Nisha had never been to a fireworks show before.

Her grandmother had told her stories about the Diwali celebrations in the big city — "Louder than thunder, brighter than a hundred suns" — but Nisha had rolled her eyes. How loud could it really be? She had heard thunder plenty of times from the safety of her bedroom, rain tapping the glass, distant rumbles rolling across the sky like furniture being dragged across a floor. Thunder was fine. Thunder was manageable.

Her father drove them to the riverbank at dusk. Hundreds of families were already gathered on the sandy shore, sitting on blankets and plastic sheets, children running between the legs of adults like excited puppies. The air smelled of roasted peanuts from a vendor's cart and the faint sulfur-sweetness of sparklers that some children were already waving in looping circles of gold.

"It starts at eight," her father said.

At 7:59, Nisha was licking the last of a mango ice cream bar, perfectly calm.

At 8:00, the world exploded.

The first rocket screamed upward from a barge in the middle of the river and burst into a chrysanthemum of red and gold. The boom hit Nisha's chest like a fist. Before she could catch her breath, three more went up — green, silver, violet — each one detonating with a crack that rattled her teeth. Then ten more. Then twenty. Then too many to count.

The sound was not like thunder at all. Thunder rolled and faded. This sound did not fade. It stacked. Each explosion layered on top of the last — booms, crackles, whistles, hisses — until the air itself seemed to vibrate like a drumhead. Nisha felt the sound in her feet, in her stomach, in the bones of her skull. The river reflected the fire back in wobbly pillars of color, doubling everything, so the sky and the water were both on fire at once.

Nisha pressed her hands over her ears, but the sound came through anyway. It was not just loud — it was everywhere. It was inside her. Her heart was beating in time with the explosions, or maybe the explosions were beating in time with her heart. She could not tell the difference.

When it finally stopped, ten minutes later, a silence settled over the riverbank that felt just as enormous as the noise had been. Smoke drifted across the water, smelling of gunpowder and burnt cardboard. Nisha's ears rang. Her hands were shaking.

"Well?" her father asked, grinning.

Nisha opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "I think," she said quietly, "the sky just cracked open."

That is what the Kaurava war drums sounded like on the field of Kurukshetra — not one sound but a hundred instruments erupting together, so loud that the earth shook and the sky seemed to split. The word the Gita uses is "tumula" — tumultuous, overwhelming. A sound that does not just enter your ears but takes over your body.