Returning Home: A Travelog in 2012

In their movement across time and space, human beings relinquish not simply love of person but also the love of place. In his book, Bijoy Misra has managed to retrace and recall those disconnections and the value systems which led to their genesis. He has described how it is that human beings join and divide, the grounds upon which they merge and separate and how our emotions are both created and diminished by such small irreversible details of the experience. If we are made for the love we are also unmade by its loss or absence, whether such love is spiritual, moral, political, artistic, or simple earthly affection. Misra is a cartographer of such transformations, their particular vicissitudes and their minute and exacting metaphors; just as the acoustic in the universe informs how human beings speak and how birds and other animals sing, so our author has offered us a precisely modulated depiction of how his own mental and emotional inheritance came to be composed during childhood and youth in Orissa, and simultaneously by the greatness of the Indian cosmos and its ancient culture. This book is the story of that attempt at repossession and discovery. In his book, the author has cataloged this journey, a voyage towards the ancestral conditions which once so informed him, perhaps even from before he was born, and he has portrayed how it is to pursue such an inquiry, such an odyssey of recovery and comprehension. What is recorded within these pages is the universal effort to exist and to endure not simply in the present which we inhabit but simultaneously in the past-with its necessary compulsions-as well as in the future with all its ideals and aspiration.