The Sublime Homecoming, by Mukesh Eswaran.
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Summary: The life of Michael Pearson, an American scientist, falls apart when his wife accidentally dies. His search for a way to deal with his grief, which takes him to India and back, leads him to spirituality. Since he firmly accepts Darwin's theory of evolution, he is skeptical of the validity of the claims of spirituality. But Socratic dialogues with an enigmatic man in India and his subsequent life-experiences compel him to gradually rethink his position. This novel traces Michael's arduous odyssey to self-discovery in a secular life, ending in a crisis that decidedly resolves his doubts about the compatibility of spirituality and evolution.
The Sublime Homecoming serves people who would like the teaching of nonduality delivered as a linear, well-manicured novel, in the tradition of Hesse's Siddhartha, Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, and Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Read Chapter 1:
The Sublime Homecoming
A Novel by Mukesh Eswaran
1.
Years
later, Michael would look back on this day as one of the most
momentous in his life. For on this day the beginning that would
lead to a radical shift in the inclination of his thoughts made
its quiet entry. He soon would start questioning, for the first
time, the most basic premises of his life. Never again would he
view either himself or the world in quite the same way. But
today, he had little idea of this.
When he awoke, the slanting rays of the sun were
streaming in through the window. He sat upright, rubbed his eyes,
and then slid along his berth to peer out. The train was passing
farm fields lined with coconut trees and the occasional date
palm. A few farmers were already in their fields, getting a head
start on the day’s tasks. There was no visible growth in the
fields, which made Michael wonder if the farmers were there on
this limpid December morning to sow seeds for the winter crop
often grown in this part of the world. In the backdrop a range of
luminous hills sat in lofty detachment, like gods indifferently
witnessing the trials of toiling humans.
As the train from
His knees and legs were stiff. His berth was not
long enough and so he had slept curled up all night. Most of the
passengers in his compartment were still asleep. He tried to
stretch his legs by walking briskly—as briskly as was
possible in a fairly full compartment that was rhythmically
rocking as the train moved along the track. His clumsy attempt
put a smile on the sleepy face of a child watching him.
He finally gave up on the exercise and sat down. On
the floor beside his neighbor’s berth lay a basket
containing food, fruit, and a bottle of water. On top of these
was a magazine with its pages fluttering. Its glossy cover
displayed a picture of a hill station nestled in snow-covered
mountains. The gentle rhythm of the train soon dimmed Michael’s
awareness of the immediate surroundings and drew his thoughts to
an often-replayed conversation.
“I think I could teach even you how to ski,
Michael. Are you absolutely sure you can’t come with me?”
Jenny said. Michael had just loaded his wife’s suitcase into
the trunk of the taxicab.
“We’ve been over this,” he said.
“You know I can’t leave now. I’m already late.”
“There’s enough food in the fridge for a
week. You needn’t cook at all if you don’t want to.”
“I’ll be so busy that I likely won’t
have time for anything other than work.”
“You mean you won’t be pining for me?”
Jenny said with mock coyness.
Michael smiled. “Have a great time, Jenny. Call
me from LaGuardia after you’ve checked in.” He kissed
her goodbye. Jenny waved to him as the cab pulled away. She
turned around in her seat, her brown hair fluttering across her
face, and blew him a kiss through the rear windshield.
The train screeched to a halt at Secunderabad
station and Michael instinctively pressed his feet against the
floor to avoid slipping off his berth. His eyes fell again on the
magazine’s picture of the mountains with snow-covered
slopes, and he became conscious of an intimate ache waiting to
welcome him.
This was his stop. He stood up and reached for his
luggage. Some of the passengers peered through the windows to see
which station it was; others, ready with their luggage, quickly
made their way to the nearest exit. Since the train was scheduled
to stop at this station for only a few minutes, boarding
passengers were as anxious to get on as those disembarking were
to get off. The logjam irritated Michael. Wouldn’t it make
more sense, he thought, to let those disembarking get off first?
He sat down again.
It wasn’t long before the stationmaster blew
his whistle and waved his green flag. The train lurched and
started to gather speed. Michael grabbed his suitcase and rushed
to the door. He squeezed past those struggling at the doorway and
fell with his luggage onto the platform. He lay there for a
moment, sprawled on the ground, watching the train pull away from
the station. He looked up and saw a sea of brown faces. What was
he doing in this strange place? Taking a deep breath, he got up,
brushed himself off and sought his way to the exit.
As he walked along the station’s platform he
invited persistent stares. He was still too new to the country to
have become inured to such overt stares. Perhaps, he thought, it
was because of his fair skin, auburn hair, and blue eyes. But it
surprised him that, though the British had left
When he neared the exit, a man using his hands to
propel himself along the railway platform approached Michael. The
man had no lower limbs; only short stumps in their place. He used
his hands for legs and swung his body to move forward. On his
hands were leather contraptions that served as shoes for his
palms. The digits of most of his fingers were missing—the
man was a leper. There were hideous lesions below his eyes, and
his lower eyelids could not close. The wasting flesh of his
cheeks gave off a stench that made Michael’s stomach heave.
The leper slowly released his right hand from its
leather contraption and pointed it at Michael. Peering through
their sockets in his paralyzed face, his eyes held Michael’s
for a few seconds. Michael backed away. Brushing past coolies and
solicitous hawkers, he thrust his ticket into the hands of the
ticket collector at the exit and staggered out of the railway
station.
As soon as he stepped out onto the street, he was
accosted by a horde of
“
Michael pulled a slip of paper out of his wallet and
looked at the address scribbled on it:
“How did you know where I wanted to go?”
Michael asked the
“Not hard at all, sir. All English sirs coming
to
“What’s your name?” Michael inquired.
“Gopal, sir,” the boy replied.
“How did you learn to speak English?”
“Wendy ma’am was teaching me. She is
English teacher in
“Not very big. Four rooms.” Seated outside
the exit gate of the station premises, Michael saw a few beggars
with upheld arms, seeking donations. Only then did it occur to
him that the leper on the platform was probably only seeking alms
with his raised palm.
“Four rooms! That is big house! You have car?”
“Yes, I did have one.”
“You have a good job?”
“Yes, I did have, before I left to come here.”
“People are saying
“I’m from
Gopal nodded. “If you have good job, big house
and car, why you come here?”
Michael opened his mouth to reply, but he didn’t
quite know what to say. He had difficulty articulating the reason
even to himself. Why had he come to
“Does Swami speak English well?” Michael
asked instead, wondering how much Telegu he would have to learn
in the coming months. He reckoned that the man spoke some English
but was not sure just how much. He wished he had made more
inquiries about this.
“Yes, he is speaking English well, sir.”
The boy was eager to inform Michael about Swami. “Swami came
here many years ago,” he said. “At that time, Kabirpet
was very small village, sir. After ashram was made, many people
coming here to see Swami. Other people coming to
“Tell me, why do people come to see Swami?”
Michael asked, anticipating stories of alleged miracles. “Does
he perform miracles?”
“Miracles?”
“You know, like magical things.”
“No, sir, Swami is not doing anything like
that. My mother is saying many people are not understanding him
but still coming to see him. That is miracle?”
Michael smiled at the boy’s answer. “No,
not quite what I had in mind,” he replied. The boy appeared
to have unquestioning faith in the man’s holiness, which to
Michael’s mind seemed charming, if irrational. Faith was
something that he had agonized over for years. What had it
brought him? What problems had it solved? His faith and the
suspension of reason that it entailed had brought him neither
wisdom nor joy. It had only handed him disappointment.
He watched the city of
He soon learned that the
He asked himself, once again, if it made any sense
for him to have quit his job in
Some strange chants that came wafting through the
air caught his attention. He turned his head in the direction of
the sound and got a distant glimpse of a procession emerging from
one of the by-lanes into the main road. Four men were carrying
what appeared to be a corpse on a stretcher raised to their
shoulders. A dozen other men were following, chanting something
in unison at regular intervals. From the distance, Michael could
not tell whether the corpse was male or female. On the chest of
the body were garlands of yellow and orange flowers. The somber
pallbearers were walking in measured steps heading, he surmised,
towards a burial or cremation ground.
The procession faded from his view when his
“Is this Mr. Michael Pearson?” asked a
solemn voice.
“Speaking.”
“This is Inspector George Winston calling from
Telluride,
Michael felt a surge of fear. That’s where
Jenny’s gone.
“Mr. Pearson, I’m afraid I have bad news
for you. There was an avalanche here this weekend on one of the
steeper slopes, and —.”
“Good God!”
“We fear that your wife was one of the
casualties. A search of the rooms in the nearby resorts gave us
her name and this phone number I’m calling. Could you come
here as soon as possible to identify the body?”
“Yes…yes, of course,” Michael said.
He was too stunned to ask for details.
Over a year had passed since he had received this
dreadful phone call. A month ago, or even a week ago, he would
never have imagined that he would find himself in a strange
country where he personally knew no one. But, then again, what
did it matter where he was? Grief had isolated him, regardless of
the company he kept. Hanging flowerpots, grocery lists, Christmas
cards, fragments of Chopin—they all came with a referral
from a past with Jenny. Every thought he now had of her awoke a
hundred others that made sense to him and him alone. The empathy
of others provided so little comfort to him that he usually never
bothered to seek it. He alone knew what it had meant to him when
Jenny had caressed his face. How could he conceivably share his
grief with anyone? His happiness, possibly, for it seemed to be
less at the mercy of his individual history. But sorrow? That was
his alone—he seemed to own it more than he owned anything
else. A man’s sorrow was as unique as his fingerprints.
The
Michael, trying to smile, nodded but said nothing.
All he managed was a resigned shrug. He turned around and faced
the ashram of Swami Arulananda.
The
Sublime Homecoming
by Mukesh Eswaran.
Order this book at Amazon.com: http://snipurl.com/xl4e
Thank you.