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  Walking, Wandering, Wayfaring by Chitra Gopalakrishnan

  ₹499.00

  Walking, Wandering, Wayfaring, a collection of short stories, uses the ‘literature of journey’ genre and its premise of the quest for meaning, both as scaffolding and metaphor, to intertwine travels of the body, mind, and spirit. As these voyages are not separate or linear and written into the emotional core of each narrative, this collection deliberately sets aside the order of the pursuit, bringing forward the ‘way’ as the vibrant space where the seeking happens. The narratives immerse the readers in the physical, nomadic wanderings of both men and women, the latter’s often more anarchist and map-less—on roads, highways, mountains, fields, rivers, ponds, forests, cities, villages, village squares, mofussil towns, and even cremation grounds—each a treacherous terrain where the route is not an inert backdrop but actively influences the traveller and their thoughts.

  Even as the wayfaring shakes up the sojourners’ illusory sense of normalcy and routines, and pitches them between despair and hope, and belonging and un-belonging, it ignites within them a life energy, an élan vital, that brings deliverance, as they become the path and exude its spirit of freedom. As people tramp on their journeys, not necessarily by choice but certainly by necessity, the question lingers: did the wanderer find the way, or did the way find the wanderer?
  The tales, at the same time, focus on individuals experiencing a ‘rite of passage’, as their minds transition from one way of life and perspective to another. While they reflect on the fragility of the human psyche, they also celebrate growth, transcendence, and healing.

  The collection also engages in a contrasting journey, an unhurried one, of letting go—releasing the hinges of ‘I’ and ‘mine’—where characters discover that true freedom, the site of all meaning, lies in liberating all transient paths and attachments, and in recognising the God within themselves—to find an enormous, true, permanent, healing and luminous world that reveals the cosmic significance of existence.

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