Muniya’s Light: A Narrative of Truth and Myth

Two Indians, a man and a woman, decide to take the same flight home from America, on the first anniversary of 9/11. He is a peripatetic philosopher and spiritual seeker of an older generation. She, daughter of an old college friend, is a young graduate student of ‘art and religion’ at an American University. He had last seen her when she was a child who spoke very little. Now she plies him with questions about the role of Indian philosophy and spirituality in the world traumatised by violence and vengefulness. He shares with her his understanding and experiences of a cross-section of people he has met and his conversations with them, art that he has seen and the wisdom of modern India. We can love the world as ourselves, because all things are but images, lucid or distorted, of Atman, our own deepest self. This timeless teaching of Advaita, he suggests, is the light in the midst of the darkness of our times. Muniya’s Light is a work of fiction in the Indian tradition of storytelling and simultaneous philosophical and spiritual inquiry.