“Like many ordinary citizens living in these troubled times I, though physically far removed from Bamiyan in Afghanistan, too was pained by the senseless acts that culminated in the destruction of the ancient statues called Shahmama and Sol Sol.

The horrific acts and as yet ominously inconclusive chain of action and reaction poignantly highlights the state of the troubled human condition today. A condition I have tried to explore through an imagined dialogue between the two protagonists while weaving into the communication certain illustrative tenets and symbols of Buddhist learning.

That a novice writer on a distant island could be so creatively engaged by the event is, for me, a testimony to the powerful and enduring legacy of Shahmama and Sol Sol.”

Today, the unsettled sands around the desolate region of Bamiyan bear a forlorn look. Perhaps, permanently stained by the “moments of madness” that destroyed these age old witnesses of time. Witnesses whose physical form might have been shattered but whose spirit has been brilliantly captured in the 160 stanza long, 640 line epic called Darkness at Bamiyan.

William Powell, a senior journalist based in Cambridge has written the following about the book – “I am especially glad that you have treated – a conversation of stones, as it were – the historic presence of those two great Buddhist figures at Bamiyan, now destroyed. Who knows? You may in some sense have saved them from posterity just as Percy Bysshe Shelley did with the great Theban monolith he called Ozymandias. Bamiyan has a prophetic Milton-like quality which is very welcome in today’s age”.