A mysterious letter arrives at the doorstep of an aging writer and swiftly begins to permeate everything he sees and touches. When he sets out on a journey to excavate the truth—and its alibis— his confrontation leads him deep into the human psyche and the turbulent ways of the civilised. Playing with the notions of ‘shadowland’ and ‘heartland’, the stories of the narrator and his compatriots (nursing their own agendas) are cross-stitched with their anxious traversing of inner and outer worlds, interrogating the role of the reader and the writer and the degree of participation (or passivity) allowed to them. A deeply psychological tale of binaries, Deka’s ‘unfinished’ novel refuses the promise of easy answers. Yatra leaves one with the thought that perhaps our travels never really end—when one journey ends we find ourselves at the beginning of another.
