A journey of love, loss and transcendence
As a reviewer, when I opened ‘The Conquest of Kailash’, I expected a reflective, slow-burning novel. To my utmost delight, what I found was a story that seizes the reader, shakes them, and refuses to let go. Inderjeet Mani, acclaimed for his Thailand-set horror thriller ‘Toxic Spirits’, has delivered a literary masterpiece that is simultaneously intellectually ambitious and heartbreaking.
At its center is Ali Akbar, a closeted gay man in his later years, mourning the loss of his wife Helen, who has left to become a Buddhist nun. Returning from California to India, Ali’s journey begins at the Deer Park in Benares, where the Buddha delivered his first sermon, and a simple flyer promising to teach him how to love again sets him on a path that will take him to the icy heights of Mount Kailash. But this is no mere scenic travelogue. Ali must confront childhood sexual abuse, his personal failures including his expulsion from Cambridge University, and the fractured relationships with Helen and their daughter Homa. When he is assaulted at a parade led by a religious fundamentalist, the stakes of his search for love and redemption become sharply immediate.
Mani’s prose melds philosophical reflection, intimate character study, and richly textured travelogue. The philosophy of love it explores takes you far away into the world of Socrates in classical Greece and the writings of the Upanishadic sage Yajnavalkya. From Athens’ Agora to the sacred temples of Benares to California suburbia, English halls of learning, and the remote Himalayan peaks, every scene pulses with life, danger, and possibility. The chill of mountain air, the crush of city crowds, the hush of meditation, and the long, often painful afternoons of childhood are all palpable. A warning: the author does not shy away from explicitness. By exposing desire, shame, and vulnerability without restraint, Mani makes the story intimate and unforgettable.
Ali’s fascination with Mount Kailash begins in childhood, when a family friend recounts the pilgrimage’s dangers and wonders on a Benares verandah, surrounded by mango and plum trees, flocks of parrots, and their dog Krishna. The conversation sparks an early curiosity about faith, devotion, and the meaning of transcendence. Years later, this curiosity deepens at university, where his geography professor Hans Finkelstein, a German émigré, brings the mountain to life through vivid lessons on plate tectonics and the formation of the Himalayas. Ali’s imagination transforms scientific lectures into cosmic visions, linking earthly upheavals to the grandeur of Kailash, while glimpses of local children in the photographs he studies remind him that spiritual aspiration often coexists with harsh realities.
Inspired by his own pilgrimage to Buddhist sites in India and Nepal, Mani’s novel asks questions rarely addressed in contemporary fiction: Can love endure trauma, exile, and societal collapse? Can a man shaped by fear andloss still find connection? This is a story of loss, longing, and the extraordinary, unpredictable ways the human heart seeks and finds meaning.
Already popular in translation and audiobook form, ‘The Conquest of Kailash’ has been praised as “a moving and profoundly human work” by Reader’s favourite, while Amazon readers celebrate its “heartbreaking blend of philosophy, introspection, and travel” and its “deep, beautiful, and emotional” impact. There are a few passages where the philosophical digressions slow the narrative slightly, occasionally interrupting the otherwise immersive flow. Even so, it remains a rare and compelling literaryachievement.