Brief Synopsis
The story is spun
around the adoration of a man K for a young woman Mira. The central character K
– a teacher, philosopher, and poet turned journalist- has a counterpart S who
has an equally paper-thin existence and like his mentor K overreaching desires
and an overactive imagination. They want to reach somewhere beyond themselves.
The search in the case of K is even more urgent surrounded as he is by
anxieties that result from a traumatised psyche. The external cause for such a
fractured psyche is the Partition of 1947. Mira becomes the promise, the hope
and the symbol for the transcendence that the unhappy K, the central
consciousness of the book, desires. The book is part stream of consciousness
and part confessional. In between there is the narrator to keep the reader’s
interest and hold the narration intact. It’s a story to be enjoyed at the
allegorical level. All characters are reduced to three letters: S, M and K. For
all one knows, the entire drama could have been taking place in the mind of a
dreamer capable of incorporating all the men and women in the movement upwards
of the snake consciousness, represented by S (the character who early on is the
counterpart of K), to the godhead K or Krishna the over consciousness. Mira is
the catalyst that triggers off this movement.