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Shiva arrives in orderly Meluha, whose people hail him as a saviour; its life-extending Somras and feud with the Chandravanshis test his judgment.
A leader handed a great destiny he never asked for is torn between wanting a quiet life and the role others expect of him. His first test of whether he deserves it is to ask whether his own people will be better off.
If illness, disability or miscarriage is explained as punishment for sins in a previous life, then those who suffer them can be marked and shut out as untouchable. The belief turns bad luck into guilt and makes exclusion look like justice, much as caste does.
Someone who loves a person branded by an unjust rule must work out whether he objects to the rule itself or only to that person being caught by it. The first leads to changing the system; the second only rescues one individual from it.
A people forced to fight a neighbour almost every month just to stay on its land may decide the only route to peace is to leave altogether. A stronger, richer society can then win them over with a simple bargain: an easy life in return for living peacefully, paying taxes and obeying the law.
A society confident in its laws can afford to teach even its soldiers to expect the best of strangers. That same openness raises an awkward question when the society pins its hopes on someone who has only just arrived.
A rich, orderly society facing a crisis it cannot solve becomes desperate for rescue and waits on a prophesied outsider. That longing for salvation shapes its politics as much as its laws do.
The rule-bound empire's rivals organise their life around passion, beauty and freedom rather than order and law. Set side by side, the two show that the strict society and the free one each have their own appeal and their own costs.