Sometimes people left their sadnesses outside the girl’s cave, where they played in the sand until the ocean spirits came to fetch them. Sometimes they waited, because their sadness was too heavy, or it did not wish to part. Those who waited were sometimes there for centuries, or came back every year as though on annual pilgrimage
On the banks of the Ganges, west of the Sundarbans and east of Banaras, a little village called Kal echoed with an ear-splitting boom. It came from inside a tiny mud-hut of a boat-maker called Gangadharan. In fact, it was the fourteenth accident of the day, but the walls of the fragile-looking hut remained miraculously intact.
The screens in the projecting room were black when she entered. The door sealed behind her, shutting out the light. A prickle of something like nervousness traveled her skin. It wasn’t that she mistrusted Adonis; his intentions were nothing but good. No, this was a different sort of nerves. Something she hadn’t felt since… oh, maybe college?
The gods have always flitted in and out of my dreams, their words never making any sense to me – a lowly human. They never seem to detect me listening in the dark or, if they are aware of my presence, they do not care. Only on that hot, humid night did any of them try to speak to me.
A sort of adjacent sub-city swallowed by Dhaka a hundred years ago, a pustule avoided by even the moderately desperate homeless, one step away from being cluster bombed into oblivion by the satellites above.