Dying with Equanimity
A limited series by Tan
Dying with Equanimity
A dying poet undertakes an ancient ritual — fasting into death with perfect equanimity — to cross back to the wife he lost. His children have five weeks to make peace with the manner of his leaving.
The Practice
Santhara is the ancient vow of releasing the body — voluntarily withdrawing from food and water when death is already certain — to thin the passions of the flesh and meet the end awake, without fear.
“Death is not something that happens to you in the future. It is happening to you all the time. If you are aware in every moment, both life and death are involved.”
The Story
Ram Chugh is seventy-four, a poet, and dying. When his heart is given a season to live, he refuses the slow, medicated undoing the doctors offer. Instead he turns toward Santhara — the six-step vow of a deliberate, painless death — believing it will carry him back to Radha, the wife whose absence hollowed out his every year since.
As the fast deepens, time comes loose. Memory floods in out of sequence: a childhood shattered by the Partition of 1947, a burning border crossed by truck; an arranged marriage that became the reason to live; the births of his children; the pyre that took their mother. His body thins toward light. The veil between worlds turns translucent, and a lifetime begins to dissolve through him at once.
But his children will not let him go quietly. Snehit reads the vow as surrender, an unforgivable second abandonment. Sannah reads it as grace, and blesses the road. Between a son who begs him to stay and a daughter who helps him leave, the old poet tries to finish the only work that ever mattered — the story of what remains when everything else is given away.
“Why this game of life? The mind does not budge. We have played this game many times… the outcome is always the same. What remains, what is achieved — it is love. To eat in the darkness of each other's lives for eternity. After all — what is the story?”
— Ram Chugh, in the dissolution
The Family
At the center, an absence: Radha, the wife whose death emptied the years — the gravity every other character orbits. Around her, three people trying to survive a second goodbye.
74 · The Poet
Born to a Jain family in pre-Partition Punjab; a refugee at ten, a painter of damaged cars in Bombay, a poet by need. Radha was his muse and his reason. Caring, luminous, undefeated — and, without her, finished. The vow is the last poem he has left to write.
34 · The Son
Fifteen when his mother died, he chose the safety his father never had — a salary, a schedule, a child on the way. He cannot accept the choice to leave, and cannot forgive being asked to watch it. His love arrives as anger.
26 · The Daughter
Raised on her father's lullabies and poems, now an artist in LA. She was seven at the pyre and remembers almost nothing but his hand in hers. She understands the wish to return to Radha — and, against everything it costs her, blesses the road.
A Note from the Creator
Every family carries a silence. Mine carries a border — a night in 1947 when a child was loaded onto a truck and told not to look back. That child grew into a poet, and the poet became the question I have spent my life trying to answer: what do we do with a body that has finished its work, and a love that hasn't?
SANTHARA is not a story about dying. It is a story about the courage it takes to leave with your eyes open — and about the people left in the room who have to watch. I want to sit inside the ache between generations: the ones who survived something unspeakable, and the ones who inherited the surviving.
It is heavy. It is meant to be. But it is built on the most ordinary human things — a father and his children, a kitchen table, a photograph in a shirt pocket — and it earns its transcendence one small, true moment at a time.
— Tan, writer & creator
What It's About
Not death as tragedy, but as a discipline — the radical act of meeting the end awake, on your own terms.
What Partition did to one child, and how the survival of it echoes down through a diaspora family that never spoke of it.
A marriage that outlives a death — and a man willing to unmake himself for the chance of one more moment of it.
A vow the soul demands and the heart cannot bear to grant. The chasm between a good death and those it leaves behind.
Tone & Comparables
A surreal, melodramatic elegy — heavy, luminous, unafraid of silence. The interior epic of a dying poet: the polarizing work of detaching from the body, told through the significant fractures of a life. Reverent where it can be, hallucinatory when the self dissolves. In the lineage of The Tree of Life, Nostalgia, and The Sea Inside — but rooted in the Punjab, the diaspora, and the poem.
The World
The series moves between three registers of image — the historical, the sacred, and the visionary — each with its own palette, texture, and grammar.
Grainy, desaturated, historical. A childhood loaded onto a truck and driven across a burning nation — the wound the whole life is built around.
Warm, wide, radiant. Marble pillars at the edge of the sea, a circle of priests, the vow spoken aloud. Where the ritual is given its blessing.
Neon, kaleidoscopic, sacred. A rotoscoped DMT release where memory, mantra and myth collide — the signature visual device of the series.
Visual Language
Four distinct visual grammars, cut together — the camera changes its own chemistry as the fast pulls Ram between present, past, and the space beyond both.
Present Day · Timelines A / B
The Chugh house and the drive to the temple. Desaturated teal and ash — a family home going quietly dim around a man who is leaving it.
Radha & the Temple · Timelines C / F
Warm, radiant, nostalgic. Everything touched by Radha, and the cliffside temple where the vow is spoken, glows like a memory already half-sainted.
The Dissolution · Timeline D
Electric teal and deep violet against black. The DMT release, rotoscoped — where the palette itself starts to hallucinate.
Partition, 1947 · Timeline E
Bleached khaki and dust. Newsreel-adjacent, handheld, the color of a memory the whole family has spent eighty years trying not to look at directly.
Scene Settings
A small, disciplined set list — the intimacy of a limited series, with two or three production-design swings that carry the whole visual ambition of the show.
Santa Maria · Present Day
Lower-middle-class and aged — chipping paint, a dusty ceiling fan, a tapestry of Shiva over furniture that hasn't changed in twenty years. Family photographs of a younger Ram and Radha watch over every scene shot here. The dining table has one seat that stays empty.
Timeline B
Marble pillars twenty-five cubits high at the edge of a cliff, cedar roofs, a waterfall behind the gazebo where Ram takes his tea with the pandit. A circle of priests in orange, harmonizing a tone that never fully resolves.
LA · Present Day
Paint-smeared and warm, the one room in the story lit like it hasn't given up. A large canvas she won't let anyone see until it's finished — we know before she does what it's a portrait of.
Punjab, British India · Timeline F
A bazaar a mile and a half long, red-brick compounds, kerosene lamps lit by hand each dusk. Ram's grandfather's shop. A grandmother who takes him to temple every Saturday. The world as it was for exactly as long as it took to lose it.
Santa Maria · Timeline B
Ram's car, weaving the cliffs toward the temple as the sky begins, almost imperceptibly, to liquify. 8mm flashes of his wedding day overlay the windshield. The border between memory and road stops holding.
The Ritual · Six Steps
Each movement of Santhara becomes a movement of the story — the outer discipline of the vow mirrored by the inner reckoning it forces open.
He resolves to die, and says it aloud — marking the vow apart from despair. Not an escape. A decision.
He asks pardon of everyone he has wronged, and forgives every wrong done to him. Old accounts, finally closed.
Before a saint at the cliffside temple, he speaks the vow of death — and is told to return only when he is ready.
He turns inward, toward the soul beneath the man — and the mind begins to give up its dead in vivid, uninvited waves.
Solid food, then liquid, then water — surrendered in turn. The body thins toward light; the family fractures around him.
In the final meditation the soul lets go of the body — and, if the vow held true, walks into the darkness to meet the beloved.
Structure
Six timelines wound together — the present ritual threaded through a whole century of a life, surfacing and dissolving as the fast loosens the grip of ordinary time.
The present frame — Ram beneath the tamarind tree, a broken kite in the branches, breath by breath.
Now. The failing heart, the family table, the drive to the cliffside temple.
The love that made a life — the marriage, the children, the hospital bed, the loss.
A DMT release — spirals, mantra, Kali. The mind gives up its images all at once.
Leiah. The refugee trucks, the checkpoints, a child learning what death is.
The world that was lost — the bazaar, the grandmother's temple, the kite on the tree.
The Season · Five Chapters
A self-contained limited run. Each hour advances the ritual in the present while opening another chamber of the past — until the two timelines arrive at the same threshold.
A terminal diagnosis. At the family table, Ram announces he will undertake Santhara. The room breaks — Snehit in disbelief, Sannah in silence. A household accident tips him, for the first time, into the spiral. The vow is set.
The drive to the cliffside temple. Ram seeks pardon and grants it, to the living and the dead. As the priests receive his vow, the border of 1947 begins to surface — a boy, a truck, a kite caught in a tree.
The fast begins; solid food is surrendered. In memory, an arranged marriage becomes a love story — Radha, the muse who made a poet of a refugee. Snehit's resistance hardens into something like grief for a mother he never stopped missing.
Water is the last thing to go. In the deepest fast, the DMT release breaks open: Partition's full horror and the loss of Radha collide in a single visionary movement. Sannah, alone, begins to understand — and to help.
The final meditation. A family arrives, at last, at the same threshold as the man they are losing. The soul lets go of the body. What remains is the poem — and the love it was always trying to name.
The Format
Episodes
Each
Limited run
One soul, one vow
A prestige limited drama — literary, surreal, and unrepeatable.
Why Now · The Opportunity
Five self-contained hours in the auteur-TV tradition — a director's showcase and a career-defining lead role for a South Asian actor of a certain age.
Diaspora and South Asian storytelling is ascending at the highest tier. SANTHARA offers that audience something rare: a spiritual epic that is also intensely intimate.
The rotoscoped DMT dissolution is a bold, ownable visual device — festival-ready, endlessly clippable, and unlike anything on the platforms right now.
The present-day story lives in a house, a car, and a temple. The scale is in the memory — period Partition sequences that can flex to the budget without losing the soul.
Key Art
A single figure balanced in the flame of memory — the newsprint of a nation's birth burning behind him, the script of old prayers drifting like ash. One man, choosing the manner of his own ending.
“Santhara must be distinguished from suicide. It is undertaken only when the body can no longer serve as an instrument of dharma, and death is already certain.”
The full script, series bible, and production materials are ready for the right partners. For financing, development, casting, and rights — reach out directly.
SANTHARA · A limited series by Tan