Legend tells of a ferocious tiger, a maneater, haunting the forests surrounding the city of Mysore long after the fall of its ruler. Curiously, it never took domestic animals, nor did it ever threaten the city’s people.

What felt like every man, woman and child in all this teeming city was on the streets, sweating and swearing, chatting and careening through stalls, bazaars, offices and homes that seemed so closely pressed together it was a wonder the entire thing did not collapse in on itself in a jumbled heap of colour and confusion.

Like this matchstick thing. Imagine if she went and said to an adult that she had actual conversations with people she could see and hear in the flame of a matchstick. Yeah. That would not work out well for anyone.

Again, the grief returned, and the king feared that it would encompass him as it had done so many times, but although it curled between his legs and up his back, it did not drown him. “I wish to build a monument to one I have lost. A great remembrance, the greatest ever built in all the Hind…

The king, his courtiers, the society—no one would accept it! lamented my mind. There’s going to be no peace for her now on. For the first time in my life, my anguished heart berated a god. Why have you wounded my friend with the arrows of desire, Krishna? Don’t you have the milkmaids’ to fawn over you? Don’t you have your divine Radha?

The Empire of Hindustan is a parliamentary constitutional monarchy roughly covering the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. It is the largest country in the world by population as well as the largest economy in terms of nominal GDP, although USA and the German Empire have high per capita GDP. Along with the Deccan Confederation, it is one of the two major powers in the South Asian region.