Nagarasi enters Hindu Rashtra, that lies in the Vindhyas, under the pretext of finding her great-xmany-grandfather, whom she calls appa, who left on a quest to recover a missing statue — but how does one search for a person who careens through the wind, so she instead goes to the place of Saras who cooks, not at all secretly, for her beef keema in a late afternoon.

'Days ago, in my dream, I saw your place submerging in an impending flood,' Nagarasi tells Saras. 'You should pack up and leave with me. We can finally live together in one place without me having to visit here, partly scared to death all the time, every other month.'

Giving a vague nod to her, Saras persuades her uncle Shravan, whom she calls papa, to tag along as they pursue Nagarasi's appa.

'Heard of any sightings of shed human-shaped skins in the last, say, ten... fifteen days,' Nagarasi asks trying to pin down Nagarasa's shedding day of the month in her memory.

Saras logs off her BAZ Signal with a 'Shit!' and a 'Fuck!' up in her lips and logs into HR Signal.

'Double SIM-carded lover, huh, love' whispers Nagarasi.

She takes a turn, nearly rams through an abandoned cow, brakes just in time, honks twice and speeds up again. 'Where...?'

'To the garden just around the corner.'

En-route, in a courtyard, bunch of priests spout mantras punctuated with svahas, but a temple looks abandoned and in ruins.

'Oh! Look the fuck at the state of things. Without sudras, the bamans, it'd seem, don't give a shit about the temple,' Nagarasi remarks to which Saras adds, 'No grandeur means, holy shit, yeh, no slaves — svaha.'

'Svaha,' Nagarasi chimes in and pulls over beside a pull-cart.

'Ram-ram,' she greets two families exiting the garden, eliciting from them vaguely confused looks.

'You should've said rum-rum' says Saras and Nagarasi asks 'Wasn't that what I said,' spitting out the nicotine gum.

They enter a garden that looks like a ruined Nede. Saras and Nagarasi bump into a statue that's headless, abandoned beneath a half-dead peepul tree whereon hangs a translucent shed human skin. On the headless statue's neck is a crevice large enough to bury a palm-leaf manuscript.

The statue stirs for a moment, the next moment something creeps out of the crevice and it's Nagarasa standing there saying 'There's nothing in there — just sunyata, just like always.'

Saras half-screams and so Nagarasi clings to her.

It's when Shravan enters the scene does Nagarasa take the form of a huge wise serpent and begins to charge.

'YEPPA, he's NO stranger,' screams Nagarasi. 'That's my would-be's appa.'

Nagarasa transforms back into his original form and speaks: 'Buddha received a manuscript of my great-xmany-grandmother. It's more like he ran with it. That's just half of it. He'd be first in line everytime there was a feast of beef. I've heard it in screams and in dreams. Post-feast, he'd sleep two days straight and you wake him up and ask what's up, he'd say he's been meditating. That's not all. The Great Buddha spoke fluent Thamizh but with a half-funny accent. In dreams and in screams.' 

'So I hear,' speaks Nagarasi, 'but if Saras can't leave here, I'll stay here with her.'

'And you'd say, what, you came here looking for me. Look, tomorrow is the day of the month you shed your skin,' Nagarasa says tapping the side of her temple. 'Your skin tone will no longer look like it belongs in here.’

Nagarasi half-screams, climbs up a half-alive peepul tree and starts to shed.

'You HEAR me out, ILLAVARASI — this is NOT the BAZ.'

...

It was only when the number of those who died fighting in the pan-Indian reality war-game show called Who's the Real Kshatriya, funded and profited by feudo-capitalist banias, rose above seven million did people wake up to the massive massacre hidden in plain sight.

In its aftermath, one by one, the intermediate castes, all the young once-wannabe neo-kshatriyas, declared themselves casteless (something Iyothee Thassar hoped their grandpas became) finally. The mass movements that ensued against Hindu Rashtra triggered state terrorism in which hundreds of thousands were massacred again and thousands were tortured in custody.

Eventually, it was a tsunami that pulled apart Hindu Rashtra's paramilitary bases around the de-facto Dravidanadu and the caste-capitalists pulled back to the Vindhyas.

Meanwhile with the Native and Black people forming the ZAZ in Turtle Island (with Turtlians preventing the ability of Israel to churn out weapons, to say nothing of the fall in Saudi arms import, with Russia, South Korea and Europe diverting defence funding to public healthcare post-Vivus, military-industrial complex died a fast death and Palestine was free at last, so were Kashmir, Eelam, Rojava...) and with China's excessive production dwindling owing to it being submerged in water every other month — in what remained of Dravidanadu was established the Bahujan Autonomous Zone (peopled with casteless Dalits, Adivasis, minorities and the now casteless formerly intermediate castes) in whose conscience Fatima Begum and Savitribai reside alongside Ambedkar and Periyar.

Many casteless Bahujans from the Vindhyas migrated to BAZ. The few remaining dark-secret Hindu Rashtra pockets in BAZ were lit up and neutralizized. Planet Earth began to spin again at its regular pace as land, air and sea became demilitarized.

...

No sooner Nagarasi sheds her skin whistling as she does a serpentwithfeet song than does Saras start to kiss her in the mouth.

As Nagarasa is persuading Shravan to send Saras with Nagarasi, from behind the headless statue emerges a boy holding the head of Buddha.

His biological father who died as he ejaculated him inside his mother called him nothing, but his mother who died as she birthed him named him Kathir. At the age of three, Kathir developed the natural ability, an involuntary superpower of sorts, to spit inside the fire pit everytime the priests of Hindu Rashtra raised yajnas. His uncle Shravan chose on most occasions to hide him from public view as he was deemed a bad omen.

'Kathir is just eleven,' Shravan implores Nagarasa. 'If only you'd take him, too, with you... It's for his own safety.'

Head of Buddha safe in a bag, that holds Oru Paisa Thamizhan, Nagarasa along with Kathir lingers for Nagarasi and Saras a while, then he says 'The rest of Buddha's on you grownups now' as they begin to pace slowly away from the Vindhyas. Nagarasi holds the key to the car named Jotirao.

As the Musk spaceship to Mars (peopled with 1111 billionaires from around the globe including the 11 formerly Indian billionaires along with 111 technicians) explodes midair, Saras alerts Nagarasi 'Your papa is leaving the Hindu Rashtra' and Nagarasi beseeches Saras 'Hush the fuck up and kiss.'