A River Sutra

“The Government still pays my wages but I no longer think of myself as a bureaucrat. Bureaucrats belong too much to the world, and I have fulfilled my worldly obligations. I am now a vanaprastha, someone who has retired to the forest to reflect. Of course, I was forced to modify tradition, having spent my childhood in Bombay and my career as a civil servant working only in cities. Although my desire to withdraw from the world grew more urgent as I aged, I knew I was simply not equipped to wander into the jungle and become a forest hermit, surviving on fruit and roots.”

The opening lines of the novel pave the way for unconventional stories of wisdom and spirituality. The narrator identifies himself within the tradition of asceticism, with the caveat that he makes wages and lives in a government-run rest house. In traditional Hinduism, a person’s life is divided into four stages, from birth to old age; the third stage is vanaprastha, which involves a disconnection from worldly pursuits to focus on spiritual ones. This is what the narrator aspires to. He is renouncing the world of cities, businesses, and technology for the relative nature and isolation of the rest house. He explains that this is the closest to asceticism that he can reach given his upbringing, which defines the story as a modern retelling of a spiritual journey that will tackle The Conflict Between Materialism and Enlightenment.

“I patted the boulder, inviting him to sit by me. ‘We Hindus revere the spiritual teachings contained in our Upanishads. Do you know what the word upanishad means? It means to sit beside and listen. Here I am, sitting, eager to listen. As a monk, can you deny me enlightenment?’ He flung his head back, blowing the thin muslin of his mask outward with the force of his uninhibited laughter. ‘You Hindus. Always disguising your greed with your many-headed gods and your many-headed arguments.’”

Ashok’s response, that Hindus have many-headed gods and arguments refers to the narrator’s combination of the definition of Upanishad and the monk’s obligation to spread the message of enlightenment, which mixes rhetoric and religion. Critically, the definition of Upanishad, here, sets up the novel as a whole by explaining the importance of storytelling as a means to absorb and understand experiences that lead to enlightenment.