Modern Odia poetry has repeatedly challenged inherited literary paradigms by replacing romantic certainty with existential ambiguity, metaphysical incompleteness, and epistemological restlessness. Within this tradition, Chandra Kumar Mohanty's Sari Saru Nathibā Bāta ("The Road That Outlives Its Own End"), included in Asamartha Partha (2011), occupies a distinctive place because it transforms the apparently simple metaphor of a road into an inexhaustible philosophical structure. Rather than presenting the road as a symbol of destination, progress, or teleological fulfillment, the poem imagines it as a paradoxical continuum that continues precisely where endings appear to occur. Such an inversion fundamentally revises conventional understandings of journey, knowledge, language, and existence itself. This article argues that Mohanty's poem should be read simultaneously as an existential meditation, an apophatic philosophical statement, a phenomenological exploration of consciousness, a post-structural interrogation of linguistic limitation, and an Indian metaphysical reflection rooted in yet transcending the civilizational memory of the Mahābhārata. The poem does not merely narrate helplessness (asahāyatā); rather, it converts helplessness into a productive epistemology. Every failure becomes another beginning; every exhaustion becomes another threshold; every ending becomes an invisible continuation. The road thus emerges as neither geographical nor historical but ontological—a mode of Being itself. Unlike many modern poems that dramatize alienation through fragmentation alone, Mohanty's lyric simultaneously cultivates profound spiritual expectancy. The repeated confrontation with exhaustion—"How much farther can one possibly go?"—never culminates in nihilism. Instead, the poem suspends the speaker within an intermediate realm where language itself waits for "the next alphabet beyond all alphabets." This remarkable image proposes that truth is inaccessible not because it does not exist but because existing linguistic systems remain insufficient for articulating it. Consequently, the poem participates in one of the oldest philosophical questions—from the Upaniṣads through negative theology to modern deconstruction—namely whether ultimate reality necessarily exceeds linguistic representation. The present study undertakes a multidisciplinary reading by bringing Mohanty's poem into conversation with existential philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, archetypal criticism, comparative poetics, and Indian philosophical traditions including Vedānta and Buddhist thought. It also establishes illuminating parallels with the poetic visions of Rabindranath Tagore, T. S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, Antonio Machado, Fernando Pessoa, Emily Dickinson, Paul Celan, Octavio Paz, and Matsuo Bashō while demonstrating that Mohanty's vision ultimately remains irreducibly original. Although resonances may be traced across world literatures, Sari Saru Nathibā Bāta refuses imitation. Instead, it constructs a uniquely Odia philosophical modernism in which the finite continually opens toward the infinite without ever possessing it. Ultimately, this article proposes that the poem is less about reaching a destination than about discovering that authentic existence itself is constituted by perpetual incompletion. The road survives every traveler because consciousness itself remains an unfinished pilgrimage.

Santosh Kumar Nayak, "The Road That Outlives Its Own End: Liminal Consciousness, Apophatic Seeking, and the Philosophy of Infinite Arrival in Chandra Kumar Mohanty's Sari Saru Nathibā Bāta" International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Studies, V1(3): Page(40-89) July-August 2026. ISSN: 3139-0854. www.ijhssrs.com. Published by Scientific and Academic Research Publishing.