Journey’s End

Sadly, there isn’t a bridge between imagination and reality. The beginning is promising, but, sigh, there seems to be great confusion in what the novel wants to portray. Is it a tragic love story about a woman who, fettered by circumstances and the age she lives in, cannot live on her own terms? Or should we read more into it, just because she happens to have a legendary name? First, the story.

Like the Shakuntala of the classic, she too lives in mountain country, leading a harsh life of very few comforts. Yet as she grows up unsheltered in the rugged hills, the daughter of a doctor of medicinal plants who died when she was five, she steals her joys. Her mother will sound a warning—‘‘Remember, Shakuntala, birds return to their nests at dusk, but clouds must weep their tears unseen in distant lands’’—but that won’t be enough to keep her out of trouble.

And a ‘‘rock-demonness’’ sows the seeds of self-destruction in Shakuntala by telling her: ‘‘Remember that in every one of her forms the Goddess is Swamini, mistress of herself’’.

Her wanderlust will lead her to Kashi, where death lives forever. Sha-kuntala will run away from home—and ultimately, life—but can she really be free? Or will the debris of one life—and memory—pursue her through birth and rebirth?

As she lies dying in the ghats, she wonders why her namesake will not leave her: ‘‘I carry her pain, and the burden of loves I still do not understand.’’

Somehow, it’s difficult to believe that Shakuntala, who surrenders so completely to a world of pleasure, is spouting these words just because she is in ‘‘holy Kashi’’. Too much of exotica and erotica was never enough to retrieve an idea, however good.