Each night Leela screams but no sound broadcasts. Each night presses its flesh into the cavity that
once was Leela. Each night blooms into an ordinary day.
They are spheres of light with orange-red tails; incandescent, ethereal tadpoles falling towards you. A shudder permeates your bones as the destructive aura of the meteorites becomes clear. It replaces your awe with fear.
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?
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.
Across the endless night a lone match head travelled, lit at one end. It was like a star had been given life and fled its fixed position in the heavens. It was beautiful. And as it continued its lazy arc across the cosmos it came into clearer focus, growing to the size of a fingernail…
To his right, a nala yawned, splitting the Meena Bazaar road in two. Trash oozed from the concavity as rivulets of sewage trickled past it. Plastic bags of green, blue, red, pink, white, and black covered the cleft. He sensed them crinkle in a corner, right near the cemented bricks that fenced the nala from the road, and a rat emerged from underneath, sitting atop bloated polyethene.
The trolls washed against Devi 1.0 in thundering armies, calling into question her very existence, for daring to be—she was an insult to the real goddesses that bless the glorious nation of India by mimicking them, this quasi-Parvati, this impostor-Durga, this coded whore trying to steal followers from the true deities