BETTER TO HAVE GONE

A transcendent vision left dark shadows.

Founded in 1968, Auroville, in southern India, was “an aspiring utopia” aiming to “illuminate a new path for the planet.” Kapur, Whiting Creative Nonfiction grantee, was born there, as was his wife, Auralice. Both left for the U.S. as teenagers; in 2004, they returned to raise a family. Melding history, biography, and memoir, the author offers a sensitive examination of Auroville’s complex origins, tumultuous evolution, and, not least, “the very idea of utopia and the search for perfection.” Central to the narrative are Auralice’s mother and adoptive father, Diane Maes and John Walker, who died in 1986, when Auralice was 14: John, from a severe illness for which he refused medical care; Diane, by ingesting poisonous seeds. Their deaths, Kapur writes, “loomed huge in our lives” and in the community’s collective memory. Led in its early years by a Parisian-born woman whom spiritual leader Sri Aurobindo designated as the Mother, Auroville attracted idealistic individuals seeking to escape the “broken materialism” of Western culture—a world that Walker, pampered and wealthy, knew well. Although his family did not understand his commitment to Auroville, they amply funded his quest. Despite its spiritual underpinnings, the community suffered violent conflicts, intensifying after the Mother’s death in 1973. Utopia, Kapur reflects astutely, “is so often shot through with the worst forms of callousness and cruelty. Human beings—individuals, families—are mere sideshows in the quest for a perfect world; they are sacrificed at the altar of ideals.” Still, the author portrays with generosity the consuming faith that led Maes and Walker to endure suffering and to leave Auralice abandoned. “Who am I,” he writes, “to doubt that there are more things in this world than fit within my limited philosophy?” Describing the book as a “shared endeavor,” Kapur underscores Auralice’s need to make sense of the deaths that traumatized her.

A discerning portrait of a storied community.