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Ashwatthama Today - Chapter 3: The Midnight Murder and the Immortal Regret

A boy had died again. The voice from the radio said it softly, as if quieter would make it less true. “...five-year-old boy found beside his mother. A kitchen worker. Both incinerated in the second blast. No group has claimed responsibility.” Ashwatthama sat hunched beneath the bridge, spine curved like a hook, eyes vacant. Smoke from a small fire curled up from an empty can of kerosene beside him. The wind tasted like iron. He blinked once. And in that blink, it came. Not like a wave. Like a blade. It was night again. Kurukshetra. The battlefield lay in ruin. Horses long dead. Arrows broken. Bones picked clean. The earth itself seemed too exhausted to weep anymore. But Ashwatthama found him. Near the lake. Half-submerged in reeds. Duryodhana. Still breathing. Barely. His thigh—shattered. His body—rotting. His crown—gone. Flies sang where soldiers once knelt. Ashwatthama approached silently. He could smell the wound before he saw it. “Guruputra,” Duryodhana rasp...
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Ashwatthama Today - Chapter 2: A Scent of Ash in the Air

Location: Somewhere in Delhi, 2025 — AI Defense HQ, Labs, and Surveillance Control Rooms Dr. Ananya Rao begins to analyze the recent terrorist bombings using a defense AI platform. As she digs deeper, strange correlations emerge—an “anomaly” always appears at the edge of every attack. Ancient names surface. Ashwatthama among them. The air in the AI lab was cooled to an unnatural chill—an environment more suitable for machines than the people who worked among them. Dr. Ananya Rao sat alone before a cluster of curved monitors, the blue glow softening the hard lines of her face. Her lab coat lay draped over the back of a chair, forgotten hours ago. A steaming mug of chai sat beside the keyboard, untouched. Her eyes, dark and dry, flicked from screen to screen as if reading the layered histories of ghosts. Maps, timelines, behavior patterns. Location pings from the Pahalgam attack spiraled out like spider legs across the topography of India. The AI—codenamed VAJRA —responded instan...
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Ashwatthama Today - Chapter 1: The Wound That Would Not Heal

Part 1: Rainfall in the Temple of Dust The rain had stopped just before dawn, but the smell of it still clung to the stone like rot. A gust of humid wind rolled through the crumbling archways of the temple, lifting dust and blackened flower petals from the floor. A stream of brown water trickled across a cracked slab of Vishnu’s feet, pooling briefly before slipping into a drain that no longer drained. Ashwatthama lay motionless on the damp flagstone, half-covered by a torn jute shawl. His eyes were open. They had never truly closed. His breath came shallow, as if rising through centuries. Above him, a rat scampered over the shattered remnants of a stone peacock, pausing briefly to sniff his forehead. The gem embedded there—a dull, bruised violet now—throbbed faintly, pulsing in rhythm with something ancient and unspeakable. A vein in his temple flickered like lightning under the skin. He reached up slowly, almost casually, and touched the wound. His fingers came away dark with blood, ...
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