The Anagarika's Swansong

by Arup Kumar Dutta

Anagarika is a Sanskrit word broadly meaning “one who leaves society in search of the truth”. The allusion is to Gautama Buddha who, as Prince Siddhartha, left his family and discarded his princely robes in a quest for enlightenment. The unnamed protagonist of the novel too leaves his aging parents and discards his ‘mock-princely’ robes and sets out to discover a meaning to life. However, since his journey is made in the Kaliyuga his quest leads him straight to the pagalkhana (lunatic asylum) and, when he finally does attain ‘enlightenment’, it turns out to be “a poor man’s” one! ‘Swansong’ refers to the Buddhist concept of nirvana, the transcendence of the repeated cycle of birth, suffering and death to slide into the “Universal life” which will witness the obliteration of “pain and pleasure, love and hatred, charity and greed.” The protagonist had been laying out karmic pathways and fondly hopes that the current span of his existence will end in a “stumble” into “soul-pulverising sil