“Have I fallen in love?”… He knew the answer. And he knew he was walking into a maze…She was married and she was ‘committed’… The maze would be endless, and the logical thing was to get out… But how do you get out?”
In his debut novel Never Say Goodbye….Bonds Are Forever, Rajiv Seth, an aeronautical engineer, has penned a poignant love story that coheres themes of marital loneliness, the sheer anarchy of love and the perennial collision between ethos and eros.
Anjali, a doctor, finds hersel
f in the midst of a monotonous married life until she meets Akash, a doctor. Love blossoms, intertwining matters of the heart with the world of genetics. The structure of the human gene becomes a metaphor for the unbreakable bond shared between the two central protagonists of the novel. It is a story of how the field of science, a stringently rational enterprise, can bring together, in a slightly mystical strain, two smitten individuals even after their death.
Anjali cannot leave her family for Akash, despite being an intelligent, independent woman. Only after the protagonist’s death does she realise ‘bonds are forever’ both metaphorically and literally. She cannot break out of her marriage with Sunil and she can never forget her bond with Akash. Love and its daemons make the protagonists act irrational in the novel where Akash commits suicide and Anjali agrees to human cloning with Akash’s specimen, something she had been opposing all along due to ethical grounds.
The plot may sound all-too-familiar to readers of romance, but Never Say Goodbye redeems the oldest theme in literature with a finely-etched portrayal of love’s undying mystery and the homeless-ness of lovers, who have no home except each other’s embrace and memories.
(Book: Never Say Goodbye….Bonds Are Forever; Author: Rajiv Seth; Publisher: Srishti Publishers and Distributors)
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