Soul Travel

After a few years in a comfortable upper middle class existence, Madhu and Rajiv are haunted by a deep angst. Is this all to Life? Their question finds focus in Aropa, their charismatic English Guru. 'Aropa' means the attribution of divinity to man and this is what the tall, blue-eyed aircraft engineer sought when he came to India in 1942. He renounced his aristocratic roots, donned the ochre robe of the sanyasi and settled in a remote ashram in the Himalayan foothills. The author and her husband, along with five other like-minded couples, shift to Aropa's ashram to try a new experiment in living. It is no Waldenesque retreat: isolation, deprivation, gruelling manual labour: tilling and sowing, reaping and harvesting, kitchen and dairy work. Evenings energised with Aropa's philosophical discussions.

Religious experiences come to the author in her dreamlife—a dreamlife shot through with a richness of imagery and significant meaning; a grace "which brought natural reverence leaving me no option but to trail its vanishing footsteps". Times change and the couple are confronted with an intractable fellow member's hostility which eventually leads to their ostracisation from community life and temple service by the guru. Holding their pain and anguish they await a rapprochement. It does not come. They return to the city. Life comes full circle. In the final chapters, the author explores the metaphysics of a guru-shishya relationship.

The main protagonist is the narrator. All action revolves around her outer and inner life. She carries the reader along by the gritty honesty of the account. The book has a reflective tone and a lightness of touch. The prose is lucid, even austere at times, as if the author is reluctant to circumscribe in words that which is other-worldly.