“Under soma, he could feel the old man's power. And the feeling was like standing at the edge of the ocean — not the gentle ocean of Juhu Beach on a Sunday morning but the deep ocean, the abyssal ocean, the ocean that goes down eleven kilometres and contains things that have never seen light. The old man's power was that ocean: vast, dark, incomprehensible, and entirely contained within a body that sat in a wooden chair and drank from a clay bottle and told stories about the time he'd fought the Kshatriya king Kartavirya Arjuna and accidentally cut down a forest because the axe got away from him.”