On the eve of India flying to the moon, Sameer Bhai is awoken by noises in the lower berth of the train heading from Mumbai to his home, Meerut. He prays to the god of moonlight infiltrating through the window bars to not reveal his face. His phone buzzes. Light, vulgar light, he thinks, shoving the brick into his pants. He invokes the god of pitch dark. Two mouthpieces of Ram are prowling the train like rabid dogs on the loose. One is rattling a stick against the metal frame of the bunk beds. The other is stripping the railway’s itchy brown blanket off randomly selected passengers’ faces to examine their god markers. Sameer Bhai invokes the god of non-inspection, gods of panic and composure under panic. He’s felt this exact panic so frequently, even his panic has fatigue. Go back to where your god is from, the men will say when they skin him. But what is god to a khadi trader on the road for nineteen days a month. His god is the god of station benches, mosquito free hotel-rooms, god of secret pant pockets with folded cash, god of bump-free transit so the fragile spirals of bhakarwadi he’s bringing his children do not crush to powder. The footsteps lurk closer. He can see his blue suitcase under the opposite berth inside which is a fresh sample of the tri-color flag. He started selling flags—produced at the same graham udyog he buys khadi from—as a Hail Mary in these recessionary times to get over the pandemic slump. If the flag could send Baby Uncle to the moon, he is reminded of his friend/ex-friend/buyer’s gold-toothed smile, surely its presence can save his life.

Baby Uncle, the shopkeeper, is a massive flirt when it comes to gods. Customer is god, guest is god, money with the grinning head of Gandhi is god. And god? Also god but a lesser god. In college Baby Uncle used to rattle the shoulders of his comrades screaming Marx is god! Now he bends to the god of fast trains, god of please don’t sweat or my rancid armpits might repel the lady buyers. God of chilled Pepsi to convert window shopper into loyal customer. He rarely suspends the gods of commerce unless Sameer Bhai—whom he met even before he’d learnt how to organise the cash till—was passing through Bombay. Their togetherness flourished on the god of film matinees. Sameer Bhai’s arrival once meant Baby Uncle would abandon his shop to the care of his errant assistants and off the couple scurried, to Regal or Metro Talkies. Two men in their late-forties shapeshifting into college-bunking-teenagers sharing popcorn, samosas, paan in the dark. They flamed the gods of 75mm, of sneaky weekday leisure, of rebirthing long-dead youth. Hands slung over shoulders, shared whispers harping guesses in a whodunnit.

In the darkness of the patrolled train, Sameer Bhai now prays, Please, not me. To induce composure, he conjures a happy place. Baby Uncle and him lounging by a paan stall with other men from Uncle’s wholesale market, collectively cursing the fathers of the nation. Gods of venting, gods of deliciously filthy curses hurled at the chronically dug-up roads, the incomplete underground line. All the tobacco-chewing men releasing gods of overlapping scarlet spits into bottomless ditches of split open streets, joking, We can’t stitch up a road but are headed to the moon. And yet Baby Uncle persistent they celebrate the impending landing, buying everyone chai, because the flag that Sameer Bhai sold to Baby Uncle—a slow moving piece of deadstock that Baby Uncle, the shrewd inventory-keeper would otherwise not purchase outside of national holidays—became one of five flags that was bought by the space organization’s subsidiary. They’d posted Baby Uncle a letter informing him that one of his dear goods would be hoisted on the moon. How tragic that Sameer Bhai discovered Baby Uncle’s scintillating news through a common friend. How Baby Uncle would have otherwise flooded his phone with seventeen missed calls and typo-riddled texts inviting him home to celebrate with pav bhaji and biryani.

Since the news spread, customers flooded Baby Uncle’s shop. Sameer Bhai had been Baby Uncle’s particular god—and although Baby Uncle acknowledges the confluence of sheer luck and Bhai’s contribution to his accidental famedom, at home, he prances around, singing, Sindhi Maanu on the moon. He gloats with pride, pronouncing his contribution to Sindhi gods. He walks through his existence playing Sindhi Bingo, jumping on the sofa if a Sindhi actress comes on advertising a toilet cleaner. She’s only half Sindhi, his wife rolls her eyes and irked, he goes on to list full Sindhi celebrities and she reminds him they’re an assortment of flop shows. When will you understand, he scowls, Sindhis are a people who had nothing, we came on trains with empty pockets. Baby Uncle’s god of wanting to belong, of being one of some whole, any whole holy whole is so vast, even the moon’s spotlight falls short to plaster that void. Zero, he insists, is what we had when we came from Sindh. At which Baby Uncle’s father interjects, You were born in Ulhasnagar, stupid potato. When did you sip a speck of Sindh’s air? We did not not have anything. When I boarded the train in Lahore I had eighty rupees in my pant—you know its value in ‘46? So am I not pushing your work forward, Baby Uncle says. Not you, his father says, Sameer Bhai has taken us to the moon.

Baby Uncle’s father, the original shopkeeper, also genuflects to several gods. God of ageing, dentures, stents in heart. His first god is a god he cannot touch. It resides in his old country, in Nawabshah district, in a lane called ‘vichejo rasto’, the ‘middle road’ where Sindhi speaking folks rested at midday, lounging upon a concrete water tank. One afternoon, a stony growth, the size of a grenade was spotted on the tank. Unexplainable. Unextractable. And every single person, Sikh Muslim Vishnu bhakt on crossing the road began touching the stone as if it was a god. Now his gods are lost cousins, pride of never having to spend a night in a camp (shudder.) Richer acquaintances who seed-funded his shop, one of 58 shops in the market that can be walked in the shape of a giant S, a canopy of loose electrical wires overhead. Out of 58, 25 owners are Hindu (18 Sindhi; 7 Marwari), 26 Muslim, 3 Sikhs, 4 Sheikhs. Scent of agarbatti and urine. The pull-chain flush in the open latrine has been defunct since the last three governments and shopwallahs trot to McDonalds if they have to shit. From within such an obsolete commercial temple—a 9×5 feet rectangle of creaking wood slats and rusting mirrors and headless mannequins, emanates the flag that will now be planted on the moon. Don’t you think, he tells Baby Uncle, that I don’t notice how you’ve stopped inviting Sameer home. His son, Baby Uncle, named so for the cleft in his chin and a buttery face incapable of sprouting hair, rather be a devotee of money and opportunism and cutthroat salesmanship, he’d rather even be godless—that is acceptable to his father, but his son being cold to a friend, the multiplier of his bread no less—is a stone the old man cannot digest. The problem is Baby Uncle’s father, when he arrived in the new nation as a boy, barely fifteen, sought out god, not for god, but for friendship—to find people like him who’d been forced into expulsion. He desired the god of common sorrow. He’d found his people in a Gurudwara prostrate before the Guru Granth Sahib—the sacred text resting on a satin pillow. Although he’d go on to read the text—a compilation of hymns by Sikh, Sufi, Hindu and Muslim saints and sages, it is for the wholehearted hugs and backslaps of his friends that he returns to the Gurudwara every Sunday, not the hallowed touch of any priest.

And which god’s feet does Baby Uncle touch? The man knows more Bollywood songs than prayers. Has no fixed temple but convenience. Some mornings if the train is late he stops outside the temple and drops a five rupee coin into the straw-weaver mai’s plate asking her to feed a cow on his behalf. Baby Uncle eats chicken, mutton, fish, and pork. And also beef from his Bohri neighbour’s dabba bismillah and tells his wife, Don’t tell anyone, I loved it. There is a god on earth and it’s called haleem. But that is from a time when Baby Uncle still lunched with his neighbours—men petalled like school children, sitting in cross-legged circles of four or five. They unassembled their identical four-tier steel lunch boxes and moved the circular containers round and round wiping the vegetable and meat curries clean until they lost track of which dabba belonged to which set and the housewives shook their heads at receiving mismatched lunch boxes that still funnily held up on their own. Then, the virus. And like a contagion it spread—a rumour that Muslim men were on a mission to contaminate Hindu plates and bowls with their saliva to spread the disease. The god of mixing curries was therefore fired. The god of paan sharing and rust-thick spits blending on walls like communal cocktail stains; fired. Baby Uncle’s fear of being alienated by fellow Sindhi shopkeepers superseded his love of haleem. It was in such a dizziness of segregation, that Sameer Bhai arrived at Baby Uncle’s shop with his suitcase of flags. The two mourned the closure of cinema halls, their three hours of stealthy reprieve. And sure, Baby Uncle unburdened Sameer Bhai off some of his flags, but when Bhai returned the change he owed Baby Uncle for the transaction, counting the bundle of bank-fresh notes by licking the tip of his thumb with the slickest bit of his spit, fear ran like capillaries through Baby Uncle’s body. Sameer Bhai’s hand hung extended as Uncle pointed Bhai drop the cash on the shop’s stoop. He promised Sameer Bhai he’d send him a pirated link to any new movie he’d find online until they could hit the screens again. To which Sameer Bhai said, I don’t think this is a friendship I want, Baby, if you are only okay with me in the dark. Since, Baby Uncle eats his lunch alone and when he’s done admonishing his assistants and swatting the flies, he bows his lonely head into the god of Whatsapp University. Yoga is god, the University says. Hanuman is god. Cow urine is god. Drinking cow urine after a downward dog while reciting Hanuman’s song, big big god. Baby Uncle googles the words to Hanuman Chalisa. The words are Sanskrit. He only speaks Sindhi, Hindi, enough Marathi to butter up a traffic cop and numbers in Tamil, Cantonese and Afrikaans to bargain with customers. So he finds it easier to learn the prayer by setting it to a sleazy and upbeat Bollywood song that he sings to his assistants. The beat is catchy, they drum along. He records a sample and drops it into the pool of the University, broadcasting the musical offering to every contact in his messenger.

The satellite will soon propel into the lunar surface. The leader across newshours is arousing himself with his own voice. With every step science takes, our nation is getting closer to god. His voice triggers the dance of all the gods that reside in the distance between his disciples and the moon. God of borrowed pride, rowdy joy, of a pelvic thrusting man who screams into the vox-pop news camera, For how long have we let America China Russia mock us, our poverty and naked children, we’ll serve them our revenge today. God of roadside dancing, jingoistic jazz and snaring drums. Inside the train, deathly silence. The stick rattling against the tiered beds, a long metallic trill. Sameer Bhai levels with the god of death. Can you at least give me the pleasure, dear death, to not let me perish as a statistic, as a headline on page eight in a fickle news cycle. Ravage me, sure, but let me have a death that is about me, not my god. The men enter his coach. Sameer Bhai gets a peek of their boyish uniform—loose sepia shorts and baggy shirts. Missionaries of justice, Bhai thinks, and dressed like deflated paper bags. The man frisking passengers spots a light from a phone, buzzing. Sameer Bhai pulls out his stupid noise-maker. To silence it, he fumbles between the Back and Home controls, accidentally playing a file—Baby Uncle’s vocal offering. The duo run towards his berth, one at each end. One of them yells, Madarchod, this is an insult to Hanuman. But it’s so damn peppy, the other responds, It’ll be a blockbuster on Ram Navmi. Back and forth the men go, if they should uncover the man playing the tune. God’s name bops and dances to the beat of the sleaze. Anytime now, the cylinders will be fired. Aren’t you over the moon?

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This story was a runner-up in The Desperate Literature Short Story Prize 2023. You can buy a copy of Eleven Stories, containing GODS OF FATHERS, as well as the rest of the shortlist and the winning story, here.

Preeti Vangani is an Indian poet and writer based in San Francisco. She is the author of Mother Tongue Apologize (winner of the Redleaf India Poetry Prize, 2019). Her poems appear in Poem-a-Day, Slowdown Podcast, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, The Margins, Threepenny Review and elsewhere. Her debut short story won the Pen/Robert J. Dau prize in 2022, and other stories have been published in Variant Lit and The Georgia Review. Her second book of poems Fifty Mothers is forthcoming from River River Books in February 2026. Twitter: @Pscripturient