Unbound between the covers

An effort to find the unheard and absent Kabir

- Amitabh Ranjan

In the song titled "Freeing freedom from itself," early in his book, Anand gives you a glimpse of the idea of non-self that runs like a thread through Buddha, Kabir, Goraknath, Ambedkar, and a slew of others who wrote and composed in different time periods and geographies.

In "Body Thief," the death is the only lover who will wait a lifetime for us, the beloved being the God.

"I will sing my way out" lays bare the predicament of a bride who yearns for union with the beloved, a union which society and family will not allow.

These are just a glimpse of a delectable fare that awaits the reader between the covers in The Notebook of Kabir. To borrow Meena Kandasamy's words, this one is history and politics, poetry and philosophy, prose at its most precise and is simultaneously tender and savage.