Words his only prop, a diseased and disfigured interloper sets up stage. Caught unawares, his spectators stand witness to a strange outpouring. As he rambles on, his tone shifting from the flippant to the morbid, from elation to despondency, from arrogance to sentimentalizing, the listeners begin to realize that he is merely re-telling a very old tale. The one-character one-act play The Book of Night: A Moment from the Mahabharata revolves around the re-turn of an irrepressible, and therefore, immortal anti-hero of Indian itihasa. But who is this resentful intruder? And why is he sick with repentance even as he seeks to avenge the injustice done to him?