Abandoning a Book -and Ending a Suffering!

Ever since last year, when I read a book review of Pankaj Mishra's "An End to Suffering", I had been captivated by the imagery of landscapes that this book promised to explore;lands where buddhist thoughts, influence, had migrated, taken root and flowered into its own distinctive cultural and spiritual strain, that in turn, colored lives and landscapes of these regions. The book dealt with travel, buddhism, and promised lyrical prose full of light, shadows in remoteness, inner and geographical, to satisfy even a picky reader like myself.

So it was with excitement that I bought this book, and then savored the denial, a refusal to read, a delicious postponement of yielding in to what was anticipated to be a major influential literary event of my recent life.

Finally-the D-day arrived-an empty day, where tasks had been swept away, family out of the way, a long stretchy day of promised leisure, enough food, a diwan, and the book-a pot of jasmine tea, I was ready.

The book's prologue started with a rickety bus ride into himalayan oblivion, full of glowing images of countryside, tall mountains, deep valleys, people...beautiful, beautiful...Mishra's ability to draw his reader into his mindscapes and thereon to the worlds that he moved through is magical. I curled up a little more-now totally caught in this web of words, mind, lands, mind-lands, that only poets habitat.

It was with surprise that the next few chapters that unfolded delved immediately into the prosaic, academic,'scholarly', dry, historical treatise of early buddhism, and the detailed accounting of the western 'discoverers' of this religion and their lives; the preceding historical evolution of the aryan influence on the existing social structure, leading to that moment of Buddha's birth, and emergence of his philosophical ideology as a means of liberation from social, individual, suffering; and finally the chapter on 'Death of God' where ideas of modern, western, existentialism, found space with discourse on poverty in India, her lost youth....the book died for me before God did. Where did all the color disappear, the light, the story of journeys!! Why did such a remarkable writer stoop to such dull documentation-why cant histories be stories, interwoven, alive??