Swastik Sengupta shares a political allegory capturing the mind of a youth growing up in a declining state.
As far back as memory takes me there has always been that giant white mound of piety and purity present, stuck to the concrete cityscape as if some divine anchor from the past still holding on with all it’s might even when the seas have dried up and in its dried, skeletal track flows something entirely other than water. In the years when I was but a fledgling clinging to my mother’s frame, she had told me the tale of the Great Lord housed there as is expected of all mothers to bestow in a mixture of chide and affection upon their child in the long line of tradition springing from some illusionary first mother and her child. This Lord whose name was a greeting to the living and a parting to the gone was courage itself, a warrior among warriors with strength that could sustain all of heaven and earth unfallen on a solitary fingertip, wielding justice that would burn any daemon to the ground if it dared to so much as raise a word of ill will towards his devotees and servitors whom he loved and was compassionate for more than any other fact of creation.