Meenakshi Varadhan Part 1: The White Desert The train had left him at Bhuj, dusty and sun-beaten, a town that seemed more like the last outpost before the world ended. From there Kabir Deshmukh rode in a rattling jeep to the edge of the Rann, the salt flats spreading like a white ocean under the burning sky. He was thirty-eight, an archaeologist who had mapped ruins in Rajasthan and caves in Maharashtra, but nothing had prepared him for the silence of this desert. No trees, no rivers, just the crunch of crystallized salt under his boots and the horizon quivering…
