I am rereading The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru. And I can’t wait to get my hands on his latest novel, Gods Without Men.

I first read, and fell in love with The Impressionist when I found it in the ashram’s library during our blazing hot two-week stay near Rishikesh. It is a rollicking tale that had me in its lyrical grip during the entire read.

It all dovetailed so wonderfully with the satsang talks with the Swami where he talked of ego and identity and finding our inner peace and that old killer-crazy question; who are you?

As you may have guessed, this book takes place in India.  This always makes me happy. I love getting another view into that amazing part of the planet. Plus, I endeavour to read books set in the country I’m visiting. Those stories add another layer to the landscape; creating a deeper view of what I’m seeing.

Reading is such a portal into someone else’s experience of the world. Not to mention that recent studies have determined that readers of fiction are more empathetic as a result. (Didn’t I tell you I understood? Didn’t I?)

In our monthly book club, we theme our potluck dinner around the book. Now guess who recommended this month’s book? And who do you think loves Indian food? (You must be an empathetic reader of fiction to have figured out those two answers so quickly!)

But back to identity…In The Impressionist, the main character is continually reshaped and re-formed by mostly-devastating circumstances. Everything is up for grabs in his quest to remain alive. He adapts, and becomes whatever, and whomever he/she needs to be in order to stay alive.

At one point, while he is still called Pran, the fifteen-year old boy is thrown into a situation that completely traumatizes him. He finds himself staring at a tiny photo, spending hours tilting the little picture, “…the awe of transformation achieved by a tiny movement of his hands.”

And then, “Pran moving outwards from the centre, gathering momentum. Whoever might be in charge, it is certainly not him. ‘Him’, in fact, is fast becoming an issue. How long has he been in the room? Long enough for things to unravel. Long enough for that important faculty to atrophy (call it the pearl faculty, the faculty which secretes selfhood around some initial grain), leaving its residue dispersed in a sea of sensation, just a spark, an impulse waiting to be reassembled from a primal soup of emotions and memories. Nothing so coherent as a personality. Some kind of Being still happening in there, but nothing you could take hold of.”

“You could think of it in cyclical terms. The endlessly repeated day of Brahman – before any act of creation the old world must be destroyed. Pran is now in pieces. A pile of Pran-rubble, ready for the next chance event to put it back together in a new order.”

And so the questions are: Who is Pran? Who are you?  Who am I?

We all assemble ourselves largely through those first important reactions; as babies, we gauge our mother’s response, our father’s, our sibling’s, our teachers and slowly we create an assemblage that we carry through the world. But what if those formed responses are no longer working for us?

What if we really listened to ourselves, when we excused our behaviour with, “Well, that’s just the way I am.”

Says who? And why? Do you still have to be that way? Do you want to be like that? Do you want to change? Can you?

What would fundamentally shift your view of the world? What is identity? Who would you be today if you had been born to different parents? In Rwanda? Bolivia? Nunavut?

Who are you?

Related articles

• Book Review Podcast: Hari Kunzru’s Searchers in the Desert(artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com)

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• Fractured World: Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men(themillions.com)