The Night of Anguish:Tales from the Mist

The night when Siddhartha will attain Nirvana. As he meditates under the Bodhi tree insights and memories come rushing in. He had gone through periods of despair mortification and rage. There were other men who had been like a mirror to his consciousness. They have also travelled through the mire of Sansara. Men like the materialist–Ajita the determinist–Goshala and the agnostic–Sanjaya. This night which may be so benign in its blessings to Siddhartha shall also like an assassin hunt down and take away many a seer and a sage. Even as the Shramana–Siddhartha wills himself to find the truth a Brahmin hymnodist Arada and his mentor icon and friend Rudraka will experience the unfolding of fate in a glacial cave high up in the Himalayas. This spiritual drift is accompanied by its dreary counterpart in a world where strife assumes a bloody form. Where if on one hand the republics or Janapadas’ struggle to come to grips with the recalcitrant forest-dwelling tribes’ and is in the throes of war; then on the other the women perhaps suffer the most. Like Yasodhara–the wife of the Shramana living in a state of quasi-widowhood like Amrapali–an ageing courtesan caught in the grip of disease and memories and Tara–a forest-dwelling songsmith whose man Eka has contrived to kill the ‘minister-of-war’ an act which may undermine the daring plan hatched by the sovereign leader of the tribes’–the blind materialist seer Ajita. This night as a mist arise and works like a loom and spreads its veil an age shall come to a close drawing out the curtain for a new sun to emerge.