THE FLAME AND THE FLUTE : A MYSTIC NOVEL - BY DILIP KUMAR ROY

The Flame and the Flute, as the title implies, is a mystic novel in the sense that its central inspiration is spiritual. Its fire is kindled through a tussle between the flaming maya of life on one side and the haunting Flute-call to the soul on the other. The solution comes eventually through the agency of Guru-shakti (the Guru's mystic power) manifested via the magnetic pull of the Guru, the supreme mediator between the Divine and the devotee. (To put it in the words of my late friend, Yogi Krishnaprem alias Ronald Nixon: "The Guru holds with his right hand the Lord's feet and with his left the disciple's hand in order to lead him back to His fold.") The background of the Yoga-ashram at Dumel has been set off the stage on which the drama is enacted till the intervention of the Guru is made manifest first through Asit, who is already a disciple, and then, progressively, through the unsophisticated Udoy who longs to renounce the world for the Yoga-ashram even though he cannot help but vacillate. He is tom between his vital being's hunger for Shakuntala, a bayadere's beautiful and idealistic daughter, and his psychic being's thirst for the last asylum at the Guru's feet, away from that Valley of False Glimmer, Life. The Guru, too, is kept, by and large, outside the ambit of the intense drama till the very end - how and why, need hardly be anticipated. So, I will only add that this mystic intervention to cut the hridayagranti - the Gordian knot of the heart - has been the thrilling experience of hundreds of spiritual aspirants in India. But this is not the whole story. There are, also, the forces and pulls of life, too complex to be analyzed mathematically and labeled definitively,