In Parul: A Love Story, Harsha Dehejia enters the territory of fiction, albeit of a different kind. His characters Praful and Parul are “living embodiments of two opposing systems of philosophy, he of Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta and she of the madhurya of Krishna of the Bhagavata Purana”.
Praful is a professor of philosophy, married, with a child and Parul is unmarried, we presume, and can’t have children. That’s all we know about them. Praful leaves his wife to visit Parul every full moon, spending the night with her before returning home. Their romance plays out over eleven full moons, eleven lunar months of the Indian calendar, each with its own sensory delights.
Their story is set in a lush landscape, drawn from the conventions of Indian art, so while we do not get a substantial description of Parul’s home, we are told about the winds, rain, festivities and the fragrance of flowers. In that sense Parul and Praful are really archetypes, a nayika and nayaka set against a backdrop that changes with the seasons.
Parul is innately attuned to the rhythms of nature, enjoying everything that is offered while Praful is constrained by his austere understanding of Vedanta, that this world is all in the realm of maya and, therefore, unreal.
It is this artificial schism perhaps that impedes the reader from fully relating to the characters. As an academic or intellectual exercise, one can certainly contrast Vedanta, the crown of Indian philosophical thought, with madhurya. But the truth of advaita must be known/experienced through discerning practice, not just stated as a concept, and there is no indication that Praful is a realised soul or jivanmukta, or even a sadhaka along that path to realisation.
In the realm of fiction involving human beings and set in this very real, very beguiling samsara, one would like to know more about the specific details of these two jivas, Praful and Parul. After all a human being’s nature, svabhava, is linked to the confluence of time, place and person.
While Dehejia gives us lyrical descriptions of seasonal time, we do not get any sense of his characters inhabiting the modern world. So Parul and Praful remain abstract entities defining two positions.
Picture eleven miniature paintings with the nayaka and nayika in various poses under the champaka tree or beside the parijataka, where minute changes in the background afford clues to their state of being—that’s what we have in the eleven chapters. But Praful is no Krishna, nor even an attractive nayaka. He is humourless and quite a bore in his digressions, and for all his professed love of Parul, unable to leave his wife for her.
Dehejia uses his nayaka and nayika really to deliver his thoughts on concepts such as the symbolism of the mirror, the love for adorning oneself and one’s surroundings, folk versus classical art, the Indian attitude to gardens and the beauty of its crafts; mini lectures in each chapter. The couple meet in the same way mostly—Parul adorning herself to become the vassakasajika, Praful throwing his arms up in greeting or touching her feet, they talk at each other (delivering the author’s thoughts), share a meal and chastely retire to bed.
Ultimately, given that this is a mature man and woman in an amorous situation, it is baffling that Dehejia fights shy of touching upon their lovemaking, for if there is viraha and sringara then equally sambhoga sringara is an essential, delightful part of it.
After all, kama is as integral as the other three purushartha.
Tighter editing would have helped because certain thoughts and sections are repeated near verbatim testing the patience of even the most sympathetic reader. Adornment alone is expanded upon at least six times before page forty.
That said, the book is a welcome attempt to weave Indian thought systems and tropes in Indian fiction in English, something that after Raja Rao has become increasingly rare.