Vignette 1: The Betel Cart Prophet
Shivamma had been wrapping betel leaves on the corner near the old temple for thirty-six years. Her fingers moved with a rhythm older than the bypass road that now looped like a lazy snake around Nelamangala. Her cart—painted once in garish blues and yellows, now dulled by dust and diesel—was more familiar to the locals than the prayer bell at the adjacent shrine.
That morning, as rain teased the cracked earth with false promises, she wrapped an extra leaf, tucked in a clove, and handed it to the autorickshaw driver without looking up.
“You’ll find your son in Kunigal. He works in a rice mill. Goes by Chinna now.”
He paused, halfway through lighting a bidi. “How do you—?”
Shivamma just smiled, wiping her hands on her faded cotton sari. Word traveled fast in these parts—faster than buses, faster than sorrow. But she listened more than she spoke, and sometimes, she knew before anyone said a word.
That evening, after the last paan had been sold and the temple gong quieted, Shivamma sat back on her stool and whispered to herself, “Even in Nelamangala, destinies pass through like trucks on NH75. You just need to know when to wave them down.”
Vignette 2: Interlude at Chikkanahalli Gate
Shreyas had a drone in his backpack and a lie on his lips. He told his mother he was studying coding at a friend’s house, but instead he hopped a BMTC bus from Yeshwanthpur to film sunsets over farmlands and abandoned brick kilns.
He liked the symmetry of power lines. The romance of half-demolished warehouses. There was poetry, he thought, in the collision between green fields and half-baked tech parks. Nelamangala wasn’t city or village—it was molasses in motion.
Perched on a boulder near Chikkanahalli Gate, he launched the drone and watched it blink into the wide-orange sky. As it hovered over a group of kids playing cricket beside an idle JCB, an old man looked up from his cycle and asked, “Is that your toy or your future?”
Shreyas laughed nervously. “Both, maybe.”
The man nodded sagely, as if confirming a calculation. “This place. She’s neither Bengaluru nor elsewhere. But if you listen carefully, Nelamangala will teach you how to leave, and why to stay.”
The drone returned home with 19% battery. Shreyas packed up and rode the twilight bus back toward the city, unsure if he was coming from somewhere or going to it.
Vignette 3: Sunday, With Silence
Radha and Rajesh met every Sunday under the gulmohar near the shuttered textile warehouse. They’d been married thirty-two years, shared a life stitched together from secondhand dreams and savings accounts.
Now they met in silence, as though words had retired before they had.
He brought sweet buns from the Iyengar bakery. She brought jasmine from the temple. They sat together, watching a construction crew dig a foundation that no one asked for.
“You remember,” Rajesh finally said, “how this land used to flood every monsoon?”
Radha smiled, a small sideways one that barely lifted her lips. “And how your scooter would drown, every time.”
He chuckled. “Still better than the traffic now.”
After a pause, she murmured, “I don’t recognize this place. Not anymore.”
Rajesh sighed. “It’s not meant to be recognized. Nelamangala just holds a mirror—and changes what it shows.”
The breeze carried the smell of concrete dust and blooming rain trees. They sat a while longer, two aging silhouettes folding into the rhythm of an unfamiliar skyline.
