"The Echoes of The Enigma of Unakoti"

Sriza Debnath

February 12, 2026

Last June, during the rainy season, I visited Unakoti, a famous historical site in Tripura. The journey itself was exciting, as the road was surrounded by lush green forests and small hills. Because it was monsoon, everything looked fresh and beautiful.

No sooner had I set foot within unakoti than I knew I was treading an ancient realm. The experience unfolded through accumulation rather than immediacy, as carvings spilled down the hillside in reckless abundance.

I kept gaping at the carvings, unable to look away—my sight fastened and faltered, ensnared and released, again and again, until I nearly lost my footing, spell bound by a vision too vast to comprehend. It was as if countless hands had once prayed in unison, chiseling belief into rock, sealing devotion into permanence through a single, endless rite etched across the mountain’s skin. cutting faith into stone, fixing devotion where time itself might stumble— It as though multitudes had gathered to perform a single, endless rite across the mountain’s skin. The figures multiplied the further I went—faces within faces, forms half-born, half-forgotten—like waves frozen mid-collapse in a petrified sea.

Legend says that a crore of gods once paused here on a route to Kailash, those who failed to rise at dawn absorbed into stone. Standing there, the tale felt less like hearsay and more like something handed down by the hills, old as dust and just as faithful. The place carried the story the way elders carry proverb softly and patiently until it felt the moment had been set in amber.

At last my gaze settled on the legend, the enigma. At its heart—the axis upon which all else turned—loomed Unakotiswara Kal Bhairava: Shiva in silent vigilance, his thirty-foot visage watching centuries pass like a river that gives no account of itself, carving a course none may foretell, a current that remembers all yet parts with nothing. Beneath that unblinking presence, I felt unbearably small, as though the very sky itself stooped to take my measure.

Once you visit Unakoti Something of Unakoti stays behind—like a half-remembered proverb, or a name caught on the tongue. And perhaps that is its true power: not what it reveals, but what it leaves unfinished like daring you return and see what you missed.

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