Better To Have Gone: Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville

by Akash Kapur

Again: What do I know about grief? But I do know that Auralice on that afternoon seems—if not quite happy, then at least untouched.

Grief is like fame. We expect individuals to be transformed by it, to occupy a room in a different way, as if the experience of tragedy is somehow physically altering. But Auralice isn’t bigger or shinier, or more crumpled or wrinkled, or different in any way that I can see that day. She looks just the same, and she plays in the pool, bouncing in the water under a gray monsoon sky, sometimes even laughing.

A man who knew Satprem explained it to me this way: parts of a person can be highly

evolved and in touch with the divine, even while other parts remain trapped in imperfection. To me, this duality simply sounds very human.

Utopia sounds so good. Sweep away what is and build in its place a more perfect society. Like millions before them, John and Diane were looking for a better world; that search quickly grew complicated, as it always does. They got caught in the crash between their dreams and hard reality. It’s an old story, played out across time, in virtually every revolution and millenarian movement, where human lives are treated as mere expedients on the journey toward a new world. Yes, John and Diane were victims of Auroville’s revolution. They were also victims of the search for perfection.

concrete city. I think of the forests (and all that they contain: the snakes, the birds, the mongooses, the porcupines, and now wild boars, too) as an affirmation of life, an insistent declaration that preconceived human notions of what should be can never straitjacket or prevent what will be. These forests exist not because of utopia, but despite utopia.

One of the reasons Auralice and I left New York was because we needed more inner space: more room to think, to explore, just to be. A lesson we’ve both learned over the last decade or so is that inner space needs outer space. It’s hard to grow as a person—or even to think clearly—amid the exigencies of urban sprawl.