CITY OF RAPTURE

The story of Auroville’s origins, through a tragic personal history

- Shruti Ravindran

In his first book, India Becoming, Akash Kapur used a varied cast of characters, including a cattle broker and call centre worker, to animate the upheavals transforming the country he had returned to from the US. In his second, Better to Have Gone, he swaps out his panoramic lens for a more intimate focus: the family album. In this pacey, propulsive book, he turns his attention to the history of the place he and his wife grew up in and now call home: Auroville, the community founded in 1968 in the outskirts of Pondicherry (now Puducherry).

Kapur recounts Auroville’s origin story through the entwined lives of three “rebels” who wind up on the same “arid patch of earth” in South India, in search of “a deeper way of living”: Satprem, né Bernard, a former French Resistance fighter tortured by the Gestapo, who became the favoured devotee of the mystical matriarch of Auroville, Mirra Alfassa; John Walker, a wealthy American who yearns for non-materialistic meaning; and Diane Maes, a beautiful, free-spirited Belgian and the mother of the author’s wife Auralice.