shakuntala rajagopal

What Happens When Those Things that are Supposed to Comfort You—Don’t?

When Shakuntala Rajagopal lost her husband of forty-seven years in 2010, she was devastated. A devout Hindu, she followed what she had learned since birth. Her family celebrated their beloved father, uncle, and mentor through the many rituals sending him off to his new life. Shakuntala even travelled to India to lovingly give her husband’s ashes to the oceans off the southern coast of India.

As her husband’s last ashes floated away, Shaku felt her will to go on float away with him. At the age of seventy, she decided that she needed to revisit her own devout spirituality and take one of the more grueling but one of the most spiritual of all pilgrimages in India—the Char Dham—where she could bathe in the sacred waters of the River Ganges, Maa Ganga. She knew it would be her chance for a rebirth, a new beginning. But she almost doesn’t make it.

Song of the Mountains: My Pilgrimage to Maa Ganga is a story of survival, changing and challenging any reader in the way he or she approaches major changes in life. Rajagopal’s story is one that will empower the reader to take action and go forward in their own life, whatever the circumstance they are facing.