In the Python's Den

Moon-lit battlements of a decaying palace quiver as a capricious maharajah, drunk on his own myth, snatches the bride of a low-born subedar and flings the man into a sandstone oubliette writhing with reticulated pythons—serpents coiled like imperial decrees, forked tongues tasting the salt of subjugation. Through latticed jharokhas the captive woman watches torchlight fracture on her husband’s upturned bayonet while the reptiles coil tighter, each scale a tessellation of colonial dread; she answers with a quivering raga that becomes a war-cry, scaling the octaves until her voice cracks the palace’s mirrored ceilings. Court eunuchs gamble on how long a mortal can out-stare death, palace astrologers cast horoscopes inked in venom, and the prince—his turban plumed with egret feathers—presides over this theater of cruelty as though it were a nautch performed solely for his obsidian eyes. Yet the pit is no mere grave: it is a crucible. Beneath the hiss of serpents the soldier recites the 108 names of Durga, each mantra a hammer against his manacles; overhead his wife distracts the harem by dancing the tandava until anklets bruise marble, her spinning silhouette a compass rose pointing toward revolt. When monsoon clouds bruise the sky, lightning stitches the zenana’s silk canopies to the battlements; the couple’s twin desperations converge—he climbs a knot of living snakes as she slits the royal hammam’s goat-hair awnings, both racing toward the ramparts where the palace’s stone tigers snarl at their own impotence. Their midnight collision atop the curtain wall sprays sparks across the Jumna: husband and wife, strangers to silhouette, back-lit by gunpowder stars, leap together into the river’s black mouth, leaving the prince clutching only the echo of ankle bells and a python skin slipping like a shed empire into the reeds.