“The Operator looked at the mandala turning beneath his feet. He could feel the masks inside him — stacked like nesting dolls, each one containing a life, a world, a set of senses and memories and loves and fears. The salt-harvester Vikram was there — the calloused feet, the white dhoti, the knowledge of brine and crystal. The swamp-walker was there — the waist-deep mire, the Blue Fungus, the moon. And beneath them, deeper, older, the masks he had worn in parallels he could barely remember — a fisherman, a priest, a child running through monsoon rain, a woman giving birth in a cave, a soldier dying in a field of poppies, a musician playing a veena in an empty temple, a dog sleeping in the sun.”