Without the axiom, things cannot hold. It all falls apart very quickly.

If allegories unfold and any one of the above is true, you’re a speck in the larger order of things, useless, leading a pointless life.

She sits naked in the bathtub – a soupy mixture of water and milk, saffron and incense – she looks at the misty valley lit up with fluorescent lights. The Ganges at dusk. Lighted lamps floating away, gently, carrying secret sins.

The sound of her mother’s voice will break the glasshouse she has built around herself, a space devoid (of melodrama, of madness) ~ she’d rather go about doing her yogic routines.

Maybe she is wrong about her marriage. Perhaps there is love, a love defined by marriage. Devoted, spiteful love.

Memory is fiction, she has decided, every detail mysteriously metamorphoses into something else. Nothing is stable.

And I never thought this day would come, but here I am, sitting in front of the ritual fire, repeating Sanskrit mantras I don’t understand. He’s looking at me now, and I can feel it on my skin. We are getting married. Damini is locked away somewhere in a room, Lakshmi is at Lord Krishna’s feet in the heavens, and I’m going to be his wife.

Dreams? Yours are skewed versions of your everyday reality. Of Java, Oracle and servers, greasy subway trains and skyscrapers. You do fall off the precipice sometimes, naked, fly into three-dimensional turquoise oceans. At times you see pixels around you. Sperms. Electrons and black holes, the matrix, 0’s and 1’s, polarised light.