Death of a Brahmin

This is about an intrepid child's struggle to reach a moral height, wasted, as the global environment, family ties, and perceptions in rural and urban societies underwent tectonic changes.Catapulted into a world least prepared for from a conservative Brahmin family, living in a sylvan rural environment and with small-town companionship, Anil's life was transformed into one he never bargained for. Poverty, family tragedies and a difficult career, different from the traditional profession of teaching that his parents wanted him to follow, took a toll as he strived hard to prove himself.He lived in the past most of his life, yearning for the sylvan village environment, the simple love and affection he shared, and the small adventures that dotted the vast landscape of his experience, not all pleasant, from sexual abuse by a distant aunt in childhood, to conceding to be separated from a girl he loved, took a severe toll, but failed to have a major impact on his psyche.Problem came late: alienation from his children, living with an alcoholic son, and the loss of his wife. It was the aloneness that affected him most, compelling him to withdraw from the rest of the world and take shelter in a mental sanatorium he visited in his early youth in one of the hill stations of India, where he befriended a doctor and found in his wife a daughter he never had, but longed for.There he fought a constant battle of wits to fool the psychiatrists and physicians, to play the role of a patient living with schizophrenia.Ultimately he took his own life, not through suicide his beloved sister had chosen, but through Brahminic, Vedic rites; invoking death, a constant companion, he was never afraid of.