Beyond Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers

Book excerpt: Beyond Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers is a serio-fiction based on a hundred years old true story and the fictional story of a Naxalite rebel of the seventies of last century. The true story is about a man who lived in the nineteenth century and rebelled against the restrictive life of the society at that time and used to dream about distant foreign lands and adventures, stimulated by stories from Ramayana and Mahabharata. He left home as a teenager and through many adventures in the lands unknown became a renowned soldier and officer in the Brazilian Republican Army. His sketchy biography was published in a Bengali book at the turn of the century, 1899-1900, but nothing is known about him afterwards except that he died in Brazil in 1905. Born in the same year as Rabindra Nath Thakur and two years before Swami Vivekananda he remained an icon and an enigma, the only heroic-romantic character at the dawn of Indian renaissance. The fictional Naxalite rebel of the seventies also had to leave the country after many adventurous escapes, true events in the life of many young men, and reached Brazil and came to know about his predecessor a hundred years back and started searching for him. That changed his life bringing forth many perennial issues of man and society.