<p>Trauma tourism refers to the emotional return to a past traumatic event, marked by a disrupted relationship with the present. Indian <i>Itihāsa</i> traditions provide a rich psychological archive, offering layered depictions of emotional distress, memory, and moral conflict. The narrative complexity of the Mahābhārata offers a useful framework for understanding trauma and its temporal effects on the human psyche. In this context, repeatedly revisiting a past psychological wound can be understood as a form of trauma tourism, where the traumatic moment becomes a recurrent emotional destination rather than a memory integrated into the present. For some characters, particularly those positioned with relative social privilege, this repetitive return can form what this paper calls privileged peripeteia: a turning point structured through prolonged attachment to loss rather than movement toward closure. This study examines how alternative relational and temporal frameworks may interrupt the cycle of trauma tourism and privileged peripeteia, focusing on Mahasweta Devi’s <i>After Kurukshetra</i>. In the novella, Uttara’s grief following the Kurukshetra war exemplifies this pattern, especially when contrasted with the five women from the folk of <i>Lokavritta</i>, whose responses reflect different social, material, and communal orientations to mourning. Uttara remains psychologically aligned with the original traumatic moment, repeatedly reimagining Abhimanyu’s death. For her, releasing the trauma risks erasure; repetition becomes preservation. Through this process, Abhimanyu’s death becomes singular rather than collective, producing a temporal condition comparable to the Aristotelian framing of hubris as an excess of attachment rather than a moral flaw.</p>