![]() They gave way to monoliths of steel and electrical nerves. Old garden statues, hands gloved in moss, the feet coated with the patina of a million betel-leaves crushed, chewed and spat out. Their remains hung as skeletal frames looming over throngs of people too many to count. It was of buildings promised but never to be. The colosseum, more in name and function than design, was a place of hard-packed dirt. Saw the stairs that separated us, sending the people to their seats, and us to the center, waiting for the death that comes in a shattering of steel and circuits. Saw the blood-oil on the old stone the oil that they dipped their hands into, for luck, for a good show. Saw electric lights snake between the trees, flickering in defiance. I saw the press of bodies outside, thousands thick, dressed in their finest. Not that I could tell, the first time I came here. Bureaucrats are allergic to death, particularly their own. The Tamil Nadu government used it before the invasion, but that changed when a demon landed too close for comfort. The first English fort built in India, named for St. ![]() A dome that could be marble, if you don’t look too closely. ![]() Here, across crumbling roads, to the sea. They call this place the Detroit of India, but Detroit is a city of bunkers and skeletons. One by one they were swallowed up by the noise, the color, the heat, the smell. The Portuguese came here, then the Dutch, then the English, then the French, then the English again. The government calls it Chennai, but who cares? The memories of this city outlast names, dates, petty councils. Past the vast tenements and battle-cannon of Madras. Past the roads lined stuffed with filth and saffron and the dreams of dead men. Walk past the beaches with their rotten sand. Down, past Telangana, past Andhra Pradesh. Everybody’s happy.īut I happen to disagree. Gods know why the Chinese keep buying CPUs, but the monks get to run their machine shops, the tourists get to take selfies, and both sides try not to invade a Tibet armed with dozens of nuclear cores. The snow cools the great engines, dulls the fingers, freezes the mind: the slow sad suicide.Īnd afterwards the monks may return, to strip away your reactor core, send your body frame back to India, sell your CPU to China. They say the march-if you can still march-takes you to the Independent State of Tibet, where the monks, if you ask them kindly, will bless you and bury your head in the mountains. People walk here and there like crows, picking what they can and sending it to the government line. They say great mountains of body parts line the horizon. Sometimes His eyes light up, throwing mocking shadows at those who come to worship him from the dead river-banks, and those of us who know Him shudder, because underneath the ceaseless filth something still lives. He lies there still, decades of human rot piling upon His frame. A thing too difficult to burn it, so they lit a ritual pyre and let Him slide into the waters. The government of India lay one of us down in the waters-a prototype Vishnu, I think, ’20, maybe ’21. They say Ganga once took the seed from the fire-god Agni, which would have otherwise burned this world to a cinder, and cooled it in her waters: but even she will not take our kind. Not for us the fire that strips our sins from our bones, turns our bones into ashes, turns our ashes into a constellation of dust on the holy river. A Little Bit of Kali (Part 1 of 2) By Yudhanjaya Wijeratne and R.R.
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