No ordinary parable | Pavan K. Varma's 'The Lady Who Carried the Monk Across the River'

Pavan K. Varma’s impressive journey, with a third eye on the ‘great’ Indian middle class, and on ‘being’ and then ‘becoming’ Indian, has led him to this turn to spiritualism with an interest in Shankaracharya’s Shaivism and Krishna’s Vaishnavism. Now comes the nameless, vaporous buoyancy of pure thought without ‘isms’.

Centripetal bureaucratic pursuits and ringside political aspirations can often spin a short story very long—stories that have echoed in our circular colonial parliament to more noise than productivity, but this slim tome under review is a short story suitably expanded to remain short! This seems a fresh petal from Varma’s thousand-petalled Sahasrar Chakra.

Without spoiling the quick read of The Lady Who Carried the Monk Across the River, which I would recommend, especially if a few grey hairs crown your temple, the simple story throws up new ‘ways of seeing’. Seeing not in the John Berger way of looking at art, but perhaps with the third intuitive Indian eye. How should one see or hear touch? With all one’s senses immediately evoked and brought to action or just en passant, as the duty of the moment?

As the monk Kevala carries the maiden Mandakini (named after a tributary of the Alaknanda River), he is helped to cross another river—physical, material symbolisms are layered over in Varma’s text. Suppressed or just latent, intuitive lust so naturally intertwines with wafts of spiritualism, the battle of the head and the heart ensues. Readers will relate to their tempestuous journeys and how they came to still their waters or were simply washed away.

A wise book teaches by suggestion, not command, because just one variable in two comparable lives changes the whole path. The sub-title of the book calls it ‘A Parable for Ordinary People’, but as the author strews his pearls, maybe his readers will discover that some special insights that could awaken them to extraordinary aspects lay buried within themselves?