To comfort the grieving Pandavas in exile, the deathless sage Markandeya retells the whole story of Rama - the prince banished on the eve of his crowning, the abduction of Sita by the demon Ravana, the alliance with Hanuman and the monkey-folk, the bridge to Lanka, and the great war that won her back. A story of a man who lost more than Yudhishthira and bore it without bitterness.

A proud young brahmin who can kill a bird with an angry glance is humbled first by a devoted housewife and then by a humble seller of meat in Mithila, who teaches him that dharma is not where a man stands or what he recites, but the selfless doing of the duty set before him - and that the first temple anyone is given to tend is their own parents.

Cursed in the womb to be born crooked in eight places, the boy sage Ashtavakra journeys to King Janaka's court to challenge the scholar who drowned his father. Turned away at the gate as a mere child, he overthrows the undefeated Bandin in a contest of riddles, brings the drowned brahmins back from the deep, and washes his crookedness away in a sacred river.

To test the king famed across the worlds for his mercy, Indra and Agni take the forms of a hawk and a dove. When the trembling dove falls into King Shibi's lap for refuge and the hawk claims it as lawful prey, the king offers his own flesh in its place - and goes on cutting away himself, piece by piece, until he offers his whole body rather than betray a creature that trusted him.

In the Himalayan forests, the mighty Bhima is seized by a giant python he cannot break free of - the cursed king Nahusha, who once ruled heaven itself and fell through pride into a serpent's body. The python will free its captive only if its riddles of dharma are answered, and so it falls to Yudhishthira's wisdom, not Bhima's strength, to save his brother and release a fallen king from an age-long curse.

On the torchlit fourteenth night of the war, Bhima's rakshasa son Ghatotkacha ravages the Kaurava army until Duryodhana begs Karna to stop him. Unable to kill the night-giant by any other means, Karna is forced to spend the infallible Vasava Shakti - the one weapon he had saved to kill Arjuna. Ghatotkacha dies, crushing thousands beneath his falling body, and unknowingly saves Arjuna's life.

A boy raised in total isolation in the forest, who has never seen a woman nor known the world, grows so pure that the heavens favour him. When the kingdom of Anga is dying of a drought, its king sends women to gently lure the innocent ascetic out of his forest - and the moment his foot touches their soil, the long-withheld rains pour down.

Narada warns the Pandavas, who share one wife, with the tale of two asura brothers so devoted they were one soul in two bodies. Made invincible by a boon that they could die only by each other's hand, they conquered the worlds - until Brahma fashioned the flawless Tilottama, and the brothers who had never wanted different things destroyed each other over a single beautiful woman.

The small but mighty sage Agastya marries the perfect princess Lopamudra to save his ancestors, digests the brahmin-killing demon Vatapi before he can be summoned back to life, halts the proud, ever-growing Vindhya mountain for good, and drinks the entire ocean dry to expose the asuras hiding in its depths. A portrait of the sage whose deeds shaped mountains and seas.

The deathless sage Markandeya tells the Pandavas the greatest wonder he has ever seen: how he alone survived the dissolution of the universe, wandered the shoreless cosmic sea in despair, and found a radiant divine child resting on a branch of a great banyan tree. Drawn inside the child's body, he beheld the whole of creation within, and learned the imperishable truth beneath the rising and falling of all the ages.