Review: Following a Prayer bySundar Sarukkai

Twelve-year old Kalpana lives in a village in the Western Ghats. One morning, in the peak of the monsoon season, she goes missing. The same morning, Kalpana had asked her devout grandmother, Ajji, where her prayers went. To this, her grandmother had angrily asked her to follow them. And that’s where she had gone, according to Ajji. All efforts to search for Kalpana in the forest, yield no results.

Three days later when Kalpana returns, she has gone completely silent. What had happened to her in the three days that she had been missing was a mystery to everyone, and nothing can make the child speak. “She who strutted to school, who could make fun of her teachers, and spoke to cows and butterflies.” Even though children at school start making fun of Kalpana, nothing can deter her. The reader learns that she has chosen silence as she felt betrayed by the gods to whom she had prayed in the forest when she needed them the most. Also, she had recognised the complete futility of language when she spent three days with numerous creatures who did not speak. Her silence affects her younger sister, ten-year-old Deeksha, the most.

Kalpana’s school principal requests her parents to send her back to school, but she refuses to go. Over time, she begins to communicate with her family through nods, smiles, scribbles and doodles. The first reflective words that she conveys to her family after days of silence suggest that language is the cause of all lies. This leads Deeksha and her friend, Kumari, to quiz their Kannada teacher, Upadhya, on various complex questions about language. Upadhya, who had believed that neither the students nor the government cared about the Kannada class, now begins to witness interesting discussions among students. Kids who earlier hardly spoke in class suddenly begin to participate, and there is a newfound interest in the otherwise neglected subject.

After trying several treatments to “cure” Kalpana – including taking her to a temple and meeting with a “doctor of the mind”, all of which fail – her parents finally decide that she should learn music from Gangamma, who belongs to a family of nomadic singers. The unusual classes allow the girls to harness the power of sound. Among other exercises, Gangamma asks her pupils to produce any kind of sound they want, even create imagined sounds they had never heard before. She explains that singing, unlike speaking, is pure sound – that it is about the internal self and not the outside world. She adds that even though words may lie, music does not – and that we need to get out of the prison of our language. “We first sing for our soul, and if others like it, they can listen,” Gangamma says, recalling her own father’s words.

Subsequently, Kalpana decides that she wants to go to school only for mathematics classes – since she believes math is all about the truth. The girls go on to build a temple for the brain, which they conclude is like God, because it controls the individual’s words. For Deepavali that year, they decide to have a music festival at the temple, where all the songs will only have numbers instead of words. Soon, a rumour spreads across the village that Kalpana will speak the day after Deepavali, and everyone wonders what her first words will be.

The author Sundar Sarukkai is the founder of Barefoot Philosophers, an initiative to take philosophy to young people and the general public, and Following a Prayer feels like a creative experiment; a story that is an important statement on the power of silence. Being silent gives Kalpana many unique insights into her world, and she discovers that she has begun to listen more carefully: “The mountains grunted, the leaves whispered, the rain grumbled, and the wings of birds created a shock wave of sounds.” However, she declares that her favourite sound is still the sound of silence. The girls infer that they can hear silence much clearer than the words that people speak.

Following this, Kalpana begins to focus on not just the sound of words, but also their various “smells” and “tastes”. “Her body became an ear, able to detect vibrations in words, the reverberations of the syllables.” In fact, she becomes so immersed in experiencing the sounds that she does not remember the words or their meanings. The girls also note how the same word sounds different when different people utter it.

Kalpana begins to hear sounds she had never heard before – “the clouds tickling each other, the rubbing sounds of the wind brushing against the trees, the swish of the tired wings of birds and the constant grumbling of the mountains.” It makes her realise that language could never describe musical sounds.

This profound novel, which ends on a dramatic note, leaves the reader with an evocative feeling that lingers long after the last page has been turned.

A freelance writer based in New Delhi, Neha Kirpal writes primarily on books, music, films, theatre and travel.