Revisited "Saariputta" by Surendra Mohanty, one of my favourite short stories in Odia. It's about a boy who leaves his widowed mother alone to become a Buddhist monk.One day, he comes back to his mother's house, as a monk trying to convert to her Buddhism, with the stated intention that she can achieve nirvana, that is, freedom from the absurd brutalities of life by attaining 'salvation'.
The lonely mother had imagined that the son would come back to her, rejoin the world of ordinary people, marry and give her grandchildren.

She had stayed up all night preparing his favourite meal in anticipation of that.
But he just tells her, "O Kind Soul (the Buddhist phrase---instead of saying O Mother!), I just seek nirvana
so these earthly pursuits have no meaning for me.
The mother hides her tears, and says "O Saint(instead of O Son !!!), I want jivana(life), not nirvana(freedom from life)"
The mother returns to her lonely hut, and the monk quietly walks away into the still night.

Buddhism, in the context of Indian history, was an intensely political protest movement against the ruling caste elites, not the hippie, happy religion it is portrayed as in the West. Mohanty, with his magisterial command of the most understated, tautly elegant Odia prose, brings into sharp relief, millennia after the fact, the white heat of political disenchantment, and the power of society and ideology to tear families apart, to alienate and gobble up human destinies.