Reaching the Other Shore: The World of Gopinath Mohanty’s Fiction (New World Literature Series)

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Preface He always wanted the earth to wait for him and to offer him her purest gifts: experience, love and tears. He demanded more of everthing from life: agony, ecstasy, sunshine, gloom. And I would always love to believe he had his demand met, his desire fulfilled in ample measure. And I always suspected he lived outside time, in that other eternity which true creativity creates. And as a fiction writer he lived his characters and enjoyed and suffered with them. He was Sarabu Saonta playing his flute as death walked stealthily behind him. He was Sukru Jani, the mute agonised voice yet eloquent in silence. He was Rabi dreaming of a new world of togetherness. He was Tarun Ray lost watching the pounding waves of the sea at Puri. And yet he looked at himself and all his characters from a distance. He peopled the world of his fiction with unforgettable characters. There is a quality of luminosity and pureness in his narrative style that is unique in Indian fiction of our times. His language has both an earthiness and clarity that seek to give the reader a respite from the current craze for dust and needless heat. The words slowly become another form of silence, like pictures on the wall and in one’s mind. Someday, when his incomplete autobiography is published in its entirety, lovers of his fiction will see more of him, and through that also more of his characters.

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