That’s when I spot him. An elderly man walking along the roadside, a massive bundle balanced on his head. He seems to turn at the sound of my car. I pull over before I’ve decided to.

I lean back and open the rear door. He’s struggling to get the bundle down off his head, so I step out to help him with it. It’s heavy. Much heavier than a man that size and that age has any business carrying. I get it into the back and he climbs in after it.

He needs to reach the bridge, three or four kilometers up. From there he’ll catch a bus. He’s coming back from Prayagraj, he tells me, where he’d gone for the Ardh Kumbh.

Subscribe now

I ask where he’s headed.

“About fifty, sixty kilometers away.”

“Where exactly?”

“A big rock above the river bank.”

Does he have a house there?

“Sort of. But not exactly. The rock is the roof over my head.”

What? For a moment there, I’m lost for words.

Then I ask, what does he do there?

“Apna chai banate hain, aur bhajan gaate hain.” I make my tea, and I sing songs for God.

Does he live alone? With family? Some community of other renunciates, maybe, the way they cluster in these hills?

“Nahi. Aas paas log ho toh bhajan theek se gaa nahi sakte.” No. If there are people around, you can’t really sing to God properly.

Then, like he’s explaining something obvious: “Bhajan ke liye ekaant zaroori hai.” Devotion needs solitude.

I keep driving. I’m doing the math in my head and it isn’t adding up to anything I recognize. This man lives under a rock. Alone. Fifty kilometers from the nearest anything. He spends his days making tea and singing to God, and he’s just told me that other people would ruin it. Everything he owns is riding in one cloth bundle in my back seat.

I offer to drive him the whole way. All fifty kilometers, to the rock itself. I want to see it. I want to see the place where a man lives with the sky for a ceiling and no audience for his devotion.

He firmly declines. He doesn’t explain. I don’t press.

The bridge arrives way too soon.

Before he gets out, he reaches into his bundle and pulls out a guava. He offers it to me, this gift, brought all the way from Prayagraj. I help lift the bundle back onto his head, the weight settling into the groove there. As I drive off, I watch him get smaller in the rear view mirror until the road takes him.

The guava sits on the dashboard the rest of the drive. Its scent fills the car.

This is an excerpt from Savage Pilgrim, my memoir exploring India’s spiritual underground. The book goes into print next week.

Day Two. It's close to 8 PM when I stepped out of my lodge hunting for food. I spot a sign for a cafe pointing toward a narrow doorway.

Two flights up, I emerged onto a covered terrace that felt like someone had crossbred a meditation hall with a backpacker hostel. Wooden tables, plastic chairs, a large picture of Ramana Maharshi presiding over it all.

Behind the counter sat a European man in his sixties who looked like he’d escaped from either a jazz band or a philosophy seminar. Silver hair combed back, silver beard doing as it pleased.

“I’d like the thali,” I announced, my stomach making executive decisions.

“Thali’s only for lunch,” he replied, with the gentle regret of someone delivering news about a cancelled flight.

He suggested the Nirvana Bowl instead. Three types of lentils, vegetables, fresh bread. “It’ll take some time,” he warned. “But the best things always do.”

While I waited, I pulled out a little booklet I’d picked up at the ashram: Who Am I? by Ramana Maharshi. From the corner of my eye, I noticed him watching me. Quietly amused.

I looked up. He broke into a big smile.

“First time here?”

I nodded. He slid into the seat opposite mine.

“David,” he said.

Not a single spiritual accessory hung off him. No bead, no badge, not even a token Om. Just an old T-shirt, sun-worn skin, and a calm I couldn’t place.

“So what brings you to our little hamlet?”

I considered the honest answer.

“My mind won’t shut up,” I said. “I’m hoping the place does what I can’t seem to do myself.”

“Have you tried?”

“For over a year. It helps. Until it doesn’t. The noise always comes back.”

I looked out at Arunachala, barely visible in the evening dark.

“Is this really possible?” I asked. “Does this place actually do something?”

He gave a small shrug. “I could say yes. Or I could say no.” A pause. “But how would you know if I even have a clue?”

So I asked about him instead.

He was from Suffolk. First came to Tiruvannamalai in 1983, a day trip from Pondicherry where he’d been holidaying with friends. They visited the temple, then the ashram. And when his friends were ready to leave, David found himself physically unable to step outside the ashram gates. Like he’d wandered into wet cement and the world had dried around him.

He told them to carry on. He’d join them in a couple of days.

He stayed for months.

Subscribe now

Back in England, he worked as a plumber nine months a year, saving enough to spend three in Tiruvannamalai. He met his wife here. Raised two children between Suffolk and Tiru. Now he splits his year running this café.

“What keeps bringing you back?” I asked.

“Here…” he let the word hang. “…all my fears, desires, anxieties, longing… they simply vanish.”

I thought about the day before. The samadhi room. The cave. Me sitting in what I imagined was a perfect asana, waiting for something to happen. Priya’s mind had gone quiet in that room. Mine had composed a TED Talk.

“Why does it not happen to me?”

David closed his eyes and brought his hands together, resting his chin on his thumbs, digging for something.

“Have you ever wondered why you’re here, asking these questions, while most people are just getting on with their lives? Or why you have four limbs and two eyes while plenty of others don’t?”

A pause.

“Every movie is different. Every character has its own story.”

I wanted to keep him at the table. “Can I ask you something personal? What do you want out of life?”

“Only two things,” he answered, without a hint of hesitation. “That my children live as good human beings. And that more people feel the kind of peace I’ve been lucky enough to find.”

No ambition. No milestones. Just goodness and peace.

It unsettled me.

“Why the café?”

“Well, I’m alive,” he shrugged. “I’ve got to do something with my time. And this — feeding people, talking to folks like you — it’s a joy.”

Joy. Not happiness.

My soup arrived and I dove in. David stayed, watching me eat. Halfway through the bowl, I looked down at the booklet still sitting between us. Who Am I?

“What does this question mean?” I asked.

“That’s the whole point of it, my friend. To discover it for yourself.” He tapped a finger on the cover. “You won’t find it in here either.”

“Then where? How?”

He leaned back.

“Walk the road and you’ll discover. Just don’t ask anyone for directions.”

Then, with the timing of someone who’s mastered exits, he excused himself to greet a group arriving in the far corner.

I finished my bowl.

Walk the road. Don’t ask for directions.

From Savage Pilgrim, my memoir about eight years wandering through India’s spiritual underground. Out soon!

This one’s about a friend, a cricket match, and a weekend where I learned more about the human mind than any book ever taught me.

October 2020. Covid restrictions have loosened somewhat, though most people are still choosing caution over recklessness. But Freddie has never been “most people.”

He shows up at my place unannounced one Saturday evening, looking like he’s just outrun something. Whether that’s the law or his own conscience isn’t clear.

“Bantai, if there’s one day I need your brains, it is today,” he announces, making a beeline for the refrigerator. He returns clutching a bottle of water, gulping it down while somehow simultaneously trying to breathe.

I’m still waiting for him to explain when he snatches up my TV remote and starts jabbing at it. An IPL match flickers onto the screen, minutes from starting. He plants himself on my couch, drums on the table with manic energy, and delivers the punchline:

“I need you to help me win this match.”

Ah. There it is.

This has roots more than a year old. During the Cricket World Cup, I’d apparently helped Freddie make what he later described as “a killing.”

India versus New Zealand, the semi-final. India, far and away the best team in the tournament, heavily favoured. Batting first, New Zealand scraped together a modest 240. Freddie called, asking what I thought.

“Bro, this has a great Indian heartbreak written all over it,” I told him. “Overcast conditions, pressure run-chase. If India loses Rohit and Virat early…”

Freddie was sitting with a crew of other punters, everyone tripping over themselves to back India. But armed with my prophecy, he went against the tide and backed New Zealand at 3-to-1.

So here he is again. A pilgrim returning to a shrine.

He lays out the situation like he’s reading his own death warrant. He’s been on a losing streak all week. Two lakh rupees down. He needs to recover it before settlement day arrives on Monday.

It turns out to be the highest-pressure cricket match I’ve ever watched.

Freddie keeps checking in with me like I’m some kind of oracle receiving divine transmissions. A wicket falls and he looks at me with desperate hope: “Now?” A six gets smashed and the question returns, unchanged: “Now?”

It’s one thing making predictions when you’ve got nothing riding on them, tossing out opinions like peanuts. But when someone’s mortgaged his immediate future to your judgment, all reason and logic evaporate from your head.

My performance does not match Freddie’s expectations. By the end of the match, he’s another seventy-five thousand down.

I’m sitting there with my hands on my head.

“No problem, Bantai,” he says as he’s leaving, his voice carrying more optimism than the situation deserves. “There are two games tomorrow. We’ll recover everything.”

Tomorrow again?

I’m not sure my heart can take any more of this.

I spend that night doing a post-mortem on my own performance. Replaying the thought processes that led to the wrong calls. Trying to map the exact moments where intuition veered off course. And why.

Emotion. Specifically, fear and desire. That’s what wrecks rationality. And intuition.

The fear of losing, of being wrong, of watching Freddie’s money evaporate. The desire to make the winning bet, to turn disaster into triumph.

And they’re not too different from one another. Fear is just desire in reverse. The desperate hope that something won’t happen.

Subscribe now

The next afternoon, Freddie arrives with a six-pack of Budweisers. He cracks one open before the match begins. The hiss of carbonation announcing the start of our siege.

We claw through two matches, recovering some money, then more, hedging our exposure with each swing. Going into the last three overs of the final game, we’re almost home. Our books show a manageable loss whichever way it goes. From where we started, it’ll feel like victory.

I tell Freddie to hedge. Place five thousand on Team A, and no matter what happens, he walks away barely scratched.

“Can Team A still win?” he asks.

“Yeah, of course,” I reply. “It’s cricket.”

His eyes light up with that dangerous gleam I’m starting to recognize.

He opens his app and places the bet. But not five thousand. Thirty-five thousand.

Now he stands to make two lakhs if Team A wins, and lose fifty thousand if they don’t. Which is far more likely.

I am livid. I’d helped him crawl out of the hole. And he’s just jumped back in.

Then I watch the closing overs with a mix of shock and awe. Team A turns it around dramatically. And wins.

Freddie started the day two lakhs down. He ends it two lakhs up.

He screams at the top of his lungs and flings me into the air like I weigh nothing. The cats scatter into the other room in distress.

When I’m back on my feet, I tell him, “When you die, I want you to donate your balls to science.”

We end up at the JW Marriott till 6 AM. Tequila. More booze. Substances. Most of what he made has already evaporated by sunrise. I’m starting to understand how gambling wins vanish like steam.

Standing on the road in the early morning light, he tells me I have a gift for this. That I should give it a proper shot.

“No, bro,” I tell him. “It’s not for me. I don’t like my heart beating this fast.”

We laugh. We hug. He eventually lets me go.

I walk back home past Juhu Beach. Birds overhead, morning walkers striding purposefully, dogs chasing each other like kids in a park.

There are two kinds of players in the world. Those playing to win. And those playing not to lose.

Freddie plays to win. Always has. It’s the best thing about him.

But I fear it might be the end of him too.

From Savage Pilgrim, my memoir. The release date is getting closer. Just six more weeks now.

Not just any hill. “Arunachala is not a hill. It is God,” said Ramana Maharshi. He also called it the center of the universe, Lord Shiva himself. A saint who barely spoke, who preferred to communicate in thought vibrations, doesn’t throw words like that around casually. Walk around it with awareness, he said, and it will do something to your consciousness.

So here I am, an hour later, walking under a sky full of stars, the cool predawn air carrying incense from roadside shrines.

In the dark, awareness comes easy. Each step needs attention. I feel the breeze on my arms, the ground under my feet. Nothing to do but walk.

When the first light breaks over the horizon, Arunachala takes shape against a pale blue sky. The awareness makes the beauty pop like a miracle. I stop. Just stand there.

Then the sun climbs, the road flattens out, the weather turns pleasant, and my awareness quietly packs up and leaves. My mind wanders. I start wondering if this is even working. I start telling myself stories.

The heat brings me back. As the day gets hotter my energy dips, each step turns labored, the destination floats impossibly far away. And the attention returns. To the next step, and then the one after that. I can trace the sweat down my temples, the dryness in my throat.

Comfort, and my mind goes shopping. Discomfort, and it comes home. I file this away for later.

I find a shady rock and collapse onto it. Feels like the most comfortable chair I’ve ever sat in.

That’s when I notice the man.

He’s sitting alone in the sun. Wiry, dusty hair, a beard that has annexed most of his face, nothing on but a loincloth. Straight-backed in the full blaze of noon, like he’s meditating and slow-roasting himself at the same time.

A group of boys wanders past him. Mistaking him for a beggar, they offer him money. He waves them off with an irritated flick of the hand. They persist, pinning a currency note down under a few pebbles. This time he lets loose a rapid-fire reprimand in Tamil, and the boys scatter.

“What did he say?” I ask them as they pass me.

In halting English and wild hand gestures, they explain. “He say… he get food… from Sun.”

Food from the Sun. Forget enlightenment. This man could solve world hunger.

I watch him for a good twenty minutes, waiting for him to do something, anything, remotely human. Lean back on his palms. Shade his eyes. Yawn, stretch, scratch. Nothing. He just sits there, eyes half-closed, utterly still, untouched by the world spinning around him.

I want to know more. But my non-existent Tamil and his indifference to earthly inquiries don’t give me much to work with. Part of me wants to stay. But the sun’s climbing and I have a hill to finish. So I leave him to whatever dimension he’s tuned into and carry on down the dirt path, the walk finally closing its loop around nine.

It’s on that path that I remember a story from Sri M’s autobiography.

His Guru once sent him to find a man who lived under the massive wooden chariot of a temple somewhere in South India. To the villagers he was just another madman. Unwashed, laughing to himself, ignored or mocked by everyone who passed.

What they didn’t know was that he’d once been an engineer from Banaras Hindu University. Sharp, successful, rational. Until something shifted, and he walked away from all of it and never looked back. He couldn’t stop laughing at people, at how seriously they took their lives.

The world thought he was insane. He thought the world was hilarious.

I keep walking. Somewhere behind me, a man is sitting in the sun, eating light, waving off my currency and my questions with the same irritated flick of the hand.

Maybe he’s lost his mind. Or maybe he’s the only one on this hill who found the exit, and the rest of us - pilgrims, boys with pebbles, writers with notebooks - are the exhibit he can’t be bothered to look at.

I’ll never know.

This is an excerpt from my memoir Savage Pilgrim. Publishes September 2026

I roll into Maheshwar past sunset and check into a lodge without getting a proper look at the place. When I step outside early the next morning, something in the air feels different.

Water flowing somewhere close. Glimpses of a river between the old houses. The streets have that ancient feel but they’re surprisingly clean.

I have this feeling that this place is going to surprise me.

“Head to the ghats,” someone tells me when I ask for directions.

The path leads me to wide stone steps cascading down to the water’s edge. And there it is. A majestic river flowing past with steady power.

The Narmada.

As I climb down toward the riverbank, I spot a small shrine to my left where a group of men sit around an old sadhu with matted hair, one of them preparing a chillum. They smile. An invitation. I have an urge to join them. But the draw of the river is too strong. I wave a namaste and carry on.

I walk along the ghats, the Narmada to my left, architectural marvels revealing themselves on my right. Reminds me of Varanasi. A smaller, less chaotic version. Different kingdoms and dynasties built their palaces right down to the water’s edge over the centuries.

Eventually I reach the main attraction. Rajwada, Queen Ahilyabai Holkar’s palace. The name hits me with childhood nostalgia. The righteous queen from Amar Chitra Katha comics who ruled with wisdom and justice.

When I circle back to where I’d entered, the men are still there. I join them.

Introductions happen quickly. One of the men is a professional guide. Within minutes he’s launched into Maheshwar’s history in a sing-song, rehearsed manner that’s both impressive and absurd.

The sadhu treats my presence like I’m an irritating insect. Whether that’s his default setting or I’ve somehow ruined his entire day, I can’t tell.

We settle into chitchat punctuated by the ritual passing of the chillum. Two rounds later, I’m grabbed by the hand and yanked back toward the ghats.

“Let me show you Maheshwar that no tourist guide can show.”

Suddenly I’m following this guy like I’m in a fever dream movie. Faces we pass seem distorted, features slightly too large or too small. Every sound amplified—the slap of our footsteps on stone, the distant temple bells.

He makes a stop at his room, emerging minutes later in fresh clothes. He sure means business.

He leads me to a small temple, then into a pitch-black inner chamber where a tiny shivling sits in the center. “Phone torch,” he whispers.

I flip on the flashlight and the shivling blazes to life in a stunning green-turquoise, lit from within. Then I notice the thin, vein-like lines running across its surface. Natural formations that have somehow arranged themselves into perfect OM symbols. Multiple ones. As if the stone itself is chanting.

Outside again, another set of steps. “Underground temple.” More stone deities emerge in my phone’s light, ancient figures frozen mid-dance or mid-blessing. He opens what looks like just another wall but turns out to be a door. “Secret tunnel.”

I peer into absolute darkness. When the torch beam cuts through, I nearly jump back. A stone warrior standing barely two feet inside, sword drawn, eternally guarding the passage.

“Come,” he says, already moving toward the river. “Boating time.”

We cross to the other side, where he leads me to what looks like another riverside boulder. But there’s a gap, barely wide enough for a person, hidden between the rocks. I slide sideways through the opening. We keep descending, layer after layer, deeper into a cave system hidden beneath the giant rocks.

At the bottom, a temple dedicated to deities I don’t recognize. Incense sticks burn in small holders, smoke curling upward. Garlands hang fresh around stone necks. This isn’t an abandoned relic. People worship here.

A sadhu sits cross-legged in one corner. Long matted hair, bare torso, rudraksh malas. Assuming he’s the priest, I gravitate toward him, instinctively reaching for my wallet. He shakes his head in disapproval when he sees it. I slide it back in.

“Kahan se aaye ho?”

“Goa.”

“Kahan jaa rahe ho?”

“Himalaya.”

“Kyun?”

“Udhar hi rehne ka soch raha hoon.”

The sadhu lets out a big laugh that echoes through the cave.

My guide is now standing beside me, hands folded in reverence.

The sadhu looks at me directly, still smiling. “Jao jao. Lekin yeh yaad rakho, jaaoge vaheen jahan prabhu le jaayega. Tumhe bas lag raha hai ki tum khud jaa rahe ho.”

Go. But remember, you go only where God takes you. You just have the illusion that you’re the one deciding.

I stand there nodding. My gaze turns to the incense sticks in the corner, smoke curling upward.

By the time I squeeze back through the crevice and emerge blinking into daylight, I’m ready for another round with the chillum. We sit under a tree and prepare one.

I leave Maheshwar promising the town I’ll be back.

Subscribe now

This was October 2017. I was living in Mysore then, having moved away from big city life and contemplating moving further away still. Goa had been an option until a recent run-in with law enforcement made it not one. So: Uttarakhand. Maybe Kasar Devi, a place I’d fallen in love with over the previous couple of years.

From Maheshwar I found my way up to Uttarakhand, and beyond Kasar Devi. Somewhere along the way, a realization came upon me. Solitude is not the path for me. Whatever I’m meant to do, it has to be in the world. I can’t escape from it.

On my last evening in the Himalayas, I shot off an email to someone I bumped into on this road trip, saying I was open to gigs with his portfolio companies. That email landed me a job with a startup in Mumbai.

Whatever dreams I had cooked up in my mind, I moved to Mumbai. The gig was for three months. It lasted six years. I still live here.

Maybe the sadhu knew things that I didn’t: how I lost Goa, why the mountains sent me back down, and how I bumped into the man I emailed in the first place. All three are revealed in Savage Pilgrim.

Savage Pilgrim releases September 2026

Share

One of them was my friend Anurag Malik aka Anoos, the copywriter. The other was Pervez Rajan aka Puru, the designer. Together they handled the Coca-Cola creatives. Sounds glamorous. Except that it wasn’t. Their days ran from noon to midnight, churning out posters, billboards, and newspaper ads on deadlines designed to kill creativity, under client pressure that would make anyone question their life choices.

Nobody - not their families, not us friends, not their employer - heard from them for six months.

They drifted from Himachal to Ladakh. When money ran out, a monastery took them in. Boarding and lodging in exchange for teaching the kids art, painting, and English.

When they resurfaced, they moved to Bangalore. Cheaper beer, congenial weather, a pace of life more in tune with theirs. That was Bangalore of 1999.

I moved there a couple of years later. At Anurag’s place, a home we called Anand Bhavan, I’d bump into Puru often. Parsimonious with words, generous with photographs from his travels.

When I set up my communication design firm, Puru became my go-to guy for visual design work.

One thing about his working style would make me want to tear my hair out (yes, I know what you’re thinking). Work he got paid for, the work I brought him, he treated as irritants to be dispensed with as fast as possible. Then I’d watch him spend hours trying out fonts and colours on creatives for not-for-profit causes. Work he didn’t charge a penny for.

Made no sense to me. Not to the version of me back then.

My favorite Puru moment is from 2008. He’d just returned from a six-month biking tour of the North-East. Money had run out, I’m guessing, and he was back looking for gigs.

“What’s this I’m hearing about?” he asked. “This recession or something.”

“Where did you hear?”

“People are telling me there’s not much freelance work right now because there’s a recession. What is this recession?”

I gave him the Economics 101 version. Global credit crisis, ripple effects, less freelance design work in Bangalore.

“How long will it last?”

Legitimate question. I shrugged. “Can’t tell.”

Puru went quiet for a moment. Like he was doing some mental math.

“I’m thinking I should just fuck off back to the mountains,” he said. “And return only when this damn recession is over.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or touch his feet.

Years Later

I lost touch with Puru around 2013, the way I lost touch with many people when my Savage Pilgrim years began.

A few weeks ago, I’m at Anurag & Priya’s house in Bangalore when Puru walks through the door at 10 PM carrying a sackful of mangoes. Other than the greys, not much has changed. He now lives on a farm sixty kilometers outside Bangalore, which he shares with seven dogs, four cats, multiple snakes, sixty species of birds, and a hundred types of insects. Plus occasional visits from leopards, to whom he has lost three dogs.

Two weeks after that evening, my cover designer backed out. This, after a two-month delay. My deadline for the cover was May 31. It was now well into June and I was starting from scratch.

I got a few references. Made the calls. Shared the details. They said they’d get back soon. I couldn’t wait.

So I called Puru. Would he be interested?

“Yes,” he said. “But first, I need to read the manuscript.”

Of all the designers I’d spoken to, including the original illustrator, not one had asked to read the book. The ask was always the same: synopsis, references, inspirations, any ideas I already had.

How can someone design a book cover without reading the book? I’d been asking myself that for weeks.

There are two ways I enjoy a book cover. At the start, I enjoy the aesthetics. After finishing the book, I go back to see how the cover was telling me the story all along. The great ones capture a nuance in the simplest manner. Layers that reveal only after you’ve read the last page.

Can someone produce that from a synopsis?

Neti Neti

Puru read the manuscript in a few days. Then he started sketching. His process, he says, is ‘neti neti’ - not this, not this - eliminating the non-essentials one by one so the essential can speak.

This is what he started with.

He arrived at this:

The upside-down cat in lotus pose is Puru’s way of saying the catman went spiritual and ended up flipping spirituality on its head. “Challenging every notion of spirituality the world knows,” says Puru. A smoke ring forms a mysterious halo above (or below) him.

The cat is inspired by Mahabalipuram’s famous ‘Hypocrite Cat’ in Arjuna’s Penance. Hypocrite, because the cat has struck a pose so convincing that all the rats are praying to him. The wrong version of God, worshipped with full sincerity. Savage Pilgrim in a nutshell.

Everyone I shared it with loves it. The simplicity. The resonance. The mystique that makes you pick up the book.

While I liked this, I wasn’t sure if I loved it yet. But I rationalized. Maybe I’m too attached to what’s already in my mind. Maybe I need to drop my mediocre ideas and go with the wisdom of the crowd.

But Puru wasn’t finished. At the start, he’d said he was aspiring for a Noma Bar level of cover - the man behind some of the most iconic book covers of our time, including many of Murakami’s. He sent a few more versions.

One night, I’m going through the options. Questions start swirling. So I call him. At 1 AM.

Puru’s up, of course. We go through the designs one by one. Then we reach one I like - love the font. But the design doesn’t feel ‘savage’ enough for the book, I tell him.

Puru starts explaining. And I realize I’ve completely missed the most important part of the design.

“This is it,” I’m screaming into the phone. “This is it!”

I had just spotted the man hiding in the negative space of the cat. Everything made sense immediately.

The man is the narrator. Deep in thought, smoking something, the smoke curling up into a question mark. The cat is his shadow, his alter ego, his moral compass. From its one red eye, you can tell the cat is getting high on whatever the man is smoking. Or maybe it’s the man’s neuroticism. One eye is savage, the other is a pilgrim.

The cats kept me grounded through those years of exploration, Puru says. In the book, they double as my conscience. Which is why the cat is looking at the man rather disapprovingly.

And under them both, a road. The man isn’t sitting around thinking. He’s walking. Actively searching.

Savage Pilgrim, in one image.

Here’s why I’m telling you all this. I have two covers in front of me. The Upside down Cat and the Man in the Cat. And one decision to make.

Which one is landing for you? Let me know.

In case you’re trying to put a face to this work (and this name), here’s Puru.

Savage Pilgrim will be out in September 2026

Share

February 2017. Girnar looms over its foothills half-lost in haze, indifferent to the fairground assembling below. Market stalls, crackling loudspeakers blasting bhajans, air thick with fried snacks and incense. Somewhere in this chaos, Baba Haridas is waiting for us - the sadhu I spent time with in Bharuch when my car broke down during a Gujarat road trip. He’s promised Lester, Fifi, and me a sadhu santon ka maha sammelan. A confluence of sadhus and sages.

The path to the Akhada narrows between stalls draped with rudraksh garlands, brass bowls, and stacked tridents. The crowd thins, and weathered walls rise, the ochre gateway faded and streaked with red vermilion handprints. Through it, a smoke-hazed courtyard where ash-smeared sadhus sit around fires.

“Anupam ji!”

Baba waves from a circle of sadhus in the corner. We bend to touch his feet. He introduces us with generous embellishments, calling us bhagats. Devotees. The other sadhus smile approvingly. I notice how an urban, well-heeled devotee carries status here. A white devotee bumps that status even higher.

A chillum gets lit and makes its rounds. Chai appears, then plates of fruit. An hour and a half dissolves into smoke.

“Come back at six,” Baba says.

The Master Plan

Walking back to the hotel, I share my plan with Lester.

“That fruit bowl at the Akhada? That’s our only meal today.”

Lester stops walking and stares at me. “Why?”

I decide it’s time to educate him. How this is the most important night of the year, maximum potential for spiritual elevation. Empty stomachs to capture whatever the night has to offer.

Lester doesn’t say anything. I take it as a yes.

When Fifi hears the plan that afternoon, she bursts out laughing.

“I will be eating,” she announces with finality.

The Shivir

By evening we’re settled into our Akhada’s shivir, a tented enclosure facing the street that leads to the temple and the bathing pond where sadhus will take their holy dip at midnight. The entire street is lined with shivirs, each belonging to a different Akhada.

Ours holds eight or ten sadhus. Matted hair, long beards, ash-smeared torsos. An urban Indian and two white foreigners among them makes for quite the sight. Chillums resume their rounds while a steady procession of devotees files past. Village folk who’ve traveled to Girnar on this holy night to honor Lord Shiva.

Passersby keep stopping to gawk at us. Soon a proper crowd assembles, staring like we’re a rare wildlife exhibit.

One sadhu in our group - thin, wiry, permanently pissed-off, hasn’t said a word all evening - suddenly springs up, grabs a long stick, and charges the onlookers, swinging it wildly above his head. The crowd scatters, people tumbling over each other to escape. He returns having cleared our entrance completely.

At one point, Lester leans over. “I’m really hungry, dude.”

I launch into a three-minute lecture about willpower. About not squandering tonight’s cosmic opportunity over temporary food cravings. He mumbles something that my mind decodes as ‘As you say milord’.

Girnari Khichdi

Around 8 PM, Lester and Fifi head off to explore the mela. I’m terribly high from the chillums, so I stay put. Not much later, a young sadhu approaches me politely. “Maharaj, bhojan kar lijiye.” Please come for your meal.

Like a bee following nectar, I trail him to the Akhada building behind us, where floor mats are laid out in neat rows. Khichdi gets served from buckets. I polish off two full servings. Then another bucket arrives. When I say I’m done, the server announces this is “Girnari khichdi” and ladles me a portion anyway.

The flavors explode in my mouth. Spicier, richer, possibly the best khichdi I’ve ever had. One batch of diners finishes and leaves. The next group arrives. I eat another full round with them.

After forty-five minutes of nonstop eating, I step outside. Lester and Fifi find me at the gate.

“Where were you, dude?”

I stare at him blankly. I completely forgot about them.

“I was eating dinner.”

Lester’s face shifts from shock to betrayal in seconds. He can’t believe what he’s just heard. Fifi’s practically rolling on the ground laughing.

“Go in, go in! They’re serving the last batch.”

Subscribe now

The Procession

When the procession begins, crowds pack the street and block our view from inside the shivir. One of the sadhus grabs my hand and pulls me out, Lester and Fifi following. He leads us up through the Akhada building to a large terrace. Perfect vantage point. The complete procession spread below us, the moonless night sky above, the entire terrace to ourselves.

We sit on the ledge, legs dangling over the edge, arms locked into each other’s.

The Naga Babas come first. A sea of matted hair and ash-smeared bodies flowing through the darkness, torchlight glinting off tridents and swords. The crowds lining the streets watch in reverent silence.

As midnight approaches, elephants appear, sadhus cross-legged on their backs, holding flags and blowing conch shells. The sound echoes off the buildings. One sadhu waves at a photographer, grins, then resumes his meditative pose. Another adjusts his position when he spots a camera.

Then the chariots.

The first one is elaborate. A converted truck decorated to look ancient, disco lights running along its edges, a throne at the highest point. The chief wears full regalia: ornate necklaces, embroidered robes, an elaborate headpiece. Devotees pack every available inch, some hanging off the sides. The crowd cheers. The chief stands and waves, pointing at different sections of the audience. He removes his sunglasses and places them back on with a flourish.

The next chariot is smaller. Simple decorations, a basic throne, fewer followers. The crowd’s energy shifts. People start looking down the street for what’s coming next. This chief waves too, but his smile seems more tentative. Fewer people wave back.

More chariots follow, each varying dramatically in scale. Some arrive with full sound systems blasting devotional music, chiefs standing prominently on elaborate thrones, waving continuously. Others come quietly, with modest seats and leaders who barely acknowledge the audience.

It hits me like a slap. This is all theater. This world is no different from the corporate one. The only difference is the currency. Instead of money, they’re counting devotees, chariot size, crowd reactions.

Watching the parade of spiritual wealth, the fashion show in holy clothing, it occurs to me that the material world might actually be more honest.

At least a Wall Street banker doesn’t pretend his Rolex is a symbol of spiritual attainment.

This is an excerpt from my memoir Savage Pilgrim, which chronicles my years exploring India’s spiritual underground. Out September 2026.

Those doing remarkable work, who also carry the full aura of their remarkableness. And those who ask nothing from the room, and give you everything in a quiet corner of it.

I met Chandan Gomes at such an event.

Chandan grew up in a single-room house in Delhi. He studied philosophy in St. Stephen’s College. When he graduated in 2009, he knew two things: book-making was his calling, and he had too many questions to sit still.

So he didn’t.

For the next several years, he was on the road with a rucksack containing two pairs of shirts and trousers, a borrowed camera, a cutting mat, paper, glue, thread, and a knee-tie. He traveled by train, by bus, on foot. He stayed in ghettos. He walked railway tracks at night. He met rat killers and poets. He made handmade books as he went, documenting the lives that touched him.

In 2011, Chandan was commissioned to photograph a hospital in Jaipur. Inside the hospital was a hospice — the Avedna Ashram.

During one of his visits, he found a book of drawings. Mountains. Clouds. No name on the cover.

He spent weeks trying to find its owner. Hospital privacy policies blocked him. He asked everyone — patients, staff, attendants. No one had an answer.

So he did the only thing that made sense to him.

He took the book to the mountains.

For eighteen months, he traveled with the child’s drawings, making photographs in response to each one. A child had imagined these mountains. He would find them, and bring them back.

On the hospital front, he kept looking. He had almost given up when a nursing intern told him she remembered a girl who loved to draw.

In February 2013, Chandan traced her to a village in Rajasthan. A district called Baran.

Her name was Aini. Aini Asina Bano. The name means life. The source of life. Spring.

She had died in January 2012.

She was eleven years old. She had been in the hospice - a child in a hospice - sketching mountains and clouds she would never see. Chandan had been traveling those mountains for eighteen months with her drawings in his bag, trying to find her, while she was already gone.

He didn’t stop there.

He traced Aini’s father, Anwar, to a small industrial estate on the outskirts of Delhi. Daily wage laborer. They met twice. Both times, Anwar was drunk. Continuously guilty. Still self-loathing.

But in those drunken confessions, he drew the most intimate portrait of his daughter.

He called her Shakru. Chandan asked what it meant.

“Nothing,” Anwar said. “It’s just a sound.”

A word without a meaning is like a poem that doesn’t have to explain itself, Chandan says. A sound, like falling rain. Like blowing wind.

Anwar gave him Aini’s crayons. Her doll. The only photograph he had of her.

I hope Aini’s story is told, he said, and they parted.

In 2015, four years after finding the notebook in that hospice, Chandan completed This World of You. A handmade artist’s book. Aini’s drawings alongside his photographs of the mountains she had drawn.

He made a book with someone he never met.

Someone who was already dead before he knew her name.

I think about this sometimes when I consider what it means to follow something — really follow it — without knowing where it leads or whether there’s anyone waiting at the other end.

Aini sketched mountains she would never see.

Chandan went and found them for her.

Watch Chandan tell this in his own words.

This is 2014. My astrophysicist friend Dr. Procheta Malik has his connections with the Indian Institute of Astrophysics to get us a weekend at their observatory. It was supposed to be an extended deep-space bender. But unseasonal clouds have already mocked my plans.

But somewhere past midnight, the sky cracks open for exactly long enough, and Doc swings the telescope toward a star in its supernova phase.

It is gobbling itself up in a blaze that has no right to look this beautiful. Violent beyond anything I’ve imagined. Breathtaking in the most literal sense. I actually forget to breathe.

“What am I looking at?” I ask, eye still on the lens.

“That happened a few hundred thousand years ago,” Doc says.

I pull back and look at him.

“Am I looking far into space? Or far into time?”

He smiles. Nods.

“Am I time traveling?”

At that moment, I can feel something has shifted inside me. The kind of shift you feel when a piece of furniture you’ve lived with for years turns out to have been crooked the whole time, and now you can’t stop seeing it.

A Year Earlier

The seed for that night had actually been planted twelve months before it, in Spiti, in a place with no light pollution and considerably worse plumbing.

The bathroom in a Spiti home stands its own ground, wisely detached from where people sleep and eat. A hole in the floor. A generous mound of sawdust for the aftermath. No frills, no flush, no apologies.

One night I step out of that little structure, business concluded, and look up out of pure habit.

BOOM.

A blanket of stars hangs so low I’m convinced I could touch it with a half-decent jump. The scale of it makes my anxieties, my five-year plans, my entire sense of self-importance, evaporate into something smaller than a rounding error.

I stand there a few minutes, properly transfixed. But I’d dressed for a quick biological errand, not an astrophysics seminar, and the cold eventually wins. I promise myself I’ll come back the next night, properly layered. Every subsequent evening, the warm room wins that argument instead.

The Itch Comes Back

In April this year, an Instagram post from an outfit called Stargazing Mumbai finds me at a weak moment, advertising an AstroTour to Spiti. I sign up without thinking too hard about it.

This is not my preferred mode of travel. Twenty strangers. Two tempo travellers. A higher power of the human variety deciding where I go, when I stop, what I’m allowed to look at. But if the deal includes stars, I’m willing to outsource my free will for a week.

Two days of navigating Himachal Pradesh — a peace-time war zone if there ever was one — gets us to Chitkul, roughly where Indian roads give up, and then to Nako, near the edge of Spiti. Telescopes come out both nights. We get the zodiac belt, the Big Dipper, the North Star, a close-up of the moon. Enough to sound informed at a dinner party. Not what I came for. The real event, everyone keeps saying, is still a day off.

The Big Night. Langza. Standing under the Buddha statue that watches over the valley, looking up at a sky lit by the Milky Way.

Bad News, Then Worse News, Then a Bus

I wake up to rain in the air and snow on the route to Manali. Which means no Losar, no Chandratal. Tonight, at Langza, is the only shot I’m going to get. And the sky, currently, looks like it has personally decided to ruin my week.

I can’t help but think of that weekend in Kavalur. And, for some reason, Bhaskar Pillai. The Delhi batsman from the 1980s who was once selected to play an ODI for India. But that match got rained off. And he never got that chance again.

But these are the Himalayas. The weather here changes its mind faster than an overexcited puppy. I climb into the bus with what I’d call muted optimism, if optimism could be muted any further without disappearing entirely.

By the time we reach Kaza, the sun is setting, the breeze is decent, and the clouds are thin enough to keep hope technically alive.

I step outside around 11 PM, every part covered except the eyes, because Langza at this hour does not negotiate on temperature. The clouds are still there. The moon keeps almost appearing, then changing its mind.

On the bus, my eyes follow the skies with a prayer under my breath. I know this feeling. I’ve wanted the skies to clear before, and they’ve never once cared what I wanted.

I tell myself that standing there at midnight, even with nothing to see, still counts as something. I fall asleep on that thought.

Langza

I wake up five minutes before we arrive. I look out the window. And I can’t believe my eyes.

The sky is clear. Properly, stupidly. A few clouds drifting through, thin and quick, more decoration than threat. I get off the bus and walk up to the statue. I tilt my head back.

The moon is setting on the west. The Milky Way is rising on the east. Like the two of them have agreed to a handover and are running it with precision.

I stand there for half an hour, watching the moon finish its exit while the galaxy makes its entrance. Neither of them in any hurry, both of them indifferent to my impatience.

The light from that supernova in Kavalur had taken a few hundred thousand years to reach me. The light over Langza was older than that. Older than the question I’d asked Doc, older than every plan I’d made to come back and never kept.

I still don’t know if I’d finally caught up with something, or if I’d gotten very efficient at booking my seat wherever the universe happens to be putting on a show.

Either way, I come back with this picture.

What I didn’t expect was the near-total absence of electricity.

During my entire stay, I witnessed electric power for approximately 15 minutes. Almost every home had a modest solar panel that powered a couple of light bulbs with all the luminosity of a dying firefly. Spiti Ecosphere, the non-profit that had arranged my trek, had spent years trying to push solar projects with government authorities. Minimal progress — there’s no bureaucratic kickback in solar panels compared to multi-million dollar hydropower projects.

Before the trek, I wanted to make a final call home. I found a public telephone shop in Kaza.

“There’s no electricity,” the shopkeeper told me. Nonchalant. Complete.

When I returned post-trek, same shop, same story. I asked when power might come back.

“Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week,” he said, with a shrug I’m still thinking about. “Last week electricity came, so I think there will be some in the next few days.”

Not a trace of despair. Not frustration. Just — reality as it was.

This was a man whose entire business was phone calls. No backup plan. No diversification strategy. He showed up every day, morning to evening, in case power decided to make an appearance.

I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. Still can’t.

Then there were the 15 minutes.

We were in the kitchen-dining hall of one of our host’s homes. Around 7 PM. Cold outside, cozy within. Dinner underway, butter tea in hand, a feeble solar lamp making faces just barely distinguishable from the dark.

Without warning, a bright bulb overhead flared to life.

Collective gasp. The closest thing to religious rapture I’d seen outside an actual ceremony. Our host leapt up, switched off the solar lamp with the decisiveness of someone making an executive decision, and turned on a small TV mounted on the wall.

Local news channel. Default preset. A crime report that seemed to involve every possible transgression short of alien abduction. I looked around the room: instant mass hypnosis. Every person transfixed. Conversations abandoned mid-sentence.

Fifteen minutes later, the electricity left as abruptly as it had come. Our host rose, turned the knob off, relit the emergency lamp.

Normalcy returned. No frustration. No complaints. Not even a mention of it.

I’ve thought about that room many times since. About what it means to live beyond the constant bombardment — news, advertisements, manufactured desires. Whether the contentment I felt in that valley had something to do with simply not being reminded, every hour of every day, of everything you don’t have.

I don’t know. It’s probably more complicated than that.

Today, 13 years later, I’m on my way back to Spiti. Every place in India has transformed in this time. Am hoping not everything.

Spiti is Chapter 1 of Savage Pilgrim — the place where something started that I spent eight years trying to name.

I wonder if the shopkeeper is still there, sitting by his phone, waiting for the electricity to come.

(Posting this from the phone app that doesn’t seem to have the ‘Schedule Post’ button. Weird. So this might reach you on a Tuesday, and not the usual Friday. Dammit!)

Entire identity: over. Clean slate: beginning. Outcome: Uncertain. Either this turns out to be the best thing for me — or it turns out to be the most disastrous decision I’ve ever made. No middle path. Or that’s how it felt at the time.

What does a man do at a fork like that?

In my case: respond to a cryptic email from an acquaintance about an overnight ceremony involving plant medicines, a shaman from South America, and Naga Babas.

Obviously.

I find myself in Haridwar for the Peyote ceremony.

The medicine - Peyote - is a cactus that grows in Mexico. It’s dried, powdered, and offered with reverence in the ceremony. Songs, sung in a specific rhythm, along with the beating of a water drum, act to direct its energy.

I reach the location late afternoon. Bubbling with the excitement of a first date. When I land there, let’s just say expectation and reality have a major falling out.

I had imagined us sitting around a fire by the Ganges under a starlit sky. What I got was a vacant plot squeezed between residential homes, the kind of space that exists while it waits for a departmental store to come up.

The shaman, Horacio, was whiter than I expected and younger too. Rugged face, thick hair tied in a plait, the aura of a man who could either heal your spirit or kick your ass. From the moment he laid eyes on me, I have the distinct feeling he’s always considering the latter.

He sends me to the market for supplies.

I find everything except corn. Wrong season. No departmental stores with the frozen type. What does a creative mind do? Well, it adapts. I look at the chickpeas and think: roughly the same shape, roughly the same size.

I pick ‘em up as a healthy substitute. This turns out to be the botanical equivalent of bringing a hamburger to a Hindu ceremony.

“CORNNNNNN…WE USE CORN… IT IS OUR TRADITION”, Horacio bellows with the menace of a fitness trainer who doesn’t approve of your choice of protein.

The Peyote ceremony starts around 7 PM, just as the sun set.

Eighteen of us sit in a circle around the fire. To Horacio’s left sits the head of the Akhada — Babaji — ancient tree made human. Long white beard, thick matted hair, gentle eyes, the calming aura of someone who has seen too much to be rattled by anything.

And sitting directly across from me, visible through the flames, is the figure who would hold my attention for the next ten hours.

He’s African American, maybe thirty-five. Tall, well-built like an athlete. Clean-shaved head. White kurta pajama. Seated in lotus position, perfectly upright, eyes fixed on the fire.

His name is Isaiah. And he is blind.

A few years earlier, working construction in Atlanta, something went wrong. Both eyes. Just like that.

Horacio asks the group to adopt Isaiah’s intention as our collective one. For the night, we would direct our energy toward whatever it is that Isaiah is looking for.

Ten hours is a long time to sit around. 8 PM to 6 AM. Every one of us, at some point through the night, slouches. Leans back. Leans forward. Dozes. Fidgets. Gets up to stretch.

Not Isaiah.

He sits there - blank eyes facing the fire. Absolutely still. Like he’s carved from stone. Part monk, part warrior.

I keep wondering what experience he’s having. The peyote, among other things, produces extraordinary visuals — mesmerizing, distracting, sometimes overwhelming. That dimension simply isn’t available to Isaiah. Without the visuals pulling his attention outward, is he able to bring everything inward? To the sensations moving through the body, which are themselves enormous?

I don’t know. I never asked him.

All I know is he sits there the entire night like he’s made a decision to sit there, and nothing’s going to change that.

At around 4:30 AM, Babaji suddenly leaps to his feet and bolts from the circle — no goodbye, no warning, no adherence to any of the ceremony protocols.

“Damn! He sure saw a ghost,” I’m thinking.

(He had. We’ll get there.)

Dawn arrives. The fire comes down to its last embers.

Horacio opens the space for anyone who wants to share.

Isaiah speaks first.

He tells us about the accident. The months of rage that followed. The endless loop of what-ifs.

Kira, his girlfriend traveling with him, joins in the story. India was her idea. She had a feeling — not specific, just a feeling — that this is where he’d find something that helps. So they came.

India, Isaiah said, was nothing like expected. It was an assault on every sense simultaneously. The sounds alone were overwhelming. They traveled for three or four months, spent time with gurus and yogis and medicine men. Nothing landed. Nothing clicked.

Haridwar is their last stop. The next day they are driving to Delhi, flying home.

And on the train from Varanasi to Haridwar, they had no reserved tickets. They bought general compartment seats and squeezed into a compartment where people occupied every bench and every inch of floor.

Traveling with them in that compartment was a large Indian family spanning three generations: the senior-most member a matriarch in her seventies who everyone called Ma ji. She didn’t speak English. This did not stop her.

Through her grandson as interpreter, she ran a full interrogation. Why weren’t they married? Was it because of his blindness that Kira wouldn’t marry him? What did her parents think about her traveling with a man she wasn’t married to? She commented on Kira’s skin — beautiful, she said, even though dark.

Then, just before their station arrived, Ma ji turned to her grandson.

Ask him: have you figured out why you lost your sight?

Isaiah says he heard the question but couldn’t understand what she meant, so he asked the grandson to repeat it. The grandson translated again.

Have you understood what life is asking you to do?

Isaiah asked Ma ji to explain what she meant.

So she told them her own story.

Married when she was fifteen or sixteen. By twenty-three she already had three daughters. That’s when her husband died, and her in-laws threw her out — bad luck, they said. Her own parents refused to take her back. She was twenty-three years old, three daughters all under the age of four, one who hadn’t even started walking yet, and she was homeless.

She brought all three daughters to Delhi. Started working. Educated herself. Eventually got all three daughters educated, married, settled with their own families.

Because of what she had done from where she had started, other women in the same position began coming to her. She helps them. She figures out ways for them to find help.

Life put me in that situation, she said, because life knew I could handle it and grow from it and be useful. Life has put you in your situation for the same reason. If you haven’t figured out what that is yet — you need to.

The station arrived.

She placed both hands on Isaiah’s head and blessed him.

He burst into tears. Holding her hands to his face, sobbing. She wiped them quietly, the way a mother does.

And then she was gone.

Isaiah turns toward Horacio. His voice is low and steady.

Last night I made a pact with the grandfather fire. I will find out what life wants from me. I will go through this and become useful to the world by it.

Horacio’s wife, Juanita, walks over slowly. She sprinkles sage around Isaiah in quiet circles, murmuring soft chants. Sealing the pact.

I find myself crying. Tears just flowing out, as if the eyes can’t hold them back anymore. Like it’s a pact I’ve made too, I just don’t know it yet.

Later I seek out Babaji, who had spent the night with us and then disappeared at 4:30 AM without explanation.

He’s back at the dhuni with a few other sadhus. I touch his feet, sit down. The chillum makes its rounds. I ask him, humbly, how the night was.

Accha tha, he says. It was good.

He pauses, looking at the smoke curling up from the fire.

I sat with Bhairon the whole night. Right at his feet. I wanted to touch them but he would not let me.

He looks at the other sadhus.

I still have work to do.

Then, snapping back into the courtyard, already laughing:

“Fir unhone ek chamaat lagaya gaal pe aur kaha - Pooja ka samay ho gaya hai, yaheen baitha rahega kya?”

Then he slapped me hard on the face. And asked me — ‘It’s time for your prayers. Are you going to sit here all night long?’

The sadhus erupt.

That was why he ran.

Not because he saw a ghost.

Because he got slapped by one.

This is an excerpt from Savage Pilgrim, my memoir about eight years inside India’s spiritual underground. Hoping to publish it in September 2026.

Share

The old man asks him whose medal it is. The young man says it’s his. The old man asks how he got it. The young man says he won it - first in his district, school leaving exams. The old man asks why he’s selling it.

To pay for my college exams, the young man says.

The elderly man refuses to take the medal. He gives the young man the money he needs. He tells him to return it when he’s earning and has the means to do so.

The young man, at this point, is attending evening college. Through the day he works in an office as the office boy. Cleaning, serving tea, retrieving files. The place also serves as his sleeping quarters at night. Work, evening college, dinner, sleep on the office floor, wake up, repeat. The loop his life runs on.

He takes his exams. Graduates. Gets a job at an insurance company. Starts rising. Within two or three years he has enough money to pay the old man back. He goes to the bazaar, walks into the shop, and finds a younger man sitting where the old man used to sit.

His son. The father had passed.

The young man explains why he’s there - the loan, the exam fees, the promise. He offers the money. The son refuses it. Says his father never mentioned this to him, so he can’t accept it. The young man insists. The son won’t move. He simply cannot take money he has no record of.

The young man walks out with the money still in his pocket.

He uses it to set up a trust to fund education for those who can’t afford it. That trust runs for years. Helps hundreds of people.

I know this story because that young man was my grandfather. I heard it from my aunt.

I’ve sat with it long enough to be honest about where I stand in it.

If I were the old man and a young student walked in to pawn his gold medal for his exam fees - yes, I’d give him the money. I think I would.

If I were my grandfather, I’d go back to repay the debt. That one I’m sure of. Though I’ll admit - there would probably be no gold medal to pawn in the first place.

The trust? I don’t know. Maybe I would donate the money. Maybe I hold it with good intentions that slowly get absorbed into the friction of living. Setting up a trust and running it for years? I’m genuinely not sure.

But the one that stops me is the son.

A stranger walks into your shop with a story about a loan your dead father gave him years ago, a loan nobody documented, a loan you have no way to verify. He’s clearly not lying - why would anyone fabricate a story about owing money? Every reasonable instinct says: accept it, it’s fine.

The son said no. He couldn’t take what he wasn’t certain was his to take.

This is the one I keep returning to. Because it required refusing something I could have kept without a whisper of consequence.

This, to me, is the noblest of all these acts. Because, if he had kept the money, there would be no trust. What a homage to his father’s life, converting his gesture into one that impacted hundreds of lives.

These were ordinary men. Unremarkable by most measures. This wasn't heroism. It was just how people were, barely ninety years ago.

I keep asking myself the same question.

How did we get from that to this so fast?

Subscribe now

He might also be the most enlightened. Not for anything he said. For just being the way he is.

His name is Lakshman ji.

A Kalaripayattu artist of rare caliber who runs a centre near Auroville.

But his real vocation is his practice of Tantra and his devotion to the Goddess.

Kalarigram, the center he set up in 2011, has grown into something genuinely treasured. Lakshman ji claims no credit for any of it. All credit to Devi and his Guru. He just happens to be there, letting things happen through him.

Being a tantrik, he is always in red. Usually a lungi. In fact, a red lungi is all I had ever seen him in. Except once.

We were to go to a nearby village to watch a street theatre performance. To support one of his students who was acting in it.

That evening, for the first time, I saw Lakshman ji in trousers. Red ones.

I asked him what’s going on. I didn’t even think he owned a pair of trousers.

He told me the backstory.

He’d been in Chennai when a friend called. A music artist from the UK - of Sri Lankan origin - was in the city. She’d been researching the mechanics of the human body and wanted to meet someone who could clarify some of her doubts. Given their mastery over Kalari, few people understand this subject like they do. The friend who called was out of town. Could Lakshman ji go instead?

That artist was M.I.A.

Lakshman ji went to meet her. At the five-star hotel she was staying at. But he couldn’t get past the doorman. No lungis allowed.

So Lakshman ji asked what he needed to wear to go in.

Trousers, he was told.

He went out to the street, found a shop, bought red trousers, put them on, walked back in. He spent an hour with M.I.A. He was impressed with her knowledge and curiosity.

When he told me the story, it was a simple matter of fact.

No angst at being turned away. No philosophical discourse on India not respecting its own traditions. No offense taken, no outrage performed.

His outfit was just a practical problem with a practical solution.

Except for the colour.

Red was non-negotiable.

How I wish I could write about my time with Lakshman ji in Savage Pilgrim. But I’m not sure I’m allowed to disclose many of the things he told me. About his Guru, The Mother, and how Tantra actually works.

Orchha is trippy as fuck. A friend had warned me. One look at the town and I knew exactly what he meant.

Women in bright saris walking past centuries-old cenotaphs. Kids playing cricket in courtyards that once hosted Mughal emperors. Goats grazing in the shadow of towers that seem to defy both gravity and time.

I settle at a roadside dhaba outside the main fort as the day fades. Nursing my chai.

At a table in the adjoining dhaba sits a foreign woman. Slight build, shoulder-length black hair, porcelain skin. Dressed in a crisp white salwar kameez. I watch her engage with everyone passing by: trinket vendors, fellow tourists, local shopkeepers. There’s an openness in her body language, a warmth in how she leans forward when people speak, that seems almost otherworldly in its unselfconsciousness.

I walk over and ask to join her. She flashes a smile and gestures to the chair across.

Twenty-six years old. Israeli. Nine months traveling through India. Leaving in a week.

“India is the best country in the world,” she says. “And Indians are the best people in the world.”

Interesting. I lean forward, wanting to know more.

“My entire time here has been spent in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.” Two states that every guidebook warns women away from. “Unreserved train compartments, local buses, the cheapest lodges you can find. Stranded alone at train stations in the middle of the night.”

She pauses.

“Not one bad incident. Not once have I even felt unsafe.”

This completely contradicts everything I believe to be true. Everything my female friends have experienced and warned me about. I’m sitting there wondering how this young, obviously foreign woman could navigate UP and Bihar for nine months without a single threatening experience.

Then a pot-bellied middle-aged man approaches our table and just stands there. Staring at her. Not selling anything, not asking anything. Just openly gawking.

I immediately clock him as a creep. Feel my irritation rising. I’m about to tell him to move along.

She turns to him with the same warm, broad smile she’s been giving everyone else. No annoyance. No fear. No defensive body language whatsoever.

The man’s entire face transforms. Breaking into a huge grin, teeth jutting out like Bugs Bunny’s.

“Kya naam hai aapka?”

“Like your sweet kheer,” she replies with genuine warmth. “Shira.”

“Seeraaaa,” he repeats, clearly thrilled to have made this connection.

They chat warmly for a couple of minutes. He wanders off with a satisfied smile.

I sit there thinking about how I’d already labeled this harmlessly curious man as a threat before he’d even opened his mouth. If it weren’t for Shira engaging with him the way she did, I would have left Orchha convinced it was full of perverted men harassing foreign women.

And then I think about those nights alone at train stations.

If she’d been operating from a lens of fear, every interaction would have felt threatening. The same curious looks, the same attempts at conversation — all reinterpreted as danger. She could have left India with the exact opposite story, convinced it was the most dangerous place on earth. Even if nothing actually threatening had occurred.

How much of our reality is shaped by our perception, the lens we have on?

Maybe her nine months of safe travels weren’t despite her openness.

Maybe they were because of it.

This interaction features in my travel memoir Savage Pilgrim. Out Sept ‘26.

Share

That wasn’t to be.

Shailli’s phone kept ringing. Some dispute over Diwali lights. Everyone had opinions. In a fit of anger, he resigned from the secretaryship of the housing society. On the phone. This triggered another round of calls. People pleading for him to reconsider. Him standing his ground.

When we reached his house, two aunties from the society were waiting at the door. He was whisked away for an emergency meeting.

And I sat there thinking about the irony of it all.

Just a few years ago, Shailli's conflicts were not about Diwali lights. And they did not end with handshakes over chai.

Let’s see if you can guess which one Shailli is

Shailli was my junior in college. He left college midway, deciding to complete his education in the US.

That was not to be.

A year or so into his US stint, during a drunken argument with a friend over money, he picked up a kitchen knife and killed him. He was sentenced to seventeen years in a maximum security prison in New Jersey. The only Indian in a sea of Blacks and Hispanics.

He learned to survive. Mainly by building a reputation for violence. Knives, shanks, coffee bean cans, telephone wires, bare knuckles. Anything. To intimidate. To stay safe.

Eight years in, there was a major riot between the Bloods and his gangs. He knocked out a few people, was himself soaked in blood. But had no recollection of it. People told him later what he’d done. Including continuously stabbing someone in the skull.

Two years solitary confinement.

Two years. Alone. Nobody to talk to. Nobody to fight.

This became his meditation sanctuary. His Vipassana retreat, if you will.

In that dark hole, he finally confronted himself. Saw the pain he’d been projecting outward as violence. Came face to face with his guilt. The magnitude of what he’d done. He wrote to the family of his victim asking for forgiveness.

They did not reply.

In solitary, Shailli decided that the old Shailendra needed to die. A new man will step out of these metal doors.

When he went back to the main prison, he made this clear to everyone. He just wanted to go home. No more fights.

“I never stabbed anyone after that,” he says.

In 2015, he was released and deported to India.

I met him in Delhi a couple of weeks later. I brought an assortment of intoxicants. To party. He declined them all.

“Nah, man! Life is beautiful, why blur the view.”

The India he returned to was unrecognizable from the one he’d left in 1998. No qualifications. No economic skills. He didn’t know what to do with himself. Dabbled in a few things before deciding to drive. Took a lease, started on Ola/Uber. Not long after, he was running four cars. He drove for nine years, seven of them exclusively at night.

The stories from those nights deserve their own Substack. Paid subscription.

But one thing he said to me a few years ago I haven’t been able to shake.

He’d often pick up corporate workers from offices in Gurgaon. He’d overhear their conversations. Almost always the same - hyperventilating, depressive, comparing, complaining.

“Sometimes I’ll drive three guys for ninety minutes. All they’d do is crib, crib, crib.”

“I want to shake them up. Make them see how lucky they are. To be free. To have a job. Do dinners in restaurants. Take vacations.”

Then:

“When I was inside, I used to think people outside are free. No. Everybody’s in a prison. The only difference is, my prison term came with an end date.”

Share

Take 26 minutes out and watch Shailli share his story. Thank me later!

I look. In the rearview mirror, I see a big man ambling down the street. Grey hair. Grey beard. The unhurried walk of someone who has stopped negotiating with time.

“That,” says Athul, “is someone you are destined to be friends with.”

Why?

“Rum-drinking, chillum-smoking philosopher baba.”

I don’t say anything. But I keep looking in the rearview mirror until the man disappears around the corner.

It’s 2016. I’ve just moved to Mysore. A city where nobody knows me and I know nobody, which is exactly why I moved there. Athul is the first friend I make. He turns out to be the man who knows everybody, which makes him the perfect guide to a city I’m trying to enter sideways, without baggage.

A couple of months after that drive, he takes me to the man’s house. Gurutman, the house is called.

The house sits on a large plot, a space he shares with three indie dogs. Trees everywhere, but the house itself is small. Three rooms in a row. Clearly, no architect had anything to do with it. At the entrance, a traditional Indian patio. One armchair where he sits, two stone benches along the wall for visitors. The whole place has the logic of a man who has spent his life thinking, not decorating.

His name is Kashyap Mankodi. He’s 72. Former Linguistics professor. Walking encyclopedia. Wry sense of humor. The kind of man who can start a sentence about geopolitics and end it talking about 13th century Sufi poetry, and you don’t even notice the journey.

That evening becomes the first of many.

Every week, sometimes twice, I show up at his house at 8 pm with a bottle of rum and something in my pocket. We sit in his living room or drag chairs out to the lawn, and the session begins.

All I have to do is throw one spark. One observation, one half-formed thought. Then I sit back and watch him take it apart from every angle, put it back together differently, and follow a hyperlink to something else entirely. By 1:30 in the morning I’m drunk enough to want to sleep, but he’s still going, unhurried as that walk I first saw in the rearview mirror.

During these evenings, I start putting together the pieces of his life. One spent on one social cause after another. Upliftment of tribals in Gujarat, fighting against mega projects like dams, supporting marginalised communities in Rajasthan, campaigning against wars and nuclear tests. Along with his research in linguistics, social sciences, philosophy, and history.

A few stories from his life stand out. Like how once, back in the 1990s, when he was asked to pay a bribe to the electricity department to have his massively inflated bill reduced, he chose to contact the anti-corruption bureau, lay a trap for the officials, then fight the case in Tees Hazari Court for years to have them convicted.

Principles over convenience.

Eventually I move to Bombay. Real life, real money, the whole thing. The one sadness I carry out of Mysore is those evenings. There’s been nothing like them in my life. And there never will be again.

He moves too, eventually. His health is failing. His family brings him in. First to Ahmedabad, to be with his son. I visit him there once. We drink, smoke, have a lot of fun.

Then in 2021 his wife retires from her Delhi University job and moves to Bangalore. The plan is for Kashyap and his son Kaustubh to drive from Ahmedabad to Bangalore together.

He calls me before the drive. There’s a place he’s been wanting to see since he was young. Lonar, in Maharashtra. A lake unlike any other.

Not really a lake, actually, but a crater left behind by an asteroid fifty thousand years ago. Over millennia, water filled the crater, but the minerals from outer space changed its chemistry entirely. Strange vegetation around the edges that looks like it belongs on another planet.

He wants to stop there on the way.

So we converge from different directions. Me, Athul, Sandhya driving in from one side; Kashyap, Kaustubh, and the dogs - only two of them remaining now - coming from Ahmedabad.

We spend two days at the edge of that impossible crater lake, doing what we always did. Talking, drinking, smoking, listening to Begum Akhtar songs. Him singing along.

It’s the last adventure he has. Well, almost.

The gang in Lonar, overlooking the extra terrestrial lake

I visit him in Bangalore. The second time, then the third. I notice what the walls of an apartment do to a man who used to sit outside under trees till 1:30 in the morning.

His mind is alive. His body, though, is negotiating terms.

He talks about wanting an RV. A mobile home. He wants to go back to Rajasthan, to a village community where he worked in the 80s. There was a blind girl there, maybe two or three years old. She was playing with a ball that made sound. She was laughing. Pure, unselfconscious laughter. He says that sound has lived in his memory for forty years. He wants to know what happened to her.

There was also a young woman, mother of two, who cooked for him. Late at night, doing dishes in the compound outside his window, he would hear her singing to herself. The most beautiful voice he’d ever heard. He wants to know what life gave her.

The RV never happens. But he manages one last adventure. A month at a resort near the backwaters outside Mysore. Just him and Bunji - the last surviving dog.

He pays for a month upfront and moves in. He wants Bunji to run. Have one more month of running before whatever comes next.

As it happens, I’m driving towards Bangalore on the exact day he moves in. I take a detour to Mysore.

Some of the Enfield-riding boys who used to hang out at Gurutman also show. Beers, smokes, laughs. Like old times. The trees are back. The open sky is back. It looks, for a few hours, like the old Gurutman evenings.

But he’s not feeling well.

I ask him how he’s feeling. He says: I’d be enjoying this much more if I were not feeling so ill.

I don’t understand how bad he means.

That night I stay. I spend it taking him to the bathroom and back to bed. He’s a much bigger man than me. I feel my own limitations in a way I haven’t before. The next morning we call an ambulance. He’s driven to a hospital in Bangalore, Bunji by his side the entire ride. Spends a few days in the ICU, then discharged.

The one last hurrah cost him almost everything he had left.

The Last Hurrah

In January he calls me. Bunji passed away.

I don’t say it out loud, but we both know what it means. He has no one to outlast now.

I’d finished the first draft of Savage Pilgrim by then. Still months from publishing. But I don’t want to take the chance. I send him the entire draft. All 120,000 words of it.

He finishes it in a couple of days. Sends me a message.

I’m glad he read the first draft. That draft had everything. Every place, every trip, every detour. Some of them didn’t survive the ruthlessness of editing.

He traveled with me all over the country on those pages. That means something to me.

We last speak on March 23. Make plans for me to visit him in April.

On the morning of April 7th, Kaustubh walks into his father’s room and finds him on the floor. He’d rolled off the bed sometime in the night. He’s unresponsive. They take him to the hospital. He’s no more.

For years I’d told myself it would be okay when he went. He’d had his life. He was a free spirit. The life he’d been living in those apartments wasn’t really him.

So I was prepared.

Except I wasn’t.

It still hurts.

The Savage Pilgrim publishes in September. He knew it was coming. That’s enough.

Don’t be surprised. Today’s not Friday. This is just me excited about something.

I want share with you something about the book - Savage Pilgrim. Specifically, the illustrations that it’ll carry.

Each chapter, all 35 of them, has an illustration. The pivotal moment. The sharpest insight. The chapter title that goes with it is the insight. The titles, together, form the philosophical spine of the book. That’s the idea.

My illustrator Divya and I have been trying to figure out how to present them. So the title and the image feel like they belong together. Not caption and picture. The same story told twice.

We might have just nailed it.

Sharing with you how it looks. Let me know your thoughts.

Here’s one on the hash dealer from Ladakh. You know the story.

Here’s another one. The Baba you might have hated after reading about him here.

Thanks!

Anupam

A month ago, I went to a party in one of Mumbai’s Lodha apartment complexes.

Not my usual territory. The kind of address that requires me to think for fifteen minutes about what to wear, then spend the next thirty trying to find anything ironed.

I showed up with a plan. Mocktail in hand, pleasant surface-level conversation, maximum ninety minutes, out the door in time for the second innings of India’s World T20 match.

The template was working fine.

Then I made the mistake of stepping onto the balcony.

The balcony. The eternal safe refuge for social outcasts and smokers of all persuasions.

I found my tribe immediately.

I didn’t leave until 3 AM.

Subscribe now

One story I heard that night I won’t forget.

Myra and Arjun were on vacation somewhere deep in Himachal Pradesh. A village so small and remote that most of its residents have never been beyond the neighboring two or three villages. That’s the entire world. Everything that exists fits inside those mountains.

They were sitting outside a house with an elderly village man. Himalayan vistas in every direction. The old man was curious about his guests and started asking questions.

How big is your farm?

We don’t have a farm.

How many cows do you have?

We don’t have cows.

The man looked at them, puzzled.

Must have some goats then?

No goats.

Sheep?

No sheep either.

After a long pause, staring at the mountains, he asked:

“Toh aap paalte kya ho?”

Then what do you nurture?

The Savage Pilgrim is a newsletter about life’s questions you can't unhear. If this landed, forward it to someone who needs it.

Share

I’m driving back from Madanapalle, down the dark highway, when my phone rings. It’s an old friend I rarely hear from.

I usually don’t answer calls on the road. But the words of the lady from the ashram are still fresh in my head. “Sri M has seen you. What you need on your path will come to you.”

I answer.

It’s Anand. An old friend but we’ve only ever met a handful of times.

A successful businessman whose achievements seem incidental to his real passions: yoga and meditation. Whatever chaos swirls around him, he always wears the same expression. Serene, quietly joyful, like someone who’s figured out a cosmic joke the rest of us haven’t heard yet.

Over the years, in our intermittent meetings, we’ve had some deep discussions on life. He’s always had an interesting perspective, most of which would go over my head.

But more recently, after reading some ancient texts, his words have finally started to make sense.

I give Anand a quick summary of my recent experiences, condensing months of existential exploration into motorway-friendly soundbites.

He pauses, then asks, “Have you read The Power of Now?”

“No.”

“Read it. Actually, send me your address. I’ll order it for you.”

I hang up and sit with that for a few minutes. Is this what the lady meant? Or is this my mind making shit up?

Either way, I can’t take a chance. I order the book as soon as I get home.

When the book arrives, I look at its modest dimensions and immediately feel cocky. 191 pages? Easy. Three days, tops.

I couldn’t be more wrong. It takes me a month.

Every page is like a wake-up call from reality itself. I can’t get through more than two pages without needing to pause and process.

Eckhart Tolle’s message is disarmingly simple: the only thing that truly exists is the present moment. Not the past, not the future. Just now. Life is a continuous stream of ‘nows,’ but we miss it, lost in thoughts about what’s gone or what’s ahead.

And that’s where I’ve spent my entire life.

There’s one thought experiment that stops me cold. Tolle tells the reader to pause and watch the mind, observe it like you’re bird-watching, and see what thought comes next.

I set the book down, lean back, and close my eyes.

I wait for the familiar mental chatter to begin.

I wait.

And wait.

Nothing. Complete silence. Like someone pulled the plug on a radio mid-broadcast.

One minute passes. Then two. My mental radio remains silent.

Am I doing this wrong?

I pick up the book to continue reading. Tolle explains this phenomenon in the very next paragraph.

The moment you turn the spotlight of attention onto your mind, thoughts evaporate. The very act of watching your mind makes it quiet, like a naughty kid who suddenly goes silent when the teacher walks in.

I’ve been looking at the world upside down my entire life.

By the time I finish, I can see with startling clarity how much I’ve missed. Sunsets I’ve photographed but never truly seen. Conversations where I’ve been planning my next clever response rather than actually listening.

Instead of living my life, I’ve been watching a fictitious version of it.

A perfect opportunity presents itself: a road trip to Gujarat, planned weeks earlier.

One day, I’m driving down the highway, endless asphalt cutting through vast plains. No traffic, no distractions.

I keep watching my mind for thoughts, letting them dissolve the moment they appear.

I watch the most breathtaking sunrise in the Kutch desert. The sky begins as pale grey, then slowly blushes into soft pink before erupting into brilliant orange and gold.

In Mandvi, I see tall, long-necked creatures wading through shallow waters with deliberate grace. Flamingos, I learn later, and knowing their name adds nothing to the beauty I’ve experienced.

This changes my experience of life completely. I feel like, all these years, I have not been living.

I’ve simply been waiting.

My mind goes back to the meeting with Sri M, the question I didn’t get to ask, the lady’s prophecy, Anand’s phone call, and the book landing up at my doorstep. Was this all random? I don’t know.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming memoir, Savage Pilgrim. Publishes Sept 2026.

It’s a beautiful day to drive. A smattering of clouds are flirting with the sun, who seems to be in a kind mood anyway. Temperature in the early 20s, a light breeze carrying remnants of the early morning shower.

My Bolero glides down the two-lane state highway. Past villages, barley fields, and old temples - some ornately decorated, some lost and dilapidated. It’s in front of one of those that I stop.

Sitting on a stone that was once part of a temple wall, I roll up some tobacco and reflect on what lies ahead. Is this the day my life changes course?

I’m driving to Anantapur district in Andhra Pradesh.

To meet with Sri M.

Three months ago, I hadn’t even heard of this guy. A friend had handed me his autobiography - Apprentice to a Himalayan Master. When I finished it I thought he’s either a siddha yogi or the most elaborate liar in the world.

I ordered his other books. All translations of the Upanishads. Texts I always wrote off as probably too esoteric and intellectual for the grazing cow that passes off as my brain.

To my shock, the books spoke to me. Like I’m worthy of that knowledge. In fact, it didn’t feel like I was learning anything new. More like lifting of a veil to reveal things I already knew but somehow forgot.

One evening, stationary at a traffic signal, I notice a billboard advertising Sri M’s discourses on Vedanta. This name seems to be following me around. Like there’s some hidden cosmic meaning.

Before the light turns green, I’ve already enrolled myself into the discourse.

Five PM. The Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan auditorium is packed. There’s pin drop silence as Sri M walks on to the stage in a crisp, white pajama kurta. We’ve already been told not to stand up, clap, or prostrate.

Sri M seats himself on the floor cushion, opens the thick book stationed in front, and starts reading. He shuts the book at 7PM and walks off, just the way he had walked in. No hi, no bye. The pattern plays out on all three days.

Having only recently extricated myself from the Sadhguru rabbit hole, I find Sri M refreshingly normal. Like Dylan to Sadhguru’s Mick Jagger.

I’ve always liked Dylan more. Is Sri M the one for me?

There’s only one way to find out.

I dial the number on his foundation’s website. They tell me there’s a satsang in a couple of weeks at his ashram.

So here I am. This day. On my way to Madanapalle.

The Satsang

Sri M’s ashram reflects his personality. No grandiose buildings or life-sized portraits. Just lush greenery and trees arranged by nature rather than landscapers.

The venue is a covered shed with 30-35 people in attendance. Not the intimate fireside chat I’d imagined.

I’ve been told I’ll get the chance to ask one question. I’ve spent the last two weeks thinking about it. Karma, purpose, consciousness, matter. Words I’ve been reading recently, quoting even, without the faintest idea of what they mean. Maybe he can help. Or maybe he can see how elevated a seeker I am. The real deal.

The crowd size poses a practical problem. Quick mental math. 3-4 minutes per person, tops. Not enough for the questions I have in mind.

Sri M arrives 15 minutes late. His silky grey hair neatly brushed back. He’s followed by an old, limping indie dog.

He apologizes. Then starts telling us about the dog. Cute story. But more precious minutes disappear.

We are asked to introduce ourselves with our name, city, and if we’ve ever been in his presence before.

When I introduce myself, I notice something. His gaze is sharp, almost piercing. Something that feels like being scanned by a human MRI machine.

His expression doesn’t change. He doesn’t utter a word. And yet, I feel like he can tell I’m full of shit. But it’s ok.

The Question That Never Was

The Q&A begins. I’m ready. But someone else gets in first.

“Tell us some stories about your Guruji.”

Really? You get a chance to ask Sri M a question and this? It’s like meeting Einstein and asking about his hair care routine.

To my surprise, Sri M doesn’t turn him away. He starts telling stories, as if he has all the time in the world. Another 10-12 minutes gone.

The next few people ask similarly frivolous questions: his daily life, his favorite books, whether he prefers coffee or tea. All answered with genuine interest.

I watch my window shrinking with each question.

And just like that, the satsang is over. Sri M stands up and leaves, the dog faithfully limps behind.

I’m stunned. After all the hours of deliberation, the long lists, the short lists, the careful planning. Nothing.

I find the lady who had registered me and explain, trying not to sound like a petulant child. Is there any chance of meeting Sri M the following day if I stayed in Madanapalle?

She tells me Sri M is initiating people into Kriya Yoga early the next morning, and she might be able to arrange a meeting after that, but no promises.

Like a gambler who’s already lost too much to walk away, I tell her I’m willing to take the chance.

She gently presses my hand. “Sri M’s work happens in ways we can’t understand. He has seen you. He knows what you’re going through. What you need on your path will come to you. Trust me. It will.”

The Call

It’s dark when I start my drive home, the highway empty except for the occasional lorry lumbering past. I was on the same road a few hours earlier. Brimming with quiet optimism. Now just the dark and the hum of the engine.

About an hour outside Bangalore, my phone rings. It’s an old friend I rarely hear from.

What he tells me turns out exactly what I needed at the time. I believe that to this day.

…Continues next week

A shorter version of this chapter features in Savage Pilgrim.