Riya Bhattacharya 1 The sun hung low in the Kolkata sky, its light strangely muted as if nature itself was holding its breath. The city buzzed with excitement over the impending solar eclipse, the rare astronomical event that had drawn both superstition and science into equal frenzy. But sixteen-year-old Isha Sen couldn’t care less. Trapped in her family’s ancestral home in North Kolkata, a crumbling mansion older than the city’s electric lines, she fidgeted through incense smoke and the endless drone of priests chanting shlokas. Her mother had insisted they be there for “tradition,” and her grandmother, Dida, had only…