D.Murali

Chennai: It is the eve of the Republic Day. The morning is pleasantly sunny, with the fog gradually lifting off. I tell Al Raines, “How about a walk on the beach?” But Juhu doesn’t seem to be inviting enough to Mumbaikars as much as to a visiting Chennai-ite like me. So we settle down at a hotel poolside table with some Earl Grey tea at hand.

Al Raines, you may know as the name behind ‘November Rain’, a book published in 1993 that went on to become a primetime TV serial on Zee, under the title ‘Tum Bin Jaaon Kahan’.

To jog your memory, here is a snatch, from the international edition of the book: “Moses saw Bruce coming with the little steel bowl… They were about to start the ritual. Will it happen? Again? Bruce started putting the chalk marks on the table. Soon Moses could see the alphabet – A to Z – spaced out neatly in a circle around the top of the table…”

Horror just waiting to happen, as you should have guessed! And horror also, almost every night for the past decade or so, on the small screen, from the hands of Al Raines; more than 3,000 hours beginning with ‘Maano Ya Na Maano’ in the mid-1990s, I learn.

Another book, recently published, was ‘The Prayer’. A copy is on the table, and seeing close-up its blood-spattered cover design I spill some tea on my white shirt. “For the first time ever in the history of books, the publisher offered a worldwide money-back guarantee,” Al Raines tells me.

Guarantee, for what, I wonder? “If after reading the book, you feel that ‘The Prayer’ was not one of the scariest/darkest books you have ever read, Undercover Utopia will refund you the full price of the book plus any shipping cost you may have incurred in procuring the book.”

Undercover Utopia (www.undercoverpro.net) is the publisher, and it is time I lift the cover off Al Raines to find not one but two authors, Abhigyan and Mrinal, the couple that has been scripting and publishing, loving and living, colluding and creating.

Mrinal looks heavy-eyed and I ask her, “What were you writing last night?” About wicked women, she says, without blinking. It seems there are lots of them around, and I shift in my chair! Thankfully, Abhigyan, who recounts the soul search they have been into, cuts my nightmares short. Apt, therefore, is the title of the next book from Al Raines: ‘Soul Search Engine’.

Scrawled on the pages before the prologue is “a wish to reach parts out of the whole and the whole out of the parts…” in Stegy’s diary dated ‘the dying years of the second millennium AD.’ Every time the part divided itself, ‘each of its offshoots became dissimilar in consciousness from the parent,’ continues the philosophy.

“From all encompassing homogeneity appeared miniature identities. And so evolved individuality…” I turn pages of the trial pdf, and pass by millennia… “There are infinite beautiful ideas and I am just one of them,” realises Stegy, towards the end.

I am yet to put down the book… “Creation is a manifestation of the one’s many ideas… every idea one step away from being alone… The meaning is for us to discover. Creation is only a stimulus. All we have to do is respond. And respond well. Everything is a great question waiting for a great answer.”

An apt read for the Valentine’s Day, when souls seek meaning, even as a search engine giant like Yahoo is on a soul-search mode.

**http://BookPeek.blogspot.com