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Jane Sara Abercrombie is a character in my new novel, Black
Hole. She was a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. “Kristallnacht, the Night of
Broken Glass, had broken not only the glass windowpanes of Jewish homes,
businesses and synagogues but also people’s heart.” With the shards of
Kristallnacht lying all around her as well as in her heart, Jane is overwhelmed
by a yearning for nonbeing. That yearning brings her to India, the land of
Buddha’s nonbeing which she knows through Herman Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha.
The yearning takes her to Devlok Ashram in Delhi’s
outskirts where the plot of Black Hole unfolds. Amarjeet who will
be the next Baba at the ashram teaches Jane nonbeing using Vatsyayana’s
Kamasutra. “Kamasutra is not just about various sexual positions,” he says.
“It’s more about intimacy between man and woman. It’s about how the woman
becomes as important a partner in physical relationships as the man. It’s
about rising above differences such as the gender, rising above the ego which
perceives the differences. It’s about raising the body to the heights of
ecstasy so that the body dissolves into nothingness. Nothingness.
Non-being. There is no ego in that state of ecstasy. Not even the
self. Just non-being.”
Jane thinks that Amarjeet is liberating her from the
burden of being, from Hitler’s phantoms, from Yahweh himself.
Yahweh is also a god of nonbeing, so to say. Is Yahweh
much different from Hitler? Jane wonders. Didn’t he demand the non-being of so
many people? All blasphemers must be killed, Yahweh ordered. All adulterers
must be killed. All female sorcerers must be killed. The list of those to be
awarded non-being is endless. Sabbath-breakers, women who have premarital sex,
homosexuals, and even rude children are to be killed according to the Jewish
scriptures.
Amarjeet redeems Jane from the murderous Yahweh and in
the process gifts her a son, Nitin Jane who eventually becomes Nitin Jain and
then Nityananda Baba of Devlok.
It is this Nityananda Baba who buys up Kailash Public
School and razes it to the ground through the instrumentality of Gulshirin
Madnani, a woman with a plastic smile on her Sphinx face and who also has some
similarities with Yahweh of nonbeing as well as the Pradhan Sevak of the
country.
Black Hole is available as ebook at Amazon. Click
here to order your copy.
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