Lost in Red Mist

Lost in Red Mist

She is a courtesan fighting for a respectable identity in the quagmire of degenerated nobility, wars, intrigues, debauchery, lust and, last but not the least, love.

She is a foreign tourist in India, raped, picking up the fragments of her violated self, walking with bruised honour, her innate goodness intact, to reach the house of justice to salvage her identity, to redeem her pride.

A circumstantial pawn in the checker-work of sex trade, she passes much of her youth in the muck of lust only to regain herself back, to free herself in her forties, to begin a new life.

Kashmir is burning and in the bigger fire are smouldering little worlds of common hopes, mundane dreams, routine aspirations and regular cravings.

He is huge and lifts unthinkable weights for a living, goes on living and lifting weights only to be crushed by circumstances.

On a badly stomped platform he gathers the nameless pieces of his dusted identity to have a name, a face, an identity of a common person from the normal world.

In the Tsunami ravaged Andaman, she, an Australian anthropologist, survives and looks with hope at the remnants including the sole surviving Shompen tribal.

On the devastated eastern coast of India, he, a mere kid, takes the onerous task of caring for his still smaller sister, while the world around seethes in chaos.

He dreams big from his small village, only realizing later that the dreams that grow in disproportion to one’s circumstances are as good as nightmares.

He, an old man staying alone with a cat, patches up the holes in his present through tales of the past, to survive, expecting a painless end in the future.

She, a Western tourist at Rishikesh, opens her spirits while a whole world drags around her feet.