The Krishna Key (PAPERBACK) details from indiaplaza

About The Book

Five thousand years ago, there came to earth a magical being called Krishna, who brought about innumerable miracles for the good of mankind. Humanity despaired of its fate if the Blue God were to die but was reassured that he would return in a fresh avatar when needed in the eventual Dark Age—the Kaliyug.

In modern times, a poor little rich boy grows up believing that he is that final avatar.Only, he is a serial killer. In this heart-stopping tale, the arrival of a murderer who executes his gruesome and brilliantly thought-out schemes in the name of God is the first clue to a sinister conspiracy to expose an ancient secret—Krishna’s priceless legacy to mankind.

Historian Ravi Mohan Saini must breathlessly dash from the submerged remains of Dwarka and the mysterious lingam of Somnath to the icy heights of Mount Kailash, in a quest to discover the cryptic location of Krishna’s most prized possession. From the sand-washed ruins of Kalibangan to a Vrindavan temple destroyed by Aurangzeb, Saini must also delve into antiquity to prevent a gross miscarriage of justice. Ashwin Sanghi brings you yet another exhaustively researched whopper of a plot, while providing an incredible alternative interpretation of the Vedic Age that will be relished by conspiracy buffs and thriller-addicts alike.

Who really knows, and who can swear,
How creation came, when or where!
Even gods came after creation’s day,
Who really knows, who can truly say
When and how did creation start?
Did He will it? Or did He not?
Only He, up there, knows, maybe;
Or perhaps, not even He.
                                                        —Rig Veda 10:129

Let me start at the very beginning... even before I was born. One of my ancestors was King Yayati. He was cursed by the sage Shukracharya for having been unfaithful to his wife, Devayani, who was Shukracharya’s daughter. The curse was that Yayati would grow old prematurely and thus be unable to enjoy the pleasures of his youth and potency. Later, Shukracharya relented and softened the blow: Yayati would be spared if one of his sons, Yadu or Puru, accepted the consequences of the curse. The older son, Yadu, refused, but the younger, Puru, agreed to take it on himself. As a reward, Yayati chose Puru to succeed him as king, in place of Yadu. The enraged Yayati enlarged upon the punishment to his elder son. ‘Neither you nor your descendants will ever occupy a throne!’ he prophesied, in a fury. The unlucky Yadu left his home and settled down in Mathura where his lineage flourished. Yadu’s descendants were the Yadavas, of which I was one. Yadavas, since then, have been king-makers, but never kings. Puru went on to become the patriarch of the kingdom of Hastinapur—into which the families of the Kauravas and Pandavas were born.

Anil Varshney did not know that he had less than twelve minutes left to live. His modest house in the Hanumangarh district of Rajasthan was deathly quiet at this hour except for the humming of the desert cooler. Varshney loved the silence. It allowed him to immerse himself entirely in the strange letterings and symbols that lay before him.

Work was meditation and prayer for India’s youngest linguist and symbolist who had shot to instant fame when he succeeded in deciphering several ancient hieroglyphs from the Indus Valley civilisation. Fluent in over fifteen languages, Varshney had ten publications to his credit including the most widely used multilingual dictionary of Indian languages. He was to ancient writing systems what Bill Gates was to operating systems.

His living space was fashionably disorganised, reflective of the eclectic genius that inhabited it. The bedroom was rarely used because most of Varshney’s life was spent at archaeological sites, particularly Kalibangan, the most important Indus Valley site in Rajasthan. His living room had no furniture except for a desk and a patterned-fabric couch that had seen better days. The bare floor was littered with stacks of books, bundles of research papers, as well as cardboard boxes filled with the objects of Varshney’s study—seals, pottery fragments, scrolls and parchments.

On the desk before him lay a small rectangular seal, around 20 x 20 mm, apparently made of conch shell. The seal had a square peg in the back. Strangely, the peg had no hole for inserting a ring into, as was usual with seals of this type. Three ancient animal  motifs of a bull, unicorn and goat were engraved in an anticlockwise direction on the face of the seal. And it was this frozen tableau that seemed to be the focus of Varshney’s attention.


His desk was strewn with papers on which he had made sketches and scribbles. A notebook computer stood open on a corner of the desk, its screen-saver having been triggered an hour earlier. A brushed-steel desk lamp shone a single, wide beam of fluorescent white light on the seal and the papers surrounding it. Varshney, oblivious to everything else around him, was closely examining the images on the seal with a Carl Zeiss 20X magnifying glass.

Varshney’s outward appearance was that of a geek: ill-fitting clothes, uncombed hair, and shirt pockets stuffed with a variety of Rotring Isograph pens. His face was blemished with mild eruptions of acne and his personal hygiene left a lot to be desired. But grooming, bathing and dressing were completely inconsequential in his world. Varshney had spent several years at various Indus Valley sites—including the recent one at Kalibangan—painstakingly creating a database of eight thousand semantic clusters from his lexicon of thirty Indian languages. For the first time since the excavations at Harappa in 1921, Varshney now seemed to have found a way to explain the strange hieroglyphs on over five thousand seals discovered at such locations.

Varshney was oblivious to his surroundings and did not observe the shaft of light falling on the floor that gradually widened as the main entrance door to his house was quietly opened, the lock having been expertly picked. He did not notice the beam of light disappearing as the door was gently closed. He did not hear the quiet footsteps of light rubber soles on the ceramic-tiled floor, nor did he feel the breath of the stranger on his neck. He only screamed when he saw the intruder’s face reflected on his computer screen but by then it was too late. No sound emerged from Varshney’s throat because the visitor had tightly clamped a chloroform-soaked handkerchief over his nose and mouth.

Paralysed with fear, Varshney struggled to lash out with his hands. The desk lamp fell crashing to the ground and suddenly his house went completely black. Varshney found his right arm being viciously twisted behind his back while the handkerchief retained its vice-like grip on his face. A searing pain shot up his arm, bringing tears to his eyes and momentarily stunning him. He could feel himself passing out as the chloroform slowly worked its way into his system. Soon, there was complete stillness— and silence.

The intruder effortlessly lifted the unconscious Varshney from his chair with his latex-gloved hands and placed him on the floor with his back upright against a wall and his legs stretched out before him. He unzipped the belt pack around his waist and took out a roll of duct tape with which he efficiently gagged his prisoner. He then proceeded to bind his captive’s hands behind his back with some more tape. With almost choreographed movements, the assailant delved into his waist bag and took out a little self-inking rubber stamp. He placed the rubber end of the stamp on Varshney’s forehead. The resultant image on his victim’s forehead was of a small, crimson, wheel enclosed within a circle. With Varshney still ...