“The fireworks started at eight. Mysore Dussehra was not Bangalore Dussehra — it was not the scattered, neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood affair of a city too large to coordinate. Mysore Dussehra was an institution. The palace lit with a hundred thousand bulbs. The procession — caparisoned elephants, tableaux, the Goddess Chamundeshwari carried through streets that had hosted this procession for four hundred years. And the fireworks: thirty minutes of controlled explosions over the palace grounds that turned the night sky into something that belonged in a mythology painting.”