Prof Dr Shiv Sethi
shiv.sethi@ymail.com
Author: Inderjeet Mani
Publisher: Ukiyoto Publishing
Page: 244
Price: Rs 320/
After the success of his Thailand-set sci-fi novel Toxic Spirits, Inderjeet Mani has served up a work far bolder than a commercial thriller. The Conquest of Kailash wrestles with the deepest questions of dharma, desire, and redemption, while never forgetting that fine literature must first tell a compelling story.
The novel introduces us to Ali Akbar, a man whose life has crumbled in spectacular fashion. His wife Helen, the family breadwinner, has traded California culture for Buddhist renunciation, leaving Ali to confront not just loneliness but the accumulated failures of a lifetime. His family struggles mightily to secure a foothold in an uncaring USA. His sexuality stings like a curse, and the memory of his expulsion from Cambridge University still rankles. His relationship with his daughter Homa looks like a one-way street, and his own health is now precarious. And thus he leaves his American home for what may be his final journey, landing back in Benares where it all began.
What elevates this far above standard NRI angst is Mani’s unflinching examination of how trauma shapes us. Ali’s harrowing childhood wounds, inflicted by horrible adults who should have protected him, echo through every relationship. When he faces mob violence at a fundamentalist rally, we understand that the personal is always political in ways that conventional society dares not acknowledge.
Regarding Mount Kailash, rather than falling into exotic orientalism, Mani grounds Ali’s spiritual yearning in concrete experience. We see him on childhood afternoons on the Benares verandah where a family friend first sparked wonder about the mountain. We attend BHU lectures where German professor Finkelstein transformed plate tectonics into cosmic poetry, making us see earthly upheavals as metaphors for transformation.
A word of caution for readers planning to leave this book lying around the drawing room. Mani does not believe in euphemisms. His treatment of desire, brutality, and shame is uncompromisingly explicit. It is probably necessary for the story he’s telling.
Mani writes with the assurance of someone who has walked the walk. Indeed, in an online interview, he has disclosed that the book began after a Buddhist pilgrimage through India and Nepal. His Benares pulses with authentic life and death. He makes the sacred and secular, the vulgar and the sublime, meld together in patterns that would confuse Western minds but feel perfectly natural to Indian sensibilities. The philosophical threads stretch from ancient Athens to the Upanishads, weaving together Socratic wisdom and Vedantic insight with surprising grace.
Readers have singled it out for its “deep, emotional impact”, praising it as a “moving and profoundly human” work. Occasionally, the novel stumbles under the weight of its philosophical ambitions. The author is after all a professor as well as a writer. But these are minor quibbles with a work that dares to ask whether love can survive the particular cruelties of our times. Romantic love, familial love, friendship, and divine love all co-exist, but can any of it endure? A question to ponder over!
In Ali’s arduous journey toward Kailash, Mani has crafted something increasingly rare in contemporary Indian fiction. This unique and beautifully-written novel announces Mani as a singular voice whose compassionate, heart-breaking vision lingers long after the last page.
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