Ajita by K. Sridhar is a metaphysical romp of a novel. It features among its protagonists, a bunch of ants whose collective intelligence brings to the fore the age-old philosophical conundrum surrounding autonomous individual agency. Is it just a crusty old delusion? Are all selves just a sublimation of a cosmic singularity? This book, set in the echo zone between matter and meaning invites us to frolic in a transdisciplinary playground where entry is possible only to those who are capable of fusing their horizons, and are acutely attuned to the heteroglossic abyss of time. This experiential access then lets them negotiate boundaries, and reorient aspects of cultural life that have been hitherto amputated by a frenzied quest for meaning solely in objects and status symbols.

 

 

Entomological dynamics create an insatiable curiosity in young Ajita during his rapt ant- watching in a century far, far away. He starts to contemplate the nature of coherence and its concentric impacts, embarking on a cognitive adventure fuelled by a primal wonder about the way things work. Thus begins a journey that never ends! Time capsules detail the lives of Ajita of the Cārvāka school of philosophy and Moksh Malhar, a familiar angsty figure who is a modern Indian academic. Through authorial choreography they merge surreally, as the narrative lens creates a mutual flow between them. 

 

A kaleidoscopic archive reveals itself, sublimating dualistic perspectives, becoming a sacramental channel where lexical codes begin to fade. Everything that is referential, affective, and stylistic escapes from a normative prison. As we readers travel this liminal passage into transpersonal numinosity, we may possibly have a jostling encounter with our own exiled selves who had in some incarnation fled from the reigning metacrisis of the time! This participation in truth-making creates a neuronal community engaged in dialectical entanglement across ages, classes, and circumstances. 

 

In his explorations of the fertile realm of connectivity, Sridhar deftly uses linguistic play, and other esoterica such as a plot blueprint based on a Möbius strip where beginnings and endings are looped together in a continuum. His mastery in conveying the tenor of the speaking voice reveals cultural ecologies delicately held in the realm of subtext. All these rhetorical spells make the reading experience akin to a viewing of an opera. The plethora of living absences (the likes of Buddha and Mahavira wander in and out of cameos) is freighted with meaning when viewed with hindsight by the reader. Nomenclature is imbued with an elemental synaesthesia, as we see in the numerous characters spread through the narrative. Their names could ostensibly be a soaring musical score when uttered : Ajita, Ratna, Govinda, Dhvani, Maitreya, Geet, Moksh, Japa… At a time where lexicons are at war with themselves, and the ontological import of words is lostin noise, this book actually brings us to a simmering pause - an immersion into unexpected silence. How does one translate silence? How does one curate what emerges from it? When empirical context is dismantled, what kind speculative gestures emerge? Sridhar carefully regurgitates upheavals that have mired the populace during the lives of his two main characters by using  a prismatic lens. This enables the reader to make an imaginative leap into different time periods, until the realisation begins to dawn that the past remains present, and is in fact often colonised to distort and manipulate. Ajita and Moksha are intellectual siblings in their scepticism of received narratives, and are fellow pilgrims across time on their respective introspective journeys - which amazingly and enticingly overlap. The seamy and the heavenly are equally mesmeric forces which drive them both to immerse in the very womb of reinvention, and experience the militant as well as rapturous aspects of being human.

 

Sridhar’s skill in carrying the cadence of spiritual chemistry between human beings shows us how these convergences can actually transcend time, and that connectivity can remain ensouled in different circumstances and environments. Here is an example of two different scenarios which tell a story about a story, with subtly nuanced similarities: Ajita who intuitively rejected indoctrination at a gurukula as a young novice, speaking at a Kashi symposium is evocatively presented to the reader in this description of his demeanour:

 

“His ideas flowed like the Ganges did just outside the venue and they flowed deep.”

 

A quote of Moksh meditatively in conversation with his friend Olivier reveals a sensibility in accord with the timeless within time:

 

“Every object contains a universe within itself and every moment contains a whole history.”

 

The trope of the journey is used with a deep-time perspective, and this gives the circuitous plot a magical polyrhythmic energy. Even while being discursively loaded, the book is intellectually playful. The mode of wonder is subliminally present in the transgressive allurements which drive the characters to their defiance of convention, and the reader into psychonautic adventures alongside them. Sridhar’s story is a portal into re-membering, a field guide to invisible forcefields that hover over the wordscape. It turns the reader into a transcendental tourist visiting settings where paradigm revolutions happened in the past. The mercurial substrate of a lost landscape dramatically comes to life. The synchronised emergence of neuroaesthetic inclinations from minds inhabiting different centuries has the fascinating impact of making us realise that consciously witnessing the present moment is itself a creative act. It contains within it the dialogic dimensions of the imagination where the literal and the metaphorical can dance in tandem and create kindred energies. Such a vibrant morphic field is sensed in Ajita’s contemplative reflection about the Cārvāka philosophers, which gives us a startlingly topicalnugget of wisdom:

 

“For the moment, our enemies have silenced us and wiped out our archives. But it will re-emerge at some later point because, I believe, we got a glimpse of a vision of truth and that vision will be revisited.”

 

The wild possibilities of somatic intuition, the poetics of the corporeal, and the consequent spiritual chemistry between souls is framed in a radically tender relational tableau with two silhouettes ensconced in an eternal mysterium. The cover art of this remarkable novel presents two figures intimately engaged in a moment of symbiogenesis. Illustrated by haptic master of her

medium Nalini Malani, this hypnotic merging of binaries is a sensory adventure in itself, giving us the primal taste of a biocosmic conversation happening in animated stillness. 

 

Ajita is an unfurling matrix of discoveries in a milieu of effervescent archives and entropic chaos, bringing us in vivid assemblages of lifetimes that shine tantalizingly in luminous emptiness, revealing in profound ways the very genealogy of aliveness.  The reader, lured into this whirling semantic paradox of glimpsing the infinite though the finite, gets the delicious experience of being a co-creator.