Muniandy

A Tamil tea shop owner who has run a filter coffee and chai counter two streets from the Jagannath Temple's eastern gate for eighteen years. He came from Madurai because Madurai had stopped feeling like home and Puri felt possible, which was enough of a reason. He reads people the way structural engineers read buildings. The accumulated precision of long practice. No interest in being fooled. By the end of a stranger's first week, he knows their order, their arrival time, and the approximate shape of whatever they're carrying. On the morning of the first disrupted Rath Yatra, he found a small stone in the lane outside his shop. Compressed, wrong in his hand, denser than it should have been. He kept it under the counter because he recognised it as evidence of something, without knowing what. For fifteen of his eighteen years in Puri, the chariot moved. He has lived two minutes from the temple for long enough to understand that this matters. Theologically is not the word he would use. Factually is. He would like to know why it stopped. That is as far as his explanation goes. It is enough.