Aranyani closed her eyes and stayed that way for a while. Aman noticed the faint green glow of the tattoo on her forearm. She opened her eyes and touched Aman’s forehead, and he plunged into a deep sleep.

When he opened his eyes, he was in a dream sitting cross-legged on a reed mat that ran around the inside edge of an oval hut. The bright lights hurt his eyes. He looked to his right and left, and saw ten people sitting with banana-leaf plates in front of them and a lavish spread in the centre. Every plate had a flickering blue flame swimming in a bowl of ghee. Looks like a celebration, Aman thought. But for what?

The four women and six men appeared to be in high spirits, gossiping and filling each other in on recent discoveries. To the side, a scribe cleaned his pankh, a peacock-feathered quill, and beside him stood two servers. Aman heard the men and women call for drinks and look on approvingly as their chalices were filled with sura paniyam. He saw the women cradle their hands over the fire on their plates, remarking on how auspicious this moment was. Three of the men appeared to be clan chiefs—their words were measured, and they had quivers on their backs. Two sadhus, with weathered bodies and long matted hair, sat silently, absorbed in contemplation. The odd one out in this gathering—apart from Aman—was the female child who sat on his right, wearing a milky-white gown, clearly uncomfortable in this gathering of adults.

From the corner of his eye, something got Aman’s attention. He had to turn and look again. Two plates away, right beside the little girl, at the head of the gathering, sat a man with four arms. Two of the arms emerged from his back; they were cupped together and, in their centre, sizzled a deep blue flame.

Aman looked down at his own banana leaf and spotted the same blue fire.

The man with four arms was draped in silk and adorned with many necklaces. On top of his head sat a black-and-gold crown with a crevice—this had another blue spark dancing in mid-air. Vine-like hair fell from under the crown on to his shoulders. The young girl nestled close to him—they seemed to have a filial bond.

Are they gods? Aman had never really given any kind of god a thought, let alone had dreams about them.

Aman heard one of the women boast about how she’d meditated for a couple of centuries at a stretch. Others responded with claims of their own.

The chief deity spoke. ‘You’ll really like that one! That one called apupa.’ He lifted a dish from the spread using one of his arms and placed it beside the girl. ‘It’s a barley cake sweetened with honey. Sautéed in kaccha milk and ghee.’

Aman observed that the food included dates, gooseberries, mangoes, lotus stalks, cucumbers, jujubes, water chestnuts, even wheat stew. But he was most intrigued by the sight of a large bowl with a yellow beverage, sprinkled with seeds of all shapes and sizes. The young girl, too, seemed to find it curious. ‘And that one? The yellow soup in the middle?’