Kaal: Life After All My Deaths is the third book of Ekta Saigal Pandit. The book is all about Kaal, which means ‘time’ as well as ‘death.’ It explores the relationship between the two. Kaal is also the story of Existence. It deals extensively with the origin & destruction of the universe.
Blurb of the Book
Death lurks in front of you.
It says that it is not Death.
It is Life beyond Life.
It insists that you come along.
It tells you that Life beyond Life is more meaningful.
It promises that Life beyond Life will let you ride the tides of time.
It promises that Life after Life will lead you to ultimate freedom from existence.
It promises you that your last and final desire will be realized there.
Would you go with Death?
Story in Kaal: Life After All My Deaths
The story starts in an interesting way with mysterious vibes. The protagonist’s wife is sobbing. He goes to her & informs her that the time has come, and she’s asking him to not go. From the title & blurb, it’s clear that they are talking about the protagonist’s death.
Then the story goes the night before when he meets his look-alike, who has come to convince the protagonist to shed his body & karmic load and go with him to higher dimensions of life. Later the protagonist is shown taking medicines for schizophrenia, making it mysterious whether the protagonist met his look-alike in real or in his hallucination.
Writing Style in the Book
The writing style is vivid, imaginative, philosophic, and a bit mystic. Like all her books, I’d call it a fusion of fiction & non-fiction.
The adventures of life after death and the finer dimensions of life are described elaborately. The imagination is magnificent. Everything is explained in physical terms using the concepts of physics & geometry.
The philosophies in the book are told through dialogues except on one occasion in which a philosophical concept is revealed through the boiling of tea. If more concepts were shown like this in a revealing manner, the book would have been more insightful.
Philosophies dealt in Kaal: Life After All My Deaths
In her first book, Let Go of Me, Ekta says that the purpose of soul-mates is to reduce the karmic load they’re carrying. In her second book, Kaivalya, she shows the role of rebirths in enlightenment. In the present book, Kaal: Life After All My Deaths, she takes these concepts to the extreme, especially the concept of soul-mates and elaborates how the reduction of karmic load takes place. She explains everything in physicality.
The book deals with absolute death—not the death of the body or presence as a singularity.
But it is still not complete freedom to not be. You are and you are not. Singularity still has an iota of definition, even if it is minuscule. I want to have no definition. I want to be undefined and unlimited. I don’t want to be non-existent and still be in existence. I just don’t want to be at all.
Conclusion
The book is a hybrid of fiction & non-fiction, delivering a heavy dose of philosophy on death in the sci-fi setting with some heartfelt romantic moments.