Sitarah

S I T A R A H In a frozen passage of the Himalayas, Sameer Singh, a WW2 Royal Indian Air Force pilot observes images of his recent life floating like feathered fog over the massive hidden tunnel's opalescent walls. His eyes fixate on three children playing with a pair of royal Bar-headed geese in the grand reflecting pool of the Taj Mahal. There is only one woman that the gentlemanly, Oxford educated Sameer can’t live and breathe without - the headstrong Sarah Larkin -a Burma born English maternity doctor, and childhood friend. Sameer has chased Sarah through the Yugas...and now the world's at war, and he suffers to lose the Koh-i-noor to Raj Kshatriya, a talented, cunning rebel of the British Raj - a tour de force revolutionary, that idolizes the Yankees and their freedom from the Crown, and will sacrifice anything to liberate Mother India from her colonial chains. Recovering in Darjeeling, Sameer is forcefully befriended by a scruffy, eccentric Scottish ornithologist and scientific outcast - John Baird - whose sole obsession is defending his royal clan of Bar-headed geese, whom winter in Assam’s wildlife reserve, Kaziranga. In spite of his skeptics, John believes every year at the Spring Equinox his feathered clan attempts the staggering migration over the Himalayas, “with just the meat on their bones and a thimble of 02”...ascending daunting, icy altitudes that only modern airplanes are capable of - and only then with their crews breathing supplemental oxygen. Their grande hallucinating finale - summiting Chomolungma (Mt. Everest)... at those altitudes John postulates “your hearts racing like Rolls Royce engines - your lungs on fire! Hyperventilating beyond human comprehension.” Through his unlikely friendship with John and the ancient winged clan of Anser Indicus, Sameer is destined to awaken to his true avian instincts and set a course…a course that will send him to Allied altitudes over India, Egypt, and Burma, on his lifetime’s quest to liberate Sarah from her lover’s illusions.