Frontlist | Novel that reimagines the war of Kurukshetra

Investment banker Keerthik Sasidharan narrates the final days of the Kurukshetra war in his debut book The Dharma Forest. Publishers Penguin Random House India said The Dharma Forest is filled with complex characters, conflicted loyalties and erotic jealousies from India’s most beloved epic that draws out an amoral canvas that is beyond good and evil. On the last day of his illustrious life, Krishna asks the gods what does it truly mean to be human? To answer this question, an all-too-human narrator tells Krishna about nine lives from the days of the great Mahabharata war, where each life embodies a rasa — love, courage, wonder, disgust, fear, ridicule, sorrow, anger, and tranquillity — colors from man’s emotional palette. This first volume of the “Dharma” trilogy tells about Bhishma’s wondrous immortal life, Draupadi’s loves amid erotic jealousies, and Arjuna’s war-weary courage. “Looking up into the plum-dark midnight sky that spanned from one end of Kurukshetra to another, like some thousand-headed serpent resting in the heavens, Bhishma saw the portent of his own death fly above him in the form of a bird whose wings were on fire. They were common enough sights these days, with fires raging everywhere on the battlefields, but it was rare to see them so late into the night,” the book begins.