The Last Kaurava is not a re-telling of the Mahabharata – it is an entirely new work of fiction. Though it uses several characters from the Epic and mostly follows the story-line, there are events that never occur in the Mahabharata or vary greatly from the story as told in the Mahabharata. Reading The Last Kaurava requires that the reader be flexible and open-minded enough to let the story play out.    Two stories unfold in the book:  the first story explores the writing down of the Mahabharata. It parallels the episode from the very beginning of the Epic in which Ganesha, the elephant-headed God, agrees to transcribe the poem narrated by Vyaasa. The second story, the main story, most connected to the Epic and referenced in the title of the book, explores the life and choices of Devavrata-Bhishma.   A core fact anchors each story: the first story is tied to the writing of the Epic. At some point, the orally transmitted Epic was written down – scholars debate the date. The novel assumes that a flood that destroyed the city of Hastinapur occurred around 850 B.C.E. and the Epic was written down in order to save it. I conjure up a story of how this effort to write leads to the invention of a new script, native to South Asia. Its letters are ordered by a system that is based on how the sound is produced by the speaker (unlike the Phoenician-derived scripts of the Western world), more like the Brahmi that would be found all over South Asia in the next eight hundred years.   There is an amazing, almost unbelievable, observation underlying this speculated invention – writing does not seem to have taken off in South Asia till after Chandragupta Maurya came to power around 300 B.C.E. There is evidence from contemporary visitors, like Megasthenes, that among themselves South Asian merchants made and kept oral contracts (this amazed the Greeks). The culture of South Asia was non-literate at a time when the contemporary cultures to the West (Persian, Assyrian, Greek, etc.) were writing stories and maintaining written records. Despite the lack of writing, South Asia has been seen as richer, more sophisticated, and highly evolved culture from the earliest times. So, writing down the Epic was a revolutionary act.   The second story builds on the disappearance of the river Saraswati – modern geo-mapping technology allows us to date this event to about 2000 B.C.E.. The book assumes that this disappearance was an environmental crisis that led to the destruction and dispersion of the Sindhu-Saraswati civilization.  Large groups of migrants found their way to the Frontier of that time, marked by the small trading outpost of Hastinapur (as the city is re-characterized in the novel) on the edge of the great forest covering the Gangetic plain. Unfortunately the plain was already occupied by forest-dwellers who resisted the immigrants. The Kuru rulers of Hastinapur upto Shantanu struggled to cope with the stresses – Devavrata-Bhishma saw the opportunity to create a Kuru empire ruling over both immigrants and forest-dwellers. But at the core was the conflict between the urban migrants and the native, forest-dwelling, non-urban population, a conflict with no hope for compromise. War would be the tragic outcome, the Great War of the Epic being the dramatized residue of that traumatic memory.