Outside the single-screen cinema, the line was a braided rope of expectation: schoolboys with battered footballs, elders still smelling of cedar and prayer, women with bangles clicking time to the ticket window. The poster — a cropped, sun-bleached face, a spear caught in light — promised thunder. The title in Devanagari made the foreign familiar, each curve inviting the crowd to step into myth translated not only in words but in rhythm and heart.