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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780060573683 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 02/17/2004 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.94(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Seduction of Silence
Of all mountains, the Himalayas are the highest. They sit like a prayer table on the plains. The soil is closer to the Gods, the air purer, the mind clearer. There's a potency in the earth here – a quality of the Divine in everything that takes life.
It was in the Himalayas, in the holy mountains of Himachal Pradesh, that Aakash chose to throw his first seeds into the earth on some land that had arrived in his care through Divine Grace.
Many years earlier, when he was a boy, he had won this piece of land at a game of cricket in Chail. Not by winning the game, but by laying his hands on an injured hemophiliac boy and curing him of hemophilia altogether. An act of no consequence if the boy had not been the captain of the cricket team, and, more importantly, the son of the Maharaja of Patiala. Years later, when Aakash went up into the hills as a man, he was mesmerized by the beauty of this God-sent land. Awestruck by the Silence as he walked the mountaintops and valleys, divining the perfect place to build his house.
There was one flat peninsula on the mountainside that begged for a home. From this place he could see layers of mountains on all sides, aspiring to greater and greater heights until they reached the snows. Scattered in the distance down the mountainsides were terraces which circled the hills like green tidemarks, villagers grazing their cows and goats, people washing their clothes in the river, wooden makeshift dwellings, tall pines and Himalayan weeds with the power to heal diseases that usually carried death sentences.
The land he had been given was part of a mountain range whose tributaries trickled down to both the Ganges, river of Immortality, and the Indus, river of Civilization. In fact, if a tear was shed at the top of one ridge, it could have seeped through the soil to either of those two destinations. It was left for the Fates to decide.
Aakash built a farm in these hills, which he named Prakriti, and he had an elephant that he named Ganesh. He didn't have a wife yet, but the elephant, along with the seeds and the power of his vision, formed the roots of future prosperity. The century was still young, India knew no assurance of independence, and success was a scarce resource, owned mostly by the British.
Aakash felt lucky here, but the locals were too superstitious to call it luck. They always felt he had developed certain powers or sidhis. There was no explaining why rain clouds would hover over his farm well before the monsoons broke down in Delhi. No explanation why the household's vegetables were twice the size of those sold in any of the nearby market towns. Then he also had the power of Ganesh. The villagers regularly came to give his elephant prasad from their fields and receive a regal salaam in exchange. Govinda, the mahout who looked after Ganesh, was always treated with great veneration. People said that he didn't just know the traditional pressure points to command this prehistoric force of a creature, he also knew where all the sacred points were to be found. The places between the thick elephantine folds where time immemorial was carried. Time so old, it could be traced back to its source and back to the controlling forces of the universe.
But success was a trifle for Aakash. He never sought it. He only thought how he could help his fellow countrymen. The planting of the seed was enough, and the shoots would be guided by the powers that be. His concern was to do his duty, and provide traditional medicinal herbs for those in need.
In those days Ayurveda was often the only affordable medical option for the masses. Western medicine hadn't been widely accepted and took its place amongst the other magical treatments the local people practiced. In fact, if anything, there was a far healthier scepticism toward it, as many a patient had escaped their bodies under the pioneering knife of medical science.
The seeds Aakash threw when he first planted Prakriti were later to be identified in Latin as substances such as Withania somnifera, Carum copticum, Glycyrrhiza glabra and many more. To Aakash they had greater affinity with the cosmic elements than with a botanical dictionary. They responded to the elements of earth, fire, water and air, and the way they replicated themselves as energy systems within the body. His ayurvedic herbs were the medicine of a nation that still held to ancient principles and trusted in the power of the Gods to potentiate their tinctures and cure their ills.
When Prakriti started to reap a handsome profit, Aakash was visited by his father Rahul, with talk of marriage. He was twenty-eight years old and had never questioned the inevitability of marriage. But then neither had he for a minute entertained any concept of a wife. His food was cooked by Hukam-Singh; Deepika, the cook's wife, cleaned his farmhouse, and a rotating assortment of local and migrant workers helped him in the fields. Every need he had was satisfied. And whenever he required conversation, he would spend a few hours on the verandah talking to Govinda his mahout, or he would take a stroll in the moonlight to visit his friend Xavier, the Christian headmaster in the nearby village.
When Aakash was visited by his father there were many long silences when Rahul turned their conversation to marriage. Many open-ended questions that hovered between thoughts. Rahul knew it wouldn't be easy to get an agreement out of his son. He knew also that no matter how well the farm flourished, it was his duty to find Aakash a wife. That there was no such thing as success unless a man was also "settled."
If truth be told, even Rahul found it hard to imagine his son with a wife and family. As a child, Aakash was like a deer: self-contained; poised; silently watching the world from the intensity of his own space. He never tugged at his ayah's sari palla like the rest of the brood. Neither did he feel the need to communicate with any of his siblings until he was at least four or five, when years of silence were ended with complete sentences that seemed to be spoken by a child twice his age. Nobody quite understood Aakash, and Aakash had never felt a need to be understood.
Like most parents in his situation, Rahul carried around the responsibility of his son's marriage like a piece of life's luggage. Only when he had successfully deposited this luggage would his load be lighter and his family responsibilities on earth be finalized. The weight of responsibility was far heavier than the feather-boned Aakash he had picked up in his arms the day he was born. And it weighed heavier still as his son's contemporaries garlanded each other and started having children.
Organizing a marriage for Aakash was like throwing a stick up high into a tree and hoping it would land. Even Rahul didn't dare think about what that married life might entail. The finality of the ceremony itself would satisfy him, like a handover.
The marriage he had in mind was with a family whom he didn't know too well, and that was not such a bad thing. They didn't know about Aakash and his unusual sense of detachment. The beard of a renunciant that he wore, and the eyes that looked only inward.
This unfamiliarity was also an advantage for the family of the bride. They too had an ulterior motive for marrying into a completely unknown family. It was like a marriage made on either side of a screen, with each family parading a shadow puppet for the benefit of the other.
When Rahul went to meet Krishna, the girl's father, he walked into a grand house in Amritsar, and was introduced to a beautiful, heavy-lashed, coy young Punjabi woman who held her head half-covered by her duppata and looked down at the ground. Sitting in the room with her was a cross-looking girl. The first one was introduced as Jyoti, or so he remembered, and the second one as Pyari.
The two of them were soon ushered out of the room without either girl speaking more than a few words, and the two fathers continued with more formal discussions of marriage over tea and a game of chess. The bride's father telling of the dowry he had kept aside for his daughter, and Rahul talking of his job in the Maharaja's service and Aakash's prosperous farm in the hills. They could have been any two ordinary men arranging a marriage, except that each of the chess characters they wielded had secret motives moving them across the board. Krishna won the game, but nonetheless Rahul went away feeling elated with his own success and full of great anticipation on behalf of his son. He felt sure that this would be a match that would bring Aakash's attentions fully into the world. That he would be overcome with love for the gentle beauty who was soon to become his wife.
When Aakash was brought to the wedding, fully veiled by garlands of flowers in his sehra bandi, he stood veil to veil with his future wife, Jyoti Ma. The two of them, decked in marigolds and moongra, walked barefooted around the havan fire seven times, tied together by their garments. The union was made according to the Scriptures, and according to the Stars, and only after the ceremony, when they were bonded as man and wife, did Rahul realize that there had been a bride "switch." That Jyoti Ma had not been the woman he had been led to believe would marry his son.
The moment of truth dawned when the bride's veil was dropped, revealing the expression of someone caught between a bullfighter and a bull – angry, fearful and cross-eyed. Her warrior's wide nostrils were exposed. So too was her thin hair and the layers of ghee-filled flesh that fought their way over the hem of her sari blouse.
The Seduction of Silence. Copyright © by Bem Le Hunte. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.What People are Saying About This
“There is real enchantment here...[in] prose as vivid and arresting as a marigold. I couldn’t put it down.”
“The Seduction of Silence is a work of persuasive imagination...such scope, power and narrative charm...ample and fascinating.”
“An unexpected delight... [Le Hunte] gives new meaning to the search for spiritual fulfillment.”
Reading Group Guide
Introduction
The Seduction of Silence is a richly woven epic set over five generations in an Indian family. From the Spiritual Church of Great Britain to the breathtaking Himalayas, this book takes readers on an enchanting journey that explores spirituality, birth, death, love and hope. Unforgettable characters float across the pages of this book, human and fully sentient. Eunuchs, aghoris, sages, soldiers and nuns add their magic, their stories and their images to the grand scope of this debut novel.
Meet Aakash, venerated sage and healer in the Himalayas, and founder of Prakriti, an abundant ayurvedic farm. While Aakash is a beloved leader, his unyielding wife Jyoti Ma is the fierce presence at Prakriti whose stubbornness eventually drives her children far away from the lush farm, setting in motion an astonishing chain of events that will profoundly affect the lives of future generations. Son Ram abandons home and family for a spiritual quest, while daughter Tulsi Devi, yearning for her own escape, sneaks out of her convent school and learns that one rash decision can lead to life-altering consequences. Rohini, Aakash's granddaughter, marries an Englishman and immerses herself in the London of the 1960s. With Rohini's daughter, Saakshi, the search for enlightenment comes full circle, and the great-granddaugher returns to her spiritual home - the magical Himalayas, where the story first began.
Seamlessly weaving the stories of five generations of seekers, The Seduction of Silence is a gorgeous, provocative meditation on the search for enlightenment.
Questions for Discussion
- Characters like Aakash and Ram are strongly motivated torenounce the world and devote themselves single-mindedly to spiritual practice. To what extent is spiritual progress possible 'in the world.' How do the spiritual and profane realms work together in life and in this book?
- To what extent do the births explored in this novel create turning points in the story?
- Rohini observes that life and death are part of the same continuum. Do the themes of birth and death work as parallels or opposites in The Seduction of Silence?
- To what extent do the spiritual beliefs of the characters dictate their destinies?
- How do the different characters reflect the theme of Silence?
- What is the importance of 'belief' in this story? Is it necessary to share the same belief systems as the characters in order to understand the ideals represented in this book?
- The Seduction of Silence takes place over 100 years in time, across different nations and different levels of consciousness. What are the threads that tie this story together and make it cohesive?
- How do the past and the present work together in The Seduction of Silence? To what extent does history make an impact on the experiences and emotions of the characters?
- To what extent do the women in The Seduction of Silence break the patterns of their mothers? How easy is it to break patterns that are handed down?
- The Himalayas are described by the author as the perfect setting for the soul. How important is the landscape to the spiritual sentiment of this book?
- To what extent is The Seduction of Silence bound by time and place, and to what extent is its message universal?
- Which parts of the book seem to be based on truth? Which parts are obviously 'magical'? How is magic presented as real and how is reality presented as fiction? Is the difference between the two of any significance?
- In your opinion, which event is the most magical and memorable in The Seduction of Silence, and why?