and unable to recognize their families. Once he's eaten enough souls, he'll have the power to create a new gateway to the past, without needing the mirror.
