Better to Have Gone by Akash Kapur

Author:Akash Kapur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2021-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

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One afternoon a few days later, a man drives his motorcycle from Nandanam to Aspiration. He carries an envelope and, as always, a crowd gathers in the community kitchen. The envelope is opened and passed around, its contents read carefully in silence. Satprem’s message is longer than usual, more letter than note, extending over several pages. This is his follow-up to the visit at the hospital. “To my brothers and sisters of the Matrimandir,” the letter begins. “To Auroville.”

What follows is a remarkable interpretation of Diane’s fall—full of fire and brimstone, Satprem’s words like the admonishing sermon of an old-school preacher. He insists that the accident was, in fact, not an accident at all. Following a “spiritual law,” Satprem writes, Diane’s fall is actually the “sign of a Falsehood.” Those who insist otherwise are turning their heads away from the truth (the “Truth”). Since Auroville is meant to be a place exclusively for seekers of the Truth, and since Satprem is fortunate to see things a little more deeply, so it falls to him to share the reality of Diane’s fall with the community. That reality is difficult—“but people, alas, do not understand until they start receiving blows.”

According to Satprem, an event such as this one occurring at the Matrimandir is a sign of the times—an indication of the divisions within Auroville and of the corruption of the Mother’s dream. In the second part of the letter, Satprem returns to the core grievance that has eaten at him since the Mother’s departure: the lie of her death, and the interrupted cellular transformation. He argues that the difficulties faced by Auroville in recent times—the violence, the financial hardships, the confusion of the revolution—have seeped in through the cracks formed by this original lie. Diane’s accident should be understood as part of a dismal continuum; what took place on the Matrimandir is an act of collective karma.

Satprem’s message reverberates across the plateau. Its effect is electric, transforming Diane’s fall from an individual tragedy, a terrible personal accident, to a communal misfortune for which every Aurovilian bears a shared responsibility. His interpretation comes to define Aurovilians’ understanding of what took place on that July 13 morning. More important, it shapes Diane’s own understanding, her self-perception. It sets her—and John—on a radical, severe course that will culminate catastrophically. We begin to understand the snaking paths that will lead, more than a decade later, to their deaths in a hut by a canyon.

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