Naomi spends days and weeks diving deep into a particular writer’s body of work or an offbeat niche of literature, like the pulp fiction in the times of Conan the Barbarian, or the genre of Western Novels. Then she writes incredibly detailed posts in her distinctive voice that look not just at why these books are good or bad, but how they came into existence. Her background as a science-fiction writer and an MFA student inform her work. Her book “What’s so great about the Great Books?” was published recently to great reviews.

I’ve learned a lot reading her Substack, not just about books, but also how to write about books that I love and wish to share with the world. If you read my Chekhov post that blew up recently, a lot of the thought process in writing that post can be traced back to reading Naomi’s blog regularly.

Last month, I connected with Naomi over a video call and asked her all the questions I had in mind about the life of a professional book critic. It was an amazing conversation, and I learned a lot. Some things we discussed include:

• A day in Naomi’s life and her writing process

• How she wrote her incredibly detailed piece on Thomas Bernhard

• Is there value in negative book reviews?

• Why is Substack book discourse so angry?

• Pieces she thought were easy to write but turned out to be challenging and vice-versa + Pieces she hoped would do better + Pieces that surprised her

• What does America think of foreign authors and Indian writing in English?

• Is the short story as an art form dead? What’s taking its place?

• How to stay sane and happy as a Substacker

• A rapid fire round on other popular Literary Substackers

I hope you enjoy it. (Timestamps and quotes are given below, watch at your own leisure)

Timestamps and quotes

(Bold is me talking, quotes are from Naomi’s answers. Posts discussed are linked here)

0:00 — Introduction

1:30 — What does a day in the life of a book critic look like?
“Writing is easy, reading is what I have to make time for.”

4:35 — Do you read different books for deep writing projects vs for leisure?
”Book deals come and go, but the blog is something that I’d like to keep going.”
”The experience of reading the Mahabharata is indescribable.”
”I need to write easier pieces once in a while but also keep eyes on the prize.”

9:15 — Do you have multiple pieces going on at the same time? How do you post once a week? How did you write the Thomas Bernhard piece?
”Reading books, primary literature, and leveraging work others have done.”

13:20 — The Bernhard piece is very interesting because of its scope — it’s about the person, his influences, whom he influenced, etc. How did that project come together? And how do you know where to stop?
”Fundamentally, it’s about rhetoric. Whatever you say needs to be believable. You need to put in the work to do that, and to read stuff others haven’t read.”
”I really just wanted to get it. I wanted to know: Why would so many people base their life and career on this writer?”

18:48 — What does it mean to write a book with “integrity” like Tolstoy or Chekhov? Could somebody write a Great Book today?
”You can’t point at a book today and say if it’ll last the test of time.”
”For a book that’s lasted the test of time, I try to understood why people liked them.” (The Last of the Mohicans)
”For a new book, the question is: Do I enjoy the experience of reading this?”

23:52 — Is there value in negative book reviews?
”Professional critics get assigned books, I get to choose my own.”
Sad millennial novels post
”If you really want to take down an author, you have to sound high-minded, like ‘I wanted to like this book, but I didn’t.’”

28:14 — Why is Substack discourse so angry about popular books? (Ragebait)
”So much of people talking about the book haven’t even read the book!”
”Trying to sound smart is a curse. What’s more achievable is to just be honest.”

31:25 — Where does literary authority and credibility come from? What does a book critic need to know before getting started?
The literary short story is an empty formal exercise (Post that triggered this question)
”What gives you the most authority is if people feel you’re being honest about your experience.”
”In the newsletter world, people hear your voice over and over, and that parasocial relationship is your authority.”

34:55 — How do you navigate conflicts of interest? Would you give a friend a bad review?
”Only a sociopath would give a friend a bad review!”

37:15 — Was there a piece that you thought would be easy to write, but turned out to be very hard to write? And was there a piece that you thought would be hard but was very simple?
”My biggest failure was my essay on The Saturday Evening Post.”
”I got very interested in finding out why Louis L’Amour was successful. I discovered the answer but it was unsatisfying.”
”My post on Raymond Carver was pretty easy to write because all the material is available easily, and he’s central to the MFA system I came from.”

42:40 — Were there pieces where you had high hopes for the article, and it didn’t do well? And what about pieces that surprised you with how well they did?
”I wrote a piece about book clubs, and it didn’t go as far as I thought it would.”
”My angry stuff still travels on the internet, getting plenty of subscribers. Like my short story about the writing professor who tells his students they have no talent.”
”And my post on whether or not you should get an MFA picked up late, but it did well.”
”My best example is my novella, Money Matters. It tapered out and then a critic wrote about it for the New Yorker, and it got popular again.”
(Money Matters was the first post I read that got me interested in Naomi’s work).

47:30 — I ramble about why I started reading Naomi’s substack, and my literary goals for a bit…

48:50 — Is the short story as an art form dead? What’s replacing the short story?
”The literary journal world is kind of depressing. Finding fans of your work and publishing it is more rewarding.”
”People read my Substack for the non-fiction, but there are dedicated fans for my fiction.”

52:06 — What is America’s view of literary fiction in India or the rest of the world? How does America perceive Indian writing in English?
”The literary world in America is quite different from other places. The MFA system is itself quite unique. Literary and popular writing are set apart. I don’t think that sort of financial investment in prestige exists in other countries.”
”Most Indian writers who are known in America are diasporic writers, a handful. (e.g Aravind Adiga). The US and UK still aren’t used to importing successful Indian writers.”

59:10 — How did writers from other countries like Haruki Murakami or Thomas Bernhard become famous in America or go global?
”At this moment in time, to become a global author, you have to make it big in America.”
”Sometimes books get translated between languages only through the English translation gaining traction.”

1:02:27 — Did your Mahabharata piece get you a lot of Indian readers?
”I do have a lot of Indian and Indian-American readers.”
”I was gonna read a lot more Indian literature, but then I got distracted!”

1:05:26 — Who’s the ideal reader you have in mind?
”My ideal reader is someone like you, who’s on their own journey to understand literature and my work informs what they do.”
”I saw your Chekhov piece and thought, ‘This is great!’”
”Through the newsletter, I attract a lot of people who share my worldview, and I learn a lot from them.”

1:09:59 — Your Substack isn’t just about your writing, but also a business. What are some behind-the-scenes aspects of running a popular Substack most people don’t know about?
”The emotional side is the biggest one. It has to be emotionally sustainable. You can put a lot of work into things and they might not get the response you want.”
”There’s also all the comments and feedback you get. There are three types of comments: The superfans, the drive-by commenters, and the ones who have a negative parasocial relationship with you.”
”Do I worry about forming parasocial relationships? No! That’s the product!”
”The quieter phases when the Substack doesn’t grow are more fun for engaging with the commenters. I know the ones engaging are my superfans.”

1:17:29 — Some advice from Naomi for me, to merge my two Substacks into one (plus some lore from me on why I have two Substacks)
”The bigger you get, the more unwieldy it gets. You’re putting in the same amount of effort, but it gets unmanageable. Enjoy this level where you’re at.”

1:19:44 — Do titles make a difference? Do you tweak your titles after posting?
”With titles, less is more.”
”You’re writing for two audiences. Your subscribers need to be intrigued enough to open the email. Mentioning an author’s name decreases the open rate. But that other audience who might be browsing on notes will click for the author.”
”My post on Yesteryear is one of my most popular posts. It’s insane!”

1:23:13 — Rapid fire round. Opinions on Literary Substackers and Naomi’s recommended posts from them:

• — A great post on whether the family in Pride and Prejudice was actually poor (Henry has several other posts on this book and others by Austen)

• — Slight rebellion off Madison, on J.D. Salinger’s writing (my favorite piece of his as well)

• — how to begin, a collection of six essay openings and what they can teach new writers (highly recommend!)

• — A piece on Thyra Samter Winslow and her book “Picture Frames.”

• Synthesized Sunsets by and — A guide to web fiction and a piece about a web fiction that’s 10 million words long.

• — A good one on “A Little Life.”

• — A great one on whether all fiction is propaganda, and another on how Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s reputation changed over time.

Do check out ’s newsletter Woman of Letters and subscribe!

If you had a favorite moment in the interview, let me know. I’m new to this.

Leave a comment

If you’re new here, check out my post on Chekhov’s short stories, which is my favorite post and most popular post. The complete archive of my posts is here (essays, short stories, book reviews, etc.).

It isn’t that his language is convoluted. Few writers write in such consistently simple prose shirking any metaphor or exaggeration that draws attention to itself. His themes aren’t inaccessible either. You don’t need a prior knowledge of Schopenhauer or a deep familiarity with the Bible to grasp his work. These are simple stories written with plain clarity, going from point A to point B:

A child crosses the Russian grasslands in a wagon convoy to join a boarding school.
A father struggles to explain to his 7-year-old son why smoking is wrong.
A young military officer is accidentally kissed by somebody in a dark room and becomes obsessed with the event.
A bored judge and distracted lawyers try an alleged murderer in a lazy courtroom.
A teenage girl filled with longing after watching a romantic play has nowhere to put it.
A servant girl who has just lost her father is dying to sleep, but forced to stay awake.
A lazy doctor starts showing compassion to asylum inmates, without foreseeing the consequences.1

He wrote more than 500 of these short stories. These stories influenced writers like Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway, who went on to influence generations of writers. And yet, it’s hard to explain what sets apart Chekhov, who is considered one of the greatest writers of all time.

It’s that resistance to analysis that baffled me. Every great writer is great at multiple things, but they’re recognized for something. Tolstoy had this incredible talent for creating moral masterpieces that asked big questions, filled with nuanced characters and vivid set pieces. Turgenev mastered the character of the Russian peasant: he evoked admiration for their simple lives and a horror for the system that crushed them. Dostoevsky’s frenzied rants cut deep into the darkness of the psyche, and Gogol’s deranged idiosyncratic voice conjured a bizarre world. But Chekhov…

Chekhov’s writing is like sea water that slips through clenched fingers. But it leaves the taste of salt on your palm. It’s the sound of a faint melody from a different room, a soft fragrance in the evening breeze. The after-effect of reading a Chekhov story lingers for ages, but it’s hard to verbalize or to communicate.

That doesn’t mean I can’t try. I read as many stories by him as I could over the last few months, and this post is about everything I discovered. At the end of the post is a reading list to introduce you to Chekhov’s world.

The making of a writer

The key to Chekhov’s stories is to start with the man and walk along.

Anton Chekhov was born in the small port town of Taganrog in Russia in 1860. He was the third of six children, to a kind mother and a physically abusive father whose father had been a serf.2 When his father’s business went bankrupt around 1885, the family was broken. Chekhov tutored an acquaintance’s children in exchange for room and board. He studied to become a doctor, and began writing comic stories on the side to earn some extra money for the family around the age of twenty.

Writing was just a side hustle at the beginning. A lot of his earlier stories were formulaic. For example, in “The Death of a Government Servant,” a lowly clerk feels anxious after he sneezes on a higher official at a theatre. He repeatedly tries apologizing over the next few days until the annoyed official snaps at him, after which the clerk promptly goes home and drops dead on his sofa (This feels like a parody of Gogol’s “The overcoat”). Stories like “The Slanderer,” “A work of art,” and “A play” follow a similar pattern. They’re fun but forgettable one-note jokes.

In 1886, Chekhov got a letter that changed his life. The writer-critic Grigorovich wrote telling him that he had a gift and that he should approach literature with more seriousness. Chekhov responded with: "Your letter... struck me like a flash of lightning. I almost burst into tears, I was overwhelmed, and now I feel it left a deep mark on my soul." Two years later, Chekhov published “The Steppe,” which he called “something rather odd and much too original.” It was his first major work of serious literature.

When stories become music

The Steppe is the story of Yegorushka, a little boy traveling from his village to a distant town through the Russian Steppe (grasslands), meeting a variety of different characters on the way. This is a boring and sleepy story for the most part, in which nothing much happens. But after reading it, I found many photographic images from the story bubbling up in my memory as though I had actually witnessed them. For example:

To while away the time Yegorushka caught a grasshopper in the grass, held it in his closed hand to his ear, and spent a long time listening to the creature playing on its instrument… The two boys stroked the grasshopper's broad green back with their fingers and touched his antenna, supposing that this would please the creature. Then Deniska caught a fat fly that had been sucking blood and offered it to the grasshopper. The latter moved his huge jaws, that were like the visor of a helmet, with the utmost unconcern, as though he had been long acquainted with Deniska, and bit off the fly's stomach. They let him go. With a flash of the pink lining of his wings, he flew down into the grass and at once began his churring notes again. They let the fly go, too. It preened its wings, and without its stomach flew off to the horses.

This microscopic attention to the smallest moments is a signature of Chekhov. He considers nothing unimportant. There is no larger point to this image in relation to the rest of the story; and yet it lingers in the mind, as does the image of Yegorushka being frightened when he sees a giant walking toward him through the rain illuminated by lightning, only to realize it is a peasant with a sackcloth over his head; or him pocketing a cake at the beginning and discovering a soggy mass later. The entire story is told from the point-of-view of the boy. While the boy’s sensory experience and perceptions are vivid, his verbal interaction with other characters is childish, giving an amazing glimpse into the gap between a child’s perception and expression. There are worlds in there we know nothing of.

The Steppe was “the dictionary of Chekhov’s poetics” according to Michael Finke, creating a toolbox that he would go on to enrich and develop.3 After the success of The Steppe, Chekhov never looked back, venturing deeper into serious literature. His stories after this period grew increasingly more subtle and artistic.

But what is it exactly that sets apart a Chekhov story?

Stories are memetic organisms that travel by word-of-mouth. People compress the most memorable part of the story into a few words and retell it to others. If they’re successfully infected, the story has a chance of spreading and going viral. Bards and storytellers were superspreaders before the invention of writing, and some types of stories spread better than others: stories with a twist ending, fantastic premises, grotesque characters, and spectacular events.4 These memorable parts were compressed into memes that would carry forward the story and be easily recalled in discussion. “The Monkey’s Paw” becomes a story whose short-hand is just “be careful what you wish for.”

Chekhov’s stories have none of the fantastic aspects that aid meme-ification. They’re as plain as plain can be. And yet they have lasted. How? I think the answer is that these stories are more similar to music than they are to literature. They’re all about mood, atmosphere, immersion, and evoking a feeling that cannot be compressed. You don’t ask somebody to summarize a song or quote its highlights when they recommend it. A song is meant to be heard and experienced. Similarly, a Chekhov story is meant to be read, not retold.

Chekhov knew this. In one of his stories, “The Kiss,” a young officer named Ryabovitch who has never had a romantic relationship wanders into a dark room at a party and is kissed by a woman who smells of lilac.5 It’s an accident, and the startled woman escapes. But the event becomes an obsession that completely consumes Ryabovitch’s imagination, with him spending days wondering about the young woman’s identity, exploring his own feelings, and imagining his future. Bursting with excitement, he finally tells a couple of his friends about the encounter, and this is how Chekhov describes it:

He began describing very minutely the incident of the kiss, and a moment later relapsed into silence… In the course of that moment he had told everything, and it surprised him dreadfully to find how short a time it took him to tell it. He had imagined that he could have been telling the story of the kiss till next morning.

Chekhov is aware that the masterpiece would be reduced to a trivial anecdote. He is also aware that the inner intensity of every person shines with vividness, but to translate it into an engaging story, it needs a writer. And it needs the written medium. These stories were meant to be read alone, in the privacy of your room and in the recesses of your mind, not read aloud to an audience. Like listening to a song, you have to trust the recommendation and actually take the plunge to feel the effect.

An appetite for characters

Chekhov’s world began to widen, and so did his appetite for characters. As his popularity began to grow, all kinds of people began to visit him and talk to him, feeding his curiosity to learn about the lives of other people. He was invited to stay in the houses of socialites with whom he struck up friendships, and writing plays brought him into contact with the Moscow Art Theatre. He also traveled quite a bit — to Ukraine, to France, to the penal colony of Sakhalin — and drank in sights that enriched his stories.

Something that repeatedly comes up in how his friends remembered him was how simple and unaffected he was in his interactions with all kinds of people. Chekhov’s friend Maxim Gorky writes that once, three ladies visited him and attempted to engage him by asking him questions about “serious” topics, like the war, which he kept dodging:

How will the war end? “Probably in peace”
Who will win? The Greeks or the Turks? “Those will win who are stronger”
Who do you think are stronger? “Those who are better fed and educated”

Finally, he looked at one lady and said, “I love candied fruits. Don’t you?” “Very much!” said the lady, and the serious atmosphere turned into one of levity. The three begin to talk with great interest and subtle knowledge about candied fruit, even promising to send him some when they left. As Gorky smiled and said, “You managed that well,” Chekhov laughed and replied:

“Every one should speak his own language.”

This was probably his guiding principle when he wrote short stories. Unlike Gogol, Dostoevsky, Fitzgerald, or Lovecraft, there is no “Chekhovian” voice that flavors his prose. In fact, his prose is distinctive for the absence of any ornamentation.6 What is common to all his stories is his philosophy of “letting the characters speak their own language.” He was a glutton for the stories and lived experience of the people he interacted with.

There may have been another factor contributing to his passion for writing. Around 1884, Chekhov developed symptoms of tuberculosis and the disease slowly ate at him for the rest of his life. Though he never complained, his friend and writer Ivan Bunin once heard him express wistfully: “It must be nice to be a soldier, or a young undergraduate, to sit in a crowd and listen to a band…” There were lives he could not live firsthand, as a husband, as a father, as a traveler, as a family man who grew old, and his stories might have given him the opportunity to live these lives, vicariously.

Chekhov and Tolstoy

Late in his life, Chekhov wrote a short story, “The lady with the dog.” A middle-aged Moscow man named Gurov meets a young lady with a dog at Yalta, a holiday retreat. They have a brief fling after which they part ways. But for the first time in his life, the man is unable to forget a casual affair, and he goes looking for her. It’s a very simple story, but what makes it stand out are the details. This is how Gurov’s wife is described: “She was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, staid and dignified, and as she said of herself, intellectual. She read a great deal, used phonetic spelling, called her husband, not Dmitri, but Dimitri, and he secretly considered her unintelligent, narrow, inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not like to be at home.” A portrait in just two sentences!

Later, after Gurov is pining over Anna (the young lady) in Moscow, he blurts out to a friend that he met someone fascinating in Yalta. Just as the friend is driving away, he turns and shouts:

“Dmitri Dmitritch!”
”What?”
”You were right this evening: the sturgeon was a bit too strong!”
These words, so ordinary, for some reason moved Gurov to indignation, and struck him as degrading and unclean. What savage manners, what people!

What sticks out here is the specificity of these characters, and the details that make them up. Whether he was treating children as a doctor, interviewing convicts, socializing with nobles, or moving in theatre circles, he was always collecting details and characters that would populate his stories. As the critic James Wood notes7, he carried a notebook, “the mattress in which he stuffed his stolen money. It is full of enigmas in which nothing adds up, full of strange squints, comic observations, and promptings for new stories.” Some details:

The dog walked in the street and was ashamed of its crooked legs.

They were mineral water bottles with preserved cherries in them.

He picked his teeth and put the toothpick back into the glass.

A private room in a restaurant. A rich man, tying his napkin round his neck, touching the sturgeon with his fork: ‘At least I’ll have a snack before I die’ — and he has been saying this for a long time, daily.

If you wish women to love you, be original; I know a man who used to wear felt boots summer and winter, and women fell in love with him.

But Chekhov was not interested in symbolic and poetic details, only in specific and seemingly inconsequential ones. Celine Nguyen, in her essay “mere description” said:

“Even a functional description can, in the details it includes and the specificity of those details, become beautifully expressive. That’s what great description does: it compresses a highly unusual, highly idiosyncratic point of view into the smallest observations about the world. Writing might begin with mere description. But really great, moving writing rarely contains itself to the mere.“

This mere description is what Chekhov excelled at. He populated his universe with these characters and details, showing real people doing real things, and these small specific things become a more real and authentic portrait of them than any commentary or clever line from the author could be. This is one of the things that’s special about reading a Chekhov story. In the most unsuspecting moment, he can mention a fact that catches the reader off-guard, showing a mirror to their humanity.

This is very different from how his contemporaries used detail, especially Tolstoy. Consider the scene in Anna Karenina where Anna and Vronsky have made love for the first time:

“My God! Forgive me!” she said, sobbing, pressing his hands to her bosom.

She felt so sinful, so guilty, that nothing was left her but to humiliate herself and beg forgiveness; and as now there was no one in her life but him, to him she addressed her prayer for forgiveness. Looking at him, she had a physical sense of her humiliation, and she could say nothing more. He felt what a murderer must feel, when he sees the body he has robbed of life. That body, robbed by him of life, was their love, the first stage of their love. There was something awful and revolting in the memory of what had been bought at this fearful price of shame. Shame at their spiritual nakedness crushed her and infected him. But in spite of all the murderer’s horror before the body of his victim, he must hack it to pieces, hide the body, must use what he has gained by his murder.

See how Chekhov handles the same situation in “The lady with the dog,” through the eyes of Gurov:

The attitude of Anna Sergeyevna — “the lady with the dog” — to what had happened was somehow peculiar, very grave, as though it were her fall — so it seemed, and it was strange and inappropriate. Her face dropped and faded, and on both sides of it her long hair hung down mournfully; she mused in a dejected attitude like “the woman who was a sinner” in an old-fashioned picture.

“It’s wrong,” she said. “You will be the first to despise me now.

There was a water-melon on the table. Gurov cut himself a slice and began eating it without haste. There followed at least half an hour of silence.

After this follows a monologue from Anna, very similar to the one given by Anna Karenina, and this is what follows:

Gurov felt bored already, listening to her. He was irritated by the naïve tone, by this remorse so unexpected and inopportune; but for the tears in her eyes, he might have thought she was jesting or playing a part.

“I don’t understand,” he said softly. “What is it you want?”

Hilarious, and yet true to life. Being Anna Karenina and Vronsky sounds poetic even if its tragic. Water-melon eating Gurov just feels plain wrong. And yet, that’s how we act in privacy, because the intimate spaces in real life aren’t constantly illuminated with the spotlight of literature. Chekhov’s characters too behave naturally, as if they aren’t being watched.

Tolstoy’s characters and Chekhov’s characters both act true to life. Anna and Vronsky act true to a vision that Tolstoy has in mind for them. Tolstoy’s characters inhabited a world written to his moral design — he was exploring the question of the moral life, and his characters were colored in his shades. Chekhov’s characters are true to their life. They act according to their whims, behave consistently with their character, and speak in their own voice.8 If Chekhov was the God of his universe, his maxim would be: God proposes, and man disposes. And like an all-loving God, Chekhov observes each character with complete empathy, paying close attention without judging any of their actions.

The connection between Anna Karenina and Chekhov’s story isn’t accidental.9 Chekhov loved the novel and was obsessed with it for 6 to 7 years, developing great respect for Tolstoy. He positioned himself in relation to Tolstoy, but in an orthogonal manner. Tolstoy was trying to answer the question: If a woman who has everything is prepared to risk it all for the sake of love, is it worth it?

Chekhov took that big question and splintered it into several questions, each producing its own story:

• What happens when an aging aristocrat with cynical and rigid morals is stuck in a loveless marriage with a beautiful young woman who is compassionate and philanthropic? (The wife)

• What happens when a man falls in love with a young woman who is married to an old man, and he is friends with the woman and her husband? (About love)

• What happens when a charming philanderer starts a casual relationship with a young woman and they both fall deeply in love? (The lady with the dog)

• What happens when a sensitive and artistically inclined woman marries a simple and virtuous doctor who does not mingle well with her social circle? (The grasshopper)10

• What happens when a man finds out his wife is cheating on him and decides to take the moral high ground, but the confrontation goes in a way he never expects? (The helpmate)

• What happens when a woman’s old husband and young paramour are close friends? (The two Volodyas)

• What happens when a decadent man finds out that the husband of his mistress has just died, and instead of wanting to marry her, he wants to flee? (The duel)

While Tolstoy wanted to find the definitive answer, Chekhov set the problem in the middle of the room and walked around, looking at it from different angles and chronicling what he saw. He famously said that “The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.” There is no “right” character or fate in Chekhov’s stories – all his characters are equally worthy of his attention, and their fates seem inevitable based on their personalities and the situation they are in.

It felt like Chekhov was always messing with Tolstoy on some level. In “Home,” a father manages to successfully trick his seven-year-old son into giving up smoking through perfectly manipulative storytelling, after which the father feels guilty about his terrible power. It feels like a dig at Tolstoy’s effective moral storytelling (and yet, “Home” was one of Tolstoy’s favorite stories). In “The death of Ivan Ilyich,” Tolstoy examined the existential crisis faced by a man confronting terminal illness, and he stated an answer at the end. Chekhov took literally the same premise and wrote “A dreary story” a few years later — he ended the story with a sense of complete emptiness and cynicism, just as if to show that sometimes there are no easy answers in life.

This wasn’t antagonism for the sake of it. The two writers had different concerns.

Death was a favorite preoccupation of Tolstoy’s. In many of his stories,11 characters face imminent death at the end and they either experience salvation or succumb to a tragic death. But Chekhov was interested in the living: what happens when death happens around you, and you need to go on living? In a beautiful short story named Misery, a cab driver who has lost his only son keeps trying to tell one passenger after another about his sorrow, but nobody wants to listen. It is this mundane sorrow that Chekhov confronts.

Life does not end after tragedy or bliss: the question is, how do you wake up in the morning and keep moving on? Why look for salvation or damnation in the face of death, when every living day is a possibility? It feels like Chekhov’s characters have a life that spill out beyond the last pages of his stories, and all he has done is capture a glimpse into a specific moment.

Tolstoy was an early admirer of Chekhov’s,12 and the admiration was mutual. The two eventually became friends, visiting each other and even swimming together on Tolstoy’s estate (which might have inspired Chekhov’s story “Gooseberries”).13 Despite admiration for his talent, Tolstoy and others criticized Chekhov for not having a definite moral or political consciousness in his fiction.

Morality in banality

Chekhov was very wary of isms. He didn’t want to be associated with either the right or the left (though both claimed him at different times), and he rarely shared his opinion on political views, in public or in private. There were two exceptions to this:

1. During the Dreyfus affair in France, when a Jewish French officer was wrongly convicted of treason, Chekhov publicly spoke for Dreyfus while condemning anti-semitic virulence. This fractured his relationship with Suvorin, one of Chekhov’s oldest and closest friends.

2. Chekhov’s insistence on the fact that Russia needed to take better care of its teachers and doctors who toiled away silently under harsh conditions. Stories like “The wife,” “Ward No. 6,” “The runaway,” and “In the cart” capture this preoccupation.

But despite his reticence, Chekhov’s fiction did have a definite moral consciousness. He was a scientist of habit. Chekhov’s stories do not compress tension into one critical decision or moment of revelation. Instead, they reveal character slowly, at every inflection point in the story. He seems to be saying: “The big choices that people make in grand moments don’t matter next to the small choices that add up every day. Every day is a trial. You don’t know which moment will turn out to be important.” He preferred to study what Frank O’Connor called “venial sin” instead of looking at “mortal sin.”14 The small questions instead of the big questions. Real people don’t get ruined in one fell swoop, and neither do Chekhov’s characters.

In the story “A problem,” we are admitted into the conference room of an aristocratic family where one uncle is passionately pleading for the forgiveness of a wayward nephew who has forged a note. Other relatives are less moved. It is obvious that this young man has been at it for quite some time, and he is shown sitting outside, thinking that he is obviously not a criminal and that he could be sent to prison or to Siberia for all he cared. Finally, the joyous uncle tells him he is free to go and as they walk out into the street, the nephew remembers a friend of his has a birthday party. “Give me hundred roubles!” he tells the shocked uncle, “Or I’ll turn myself in!” As the uncle fumbles in his pocket, the nephew thinks, yes, I am a criminal now.

This is not Dostoevsky exploring the question of murder, but rather about the multiple cuts we inflict on the people we love every day. It’s about the General who preaches ideals yelling at his child and taking his wife for granted at home. Chekhov keenly observed the hypocrisies of people, and he poured them into his characters, all while withholding contempt. Over time, this led to the creation of two uniquely Chekhovian characters – the ineffectual dreamer and the heartless visionary. Sometimes these two characters would clash.

In his famous novella, “The Duel,” we are introduced to two characters: Laevsky and Koren. Laevsky is a charming young man living with another man’s wife on borrowed money. He is a great talker and makes for very good company, but just loafs around. Koren is a practical and diligent zoologist, a man of precision and ruthless ideas who believes only in economic productivity and the survival of the fittest. The story is about a personal conflict between the two men which is also a moral battle under the surface. It is the story in which Chekhov comes closest to actual philosophy when a different character says: “faith without works is dead, but works without faith are worse still, merely a waste of time and nothing more.”

The conflict shows up again in “The Wife,” and again in “The cherry orchard.” It seems to be a central theme that Chekhov was wrestling with all his life. Laevsky and Koren might just have been two sides of himself that he was trying to reconcile. He was the artistic writer dreaming of private worlds and he was also the practical man of science treating patients in Russian villages. He might have hoped for a world where both these aspects were in harmony, in all people.

Nabokov says, in his lecture on Chekhov:

Chekhov’s intellectual was a man who combined the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action; a man devoted to moral beauty, the welfare of his people, the welfare of the universe, but unable in his private life to do anything useful… it is the stumble of a man who stumbles because he is staring at the stars.

Despite imagining such a type of ineffectual intellectual, Chekhov was not one himself.

Chekhov is remembered by all who knew him as a kind, gentle man who worked very hard, very uncomfortable both with criticizing people and receiving compliments, generous with his time, and extremely hard-working. Despite retiring from medical practice after his writing started to pay, Chekhov was actively engaged in building and running libraries, schools, and hospitals. He was a health officer for a Zemstvo (local government), and helped deal with a cholera epidemic with no assistants, traveling miles in carriages. He did all this while he was sick with tuberculosis, and his condition grew worse with time. He was in denial of its severity the whole time, despite being a doctor, possibly to comfort those around him.

In his later years, Chekhov retired to his orchard in Yalta (now in Crimea), and had a long-distance marriage with Olga Knipper, the lead actress in some of his plays. He died in Germany while on vacation with her, and his body was carted back in a refrigerated railway carriage marked for oysters. Hundreds of people attended his funeral.

A month before he died, Chekhov told his friend Ivan Bunin that he would be read for at most “seven and a half years.” At least 122 years have passed since his prediction. Chekhov populated his fictional world with lovingly crafted characters. But that world is our world. The humanity of every character in his stories is mirrored in every reader who picks up his book. And as long as people keep reading, Chekhov will live on.

A reading guide

If you haven’t read Chekhov yet, I’ve put together a sequence that will let you ease into it. If you’ve been reading Chekhov, you’ll discover new reads here. Feel free to skip steps or mix it up. Unless otherwise mentioned, I always prefer the translation by Constance Garnett. If the story is not easily available, I’ll link to an online version:

1. Start with Chekhov’s joke stories. They’re fun and approachable. “Letter to a learned neighbor” (his first published story), “The death of a government servant,” “A play,” and “The slanderer” are all great. “On the sea” is bawdy and hilarious.

2. Read these light-hearted stories that are slightly more serious: “Home,” “In the court,” and “Agafya.”

3. Read “Gooseberries.” A good way to do this is to get George Saunders' book "A swim in a pond in the rain." In this book, Saunders walks you through some Russian short stories page by page, and notices the beauty you might miss because you are not used to this type of story. If you write stories yourself, I doubly recommend it. The book covers three short stories by Chekhov: "In the cart," "Darling", and "Gooseberries", all of which are great.

4. If you liked Gooseberries, read “The little trilogy”: “The man in the case,” “Gooseberries,” “About love.”

5. Read three of his more conventional stories: “The Bet,” “Enemies,” and “A nightmare.” These are high on drama, and have a satisfying payoff.

6. Read three of his more subtle stories: “The lady with a dog,” “The kiss,” and “Volodya.”

7. Now try something more ambitious. Watch the movie “Winter Sleep,” a Turkish film by director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, based on Chekhov’s novella “The wife.” This movie gives you a visual grammar to understand Chekhov’s world. In fact, I didn’t fully get Chekhov’s vision until I saw this film and I’m grateful to my friend who recommended it.

8. After that, read “The wife” by Chekhov. A few other novellas by Chekhov are also good, including “A dreary story,” “Ward No. 6.,” and “The Steppe.” They are quite long though, so you might want to save them for a rainy day.

9. Chekhov isn’t just capable of funny, warm, or depressing stories. He is capable of some truly disturbing stuff as well. Read “Sleepy,” followed by “In the Ravine.” In the Ravine is so different from Chekhov’s other stories — it has a noirish vibe like Dashiell Hammett’s Nightmare Town. Incredible story.

10. “The Duel” is Chekhov’s most philosophically ambitious novella. You’ll eventually want to read it.

11. Get back to reading the short stories with the awareness of Chekhov’s range and versatility. These are some great ones:

    1. Misery

    2. Rothschild’s fiddle

    3. The grasshopper

    4. Vanka

    5. The chorus girl

    6. The head of the family

    7. A problem

    8. The witch

    9. The black monk

    10. The helpmate

If I left out any of your favorites, let me know!

Leave a comment

One tip that I found helpful: Give these stories some space to breathe. Because Chekhov’s prose is so simple to read, I used tom rush through the sentences and get to the end. But Chekhov was a dramatist as well. The real effect happens in the silences between the dialogues and the scenes (I understood this after watching “Winter Sleep.” George Saunders’ book is also very helpful). He describes something and breaks the line, and that description matters to the perception of what's going on. Small gestures, stares, and actions reveal the power dynamics between people. People say terse, blunt sentences, and it's only in the silence following that sentence that its cutting impact is felt. Reading the story aloud, pausing, and letting the impact sink in before moving on also worked for me at times.

I’m linking a sheet here with a list of the stories I’ve read. (Stories marked “Favorite” are ones I would reread, “Pass” are enjoyable enough to read once, “Fail” are skippable). I guess I’ll be updating this because I keep discovering new stories by him. Bookmark this post or the link to keep it handy.

If you enjoyed reading, consider sharing this with a friend. This Substack is where I write book reviews and sometimes share my short stories. Subscribe to get more:

Subscribe now

I also wrote a post about Anna Karenina a while back. You can read it here.

Genre: Romance/Literary | Reading time: 25 minutes | Content rating: PG-13

A young American visiting Europe is fascinated with a girl, who doesn’t speak English. They establish an unlikely connection despite the barriers of language, geography, time, and war.

This is the line that made me pick up the story:

She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there, leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.

In this short piece that was originally published in Good Housekeeping, Salinger experiments with foreign languages and epistolary storytelling without ever seeming gimmicky. His is the distinctive and warm sound of The Catcher in the Rye. That friendly quality is present in this story as well, with the tone alternating between scenes of absurd imagination, clumsy vulnerability, and a current of feeling that is unnamed but holds everything together.

Read here: A girl I knew

2. The lady with the little dog by Anton Chekhov

Genre: Romance/Literary | Reading time: 80 minutes | Content rating: U/A

People don’t set out to transgress social norms. They do things following their feelings, and they tell themselves stories that let them live with what they do. This is the story of the extramarital affair of a middle-aged man whose detached attitude and facade of composure quickly slip out of his control, turning his life upside down. It starts with a lady with a little dog whom he meets in a park.

The lady with the little dog is Anna Karenina without the operatic drama: What was happening in the rest of Russia, in the quiet households, in the holiday retreats, in the corridors of opera houses.

Chekhov peppers the text with small observations, never clever or pretentious, merely shining a light on how people obsess over their own stories while living in an apathetic world. His stories feel simple and unassuming on the first read but images from the story linger in your mind for a long time, intruding into your day at unexpected moments.

Read here: The lady with the little dog

3, 4. Two stories by John Updike: The Gun Shop and Daughter, Last Glimpses of

Genre: Coming-of-age | Reading time: 20 minutes each | Content rating: PG-13

I have a troubled relationship with John Updike’s writing. Reading a story at random by him is like playing roulette. More often than not, I walk away feeling mildly annoyed that I let this stylistic lab rat waste my time with some clever experiment. But I persist in the search. Because many years back, I read a story by Updike titled “Should wizard hit mommy?” and I’ve been on the search for stories like that ever since, because there’s one thing that Updike really shines at: Writing about watching children grow up.

In The Gun Shop, a man takes his son and father to a gun shop to get the son’s gun repaired. The story is told entirely through the point-of-view of the father and his emotional journey is tangled. On one hand, he’s proud of his son having more initiative and drive than himself. On the other hand, he feels inadequate as a father, compared to his own father. Ironically, the grandfather feels like a poor father too… The legacy he’s passed on to his son is neither his humor nor street smarts, but rather this feeling of inadequacy. It’s a story full of character moments.

Daughter, Last Glimpse of is the more complete story of the two. Unlike The Gun Shop which is more stream-of-consciousness in its style, Daughter begins with this line: “Just before she went away to live with the red-bearded harpsichord-maker, our daughter asked us how to jitterbug.“ You know how the story is going to end. All that remains to be seen is how daughter arrives at this decision to elope. Here too, it’s the father telling the story. In the details he chooses to reveal and the details he ignores, you see the truth between the lines that he’s refusing to acknowledge.

Updike treats his children as real people. They aren’t puppets or projections of his childhood fantasies. The parents are neither ideal martyrs nor apathetic tyrants – they are flawed people who recognize their inability to control their children, feel ashamed of their desire to do so, and still cave once in a while.

The Gun Shop and Daughter, Last Glimpses of are part of the collection “Problems and other stories” by John Updike. I couldn’t find a free copy of The Gun Shop online. You can read the other one here.

5. Parson’s Pleasure by Roald Dahl

Genre: Comedy | Reading time: 30 minutes | Content rating: PG-13

Sometimes you know a car crash is coming, and yet you cannot avert your eyes. That’s what it feels like reading Roald Dahl’s stories. His tales fall under a category called “Conte Cruel” which follow a predictable set-up:

• The characters are introduced

• a “bet” is introduced that forms the focal point of tension

• the stakes around the bet are built up

• the bet is resolved…

• and the story ends with a twist

Dahl is neither the first one to follow this template nor its most famous practitioner. O’Henry is known for this kind of storytelling, while Saki was Dahl’s model for his own work. But within these constraints, Dahl makes the game his own. The bulk of Dahl’s story is spent on raising the stakes around the bet. Parson’s Pleasure is the perfect example of this craft in action.

An antique dealer disguised as a parson goes around hunting for rare furniture, and stumbles across a shocking find at a farmer’s house. Now, two things must happen in the story at once – the dealer has to win the “bet” with the farmer, but Dahl must also convince us that the dealer (and hence Dahl himself) knows what he’s talking about. This puzzle is what Dahl solves beautifully. It’s a masterclass in exposition.

This kind of storytelling sometimes gets a bad rap. But done well, it’s really fun.

Read here: Parson’s Pleasure

6. Katina by Roald Dahl

Genre: War/Memoir | Reading time: 45 minutes | Content rating: U/A

This story is nothing like Parson’s Pleasure, or any other of Dahl’s usual Conte Cruels. Katina starts as the memoir-like recollection of a fighter pilot during World War I, rescuing a girl during his campaign in Greece. The fighter pilots have to win their campaign in Greece, but they also have to save this girl who is their ray of sunshine amidst a gloomy field.

From the first line, it’s obvious that there’s something very real and raw about this story, unlike his other ones that read like movie screenplays. It sounds as if it’s something Dahl lived through himself. Which turns out to be true, because Dahl was a fighter ace who served in WWI, and it’s rumored that he only began writing good stories after a head injury resulting from a flight crash.

Either way, Katina is very different from Dahl’s other tightly crafted plots. Written at the start of his writing career, it sacrifices the finesse of his later years for an ambitious form that reaches for something more subtle. It’s indulgent, meandering, and delirious, reflecting the mind of a man stuck in battle with his friends who talks to the Gods and imagines the mountains as living entities moving in on them. It portrays the humanity of the enemy without stooping to sentimentality or moralizing. And it makes the little girl Katina a strange figure, like a flower in a battlefield.

In one spectacular sequence, a dogfight goes down in messy detail – giving us this image:

There were the two bombers which collided while swerving to avoid a fighter, and I remember distinctly seeing a man being thrown clear out of the smoke and debris of the collision, hanging in mid-air with his arms outstretched and legs apart.

And then, this happens a few pages later, punctuating the chaos:

I remember peeping cautiously over the top of of our trench and seeing a small white flower growing just a few inches away from my nose. It was pure white and it had three petals.

I couldn’t find a free copy of Katina online. It’s part of the collections The Great Automatic Grammatizator and other stories, The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl, and Over to You. Cillian Murphy narrated the audiobook version of Katina, and you can listen to the first few minutes here.

7. Second-hand mattress theory by Robyn Perros

Genre: Absurd/Surreal | Reading time: 30 minutes | Content rating: A

An insomniac woman develops a theory around what would help her find good sleep, and she tests it out with the help of a guy named Mike on Facebook Marketplace. The story is told in first-person POV, with the coherence of the narrator’s voice devolving in tune with her insomnia.

This one was a surprise find in The Bombay Literary Magazine. This story isn’t as technically polished as the other ones here, but it was fun to read for its imaginative voice and bizarre point of view.

Read here: Second-hand mattress theory

8. The overcoat by Nikolai Gogol

Genre: Existential/Dark humor | Reading time: 65 minutes | Content rating: PG-13

What is a short story? Is it something defined by the length, or is it a distinct form? In The Lonely Voice, Irish-American writer Frank O’Connor addresses this question by taking the example of Gogol’s story The Overcoat. The story is about Akaky Akakievitch, a graying clerk in St. Petersburg living a mundane repetitive life with no margin for joy. He is the butt-of-jokes at his office, and he rarely responds. But:

Only when the jokes were too unbearable, when they jolted his arm and prevented him from going on with his work, he would bring out: “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” and there was something strange in the words and in the voice in which they were uttered. There was a note in it of something that roused compassion, so that one young man, new to the office, who following the example of the rest, had allowed himself to mock at him, suddenly stopped as though cut to the heart, and from that day forth, everything was as it were changed and appeared in a different light to him. Some unnatural force seemed to thrust him away from the companions with whom he had become acquainted, accepting them as well-bred, polished people.

And long afterwards, at moments of the greatest gaiety, the figure of the humble little clerk with a bald patch on his head rose before him with his heart-rending words “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” and in those heartrending words he heard others: “I am your brother.” And the poor young man hid his face in his hands, and many times afterwards in his life he shuddered, seeing how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage brutality lies hidden under refined, cultured politeness, and my God! even in a man whom the world accepts as a gentleman and a man of honour.

In this moment, Gogol takes a pathetic “mock-heroic” character of the little clerk and casts a light on him that suggests empathy for him without making a martyr of him. Frank O’Connor thinks this is the job of the short story. Unlike the novel, which relies on an embodied identification with characters over a period of time, a short story works best when it creates a piercing moment of pure insight that speaks for the “submerged population” of society.

These submerged voices are underrepresented characters. They would make poor role models unlike the heroes of novels. But their marginalized character is not necessarily due to material poverty. They could also be submerged due to the absence of a spiritual goal – failed dreamers, soldiers returning home, migrants without a rooted home, men in search of masculinity, women in search of men, millennials chasing meaning in a post-modern world. The short story’s job is to select the apt moment that sheds light on their lives, one the reader resonates with but also persists as a timeless truth for generations to come. This is what The Overcoat continues to do, though it was written in 1842.

There is a quote often misattributed to Dostoevsky: “We all came out of Gogol’s Overcoat.” Despite this weighty reputation of spurring an entire generation of Russian writers, The Overcoat is also a hilarious read, because of Gogol’s eccentric voice. In his voice is Kafka, Chekhov, Calvino, and the truth of modern humanity.

Read here: The Overcoat (Constance Garnett translation). I prefer the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation, but I could not find a free copy online.

9. The interlopers by Saki

Genre: Thriller | Reading time: 20 minutes | Content rating: PG-13

The interlopers is a very simple story. Two rivals who have a blood feud spanning generations are stuck in a forest during a thunderstorm, hunting each other in the thick of the night. Fate brings them together in an unexpected way.

Hector Hugh Munro aka Saki was the writer who developed the structure that Roald Dahl, Alfred Hitchcock, and others made their own. This story is one of his most popular and enjoyable ones.

Read here: The interlopers

10. Man-eating cats by Haruki Murakami

Genre: Suspense/Magic Realism | Reading time: 40 minutes | Content rating: A

Murakami’s stories read more like music than stories. They flow smoothly, present recurring rhythms and secret symbols, and end with a lingering feeling that could make the reader wonder what that was all about. I don’t think that’s a bad thing – it’s precisely the reason I enjoy his stories so much. But it can also leave you annoyed and befuddled if you crave understanding over experience.

Man-eating cats by Philip Gabriel is a story about a lovelorn couple trying to figure out their lives on an idyllic island in Greece. They fish, walk around, watch the sunset, paint, and make love. But underneath this serenity is a dark undercurrent of primality that threatens to destroy their lives. By denying the abnormality of their situation, by not addressing the obvious problem in the background, an atmosphere of tense repression is created that builds up to a haunting ending.

I looked up at the sky. The moon was a cold rock, its skin eaten away by the violence of the years. The shadows on its surface were like cancer reaching out its awful feelers. The moonlight plays tricks with people’s minds. And makes cats disappear.

Read here: Man-eating cats

More analysis in this note I wrote here:

11. Editors don’t want male novelists by

Genre: Literary/Edgy | Reading time: 40 minutes | Content rating: R

Naomi Kanakia writes literary criticism on Substack. She reads the Great Books and discusses them. But once in a while, a post starts out in an essayistic voice and a paragraph or two in, you realize this might actually be a story. Naomi calls this format “the tale” and I like it because it’s uniquely suited to the medium of newsletters and blogging. When people read their emails or scroll through a blog, they are not in the same mindset as when they sit down to read a full-length story. The form has to adapt to the demands of the medium, and Naomi’s tales are usually a blend of commentary and a compelling character.

In Editors don’t want male novelists, the main character is a self-aware writer who is toeing the line between literary experimentation and being morally reprehensible. You watch him in the process of persuading himself that because he is aware of his moral ambiguity, it somehow justifies the questionable decisions he takes. It’s a talky, narration-heavy style of storytelling that I like for its voice and also for the skill with which it handles a troubled, self-aware psyche without devolving into a lecture.

Adding to the story is the discourse that continues in the comments. The story is engineered to stimulate conversation, and you can see how different people react to this character, making them honorary characters in this story.

Read here:

Woman of Letters

Editors don't want male novelists

Once upon a time, a young man read on Substack that writers like him were, if not discriminated against by the world of letters, then at least severely underrepresented. To the young man, this discussion was a turning point: he had to finish writing his novel. In fact, the world…

Read more

2 years ago · 576 likes · 77 comments · Naomi Kanakia

12. The distance between platforms by

Genre: Romance | Reading time: 45 minutes | Content rating: PG-13

Places have personality. Approached with love, a place can also be a character in the story told about its inhabitants. The coastal city of Mumbai in India tends to inspire this kind of feeling in storytellers.

The distance between platforms is a straightforward, immersive story about two people who fall in love on a railway platform. The focus isn’t on the internality or intimacy between the two characters. In the busy city of Mumbai, love is a logistical problem reduced to commute times, train routes, rents, living spaces, and parental consent. Mumbai is also a living, breathing character fostering the lives of these two characters. This one is a pleasant read.

Read here:

08:08 AM Reads

The Distance Between Platforms

The first time Amrita saw Kedar was through the grilled window of the Kalyan fast, his face pressed against the bars like every other commuter trying to catch whatever breath the wind refused to give. She was on the platform at Kurla, waiting to change to the Harbour Line, and he was trapped in that metal caterpillar that swallowed and spat out millions…

Read more

6 months ago · 18 likes · 9 comments · Nirav Mehta

You can also check out some short stories I wrote, here.

My favorites are Devolution, and Compounder Kafka and the drowning child.

I’ll continue to write reviews, fiction, and my thoughts on writing. If someone forwarded this post to you, you can subscribe here to get my emails:

Subscribe now

1. Each side starts with four chess pieces – A pawn, a knight, a bishop, and a rook.

2. In every move, you place a piece on the board OR move a piece.

3. The pieces move as in chess. When a pawn reaches the end, it reverses direction.

4. Captured pieces go back to your reserve. You can place them back again.

5. The game ends when you form a line of four pieces – horizontal, vertical, or diagonal.

Here’s what a completed game looks like:

I wanted to play this game online, but it didn’t exist. So I vibecoded my own version with a tool called Lovable. Getting an initial version out was simple. All I had to do was describe what I wanted in detail. My friends seemed to love it, so I’ve been adding more features over the last couple of weeks.

You can play by yourself or online with a friend – create a room and share the code so they can join. Play it with your friends and let me know what you think!

You can email me at adhithya@marketsentiment.co with any feedback, or comment below.

Play Tic Tac Toe Chess

Hit subscribe to hear from me again:

Subscribe now

This is my personal blog where I post my stories and experiments. If you want to read my non-fiction, check out Five Slices.

The Dispossessed starts with a wall on the desert planet of Anarres. The wall encloses a space port where cargo rockets land and take off. Foreigners don’t get outside the wall, natives don’t get inside the wall. The wall itself isn’t forbidding. It’s a flimsy parapet that even children can look over. What keeps people out is the idea of the wall. The wall is a line not to be crossed, and it’s been this way for hundreds of years. Yet there’s a tension in the air as people gather around it.

A man arrives in the distance, escorted by a group, and he walks through the gap in the wall. People try to stop him, people try to hurt him, but the deed is done. He gets on a rocket and leaves Anarres. This man, Shevek, is a physicist and it is through his eyes that The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin unfurls.

Shevek is an exile, an anomaly, a fish out of water. This is obvious from the first time we meet him. But the exact nature of his alienation and his lopsided perspective of the world are not yet clear. Who is this man? Why is he leaving the planet? And why is it such a big deal? The answers are not provided immediately. Instead, in clinical, spare prose, the author starts to describe how Shevek is perceiving the world around him. He is befuddled by seeing his planet turn from a plane surface to a convex horizon to a round rock in the sky as they take off into space. He has never seen or imagined something like this before. All the characters in the book are humans. Yet they’re also aliens, because they’re humans who developed in civilizations completely unlike ours.

Shevek is going to the sister planet of Urras. On the rocket, he talks to the Urrasian doctor about women, and when the doctor assumes women as incapable of being scientists, Shevek isn’t angered – he is just mildly confused because the doctor’s cultural conditioning amuses him in its absurdity. Shevek lands on the sister planet of Urras where he is welcomed as a celebrity. Stone buildings overwhelm him with their architecture because Anarres, buildings are only one storey high. The belligerent way in which the “ruling class” treats the “working class” doesn’t make sense to him, because on his planet, there are no classes. To see trees stretch endlessly toward the horizon and to hear birds sing is a surreal experience to Shevek, a man from a desert planet where there are no animals or birds.

The planet Shevek is visiting looks and feels very similar to ours. It is an earthlike planet with class differences, with capitalist and communist countries engaged in military wars, where incredible technological achievement is juxtaposed against unbelievable poverty. The things we take for granted are reintroduced to us as if for the first time through the eyes of an alien who has come from a very different sort of society.

This makes you wonder, what sort of society is this which would shape a man like Shevek? And that’s the other half of the book.

The book has a clever structure.

• The first chapter: Shevek leaves Anarres for Urras.

  • The second chapter: Shevek is born on Anarres.

• The third chapter: Shevek meets the scientists on Urras and tours the place.

  • The fourth chapter: Shevek grows up on Anarres, attending school.

In this manner, the story has a forward motion propelled by Shevek’s adventures on Anarres, but also a bildungsroman aspect that shows how Shevek became the man he is. The two arcs are woven together like twin braids. His coming-of-age arc ends at the point where he decides to leave the planet, which loops back to the beginning of the story like an Ouroborean serpent eating its own tail. It’s poetic in a way, because it mirrors a central theme of the story: The two ways in which we can perceive time. Shevek is a physicist who is trying to reconcile the sequential way in which we process time (beginning → middle → end, causality, time as a river) with the simultaneous aspect of time (cycles, periods, time as a circle). The story’s structure mirrors this – you can read it from start to finish, and then it circles back.

Shevek’s theoretical brilliance in this field could unlock a technology that changes space-travel forever – and this is why the Urrasian capitalists have welcomed him to their planet, hoping to pamper him into submission.

But Shevek’s physics are inseparable from his metaphysics, which is where the political aspect of the story kicks in.

The politics of The Dispossessed

When I was 15 years old, I read “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand. The book’s central philosophy of Objectivism heavily impacted my worldview at a point, persuading me that individual creativity and technological progress were the only ways to preserve civilization. A side-effect of this was that it motivated me to study hard and push myself to limits I would have considered irrational otherwise. It sort of worked, in the sense that I gained financial independence. But looking at where the world is now more than a decade later, I have my doubts about Objectivism. The philosophy seems to have bred callous individuals whose hubris over their achievement is causing them to disregard the Social Contract and ravage the environment.

At the same time, I have a deeper problem with the Fountainhead: Propaganda makes for bad storytelling.

The problem with any writer with a political axe to grind, be it Orwell with Animal Farm or Rand with The Fountainhead, is that the “good people” are steelmanned and the “bad people” are strawmanned. The failure of philosophies like communism are attributed to the malice or incompetence of a few bad eggs, a coterie of cartoonish villains who are plotting to take control. The problem with this is that

a) It’s boring and
b) It creates flimsy arguments that are easy to disprove.

People reading these books can (rightly) argue: “This is not how REAL socialism would work. If we lived in a world where every country was socialist, where we started over from scratch, etc. then we’d have a utopian society.”

This is where The Dispossessed shines. In this story, Ursula Le Guin imagines Anarres as a country that is started from scratch with a completely socialist government, with leaders who encode socialism into their culture so much that there is no notion of private property or even currency. The colonists even reconstruct language to remove personal possessives. In one scene, a character says: “You can take the handkerchief I use,” instead of “You can use my handkerchief.“ There is no notion of ownership. To possess personal property or show off is social taboo, not legally wrong. There is no police, no law, and no enforcement – in a desert planet where people have to work together to survive, the people coordinate for mutual benefit.

And yet, the tagline of this novel is “The Dispossessed: An ambiguous utopia.” Even in this utopia designed from scratch, the author doesn’t discount human nature and incentives. Social hierarchy and hidden power structures emerge despite the lack of a central governing body. People do accumulate personal possessions and control. Ego and personal grudges hold back social progress. And our protagonist Shevek, blocked in his scientific work, realizes that he is an individualist on a socialist planet. The problem with a perfectly utopian society where equality is enforced is that while it limits misery, it also limits achievements, and no tall poppy can stand out without getting its head lopped off.

And in the other half of the story, Shevek enjoys bliss in his time on Urras, revelling in a society of immense beauty and convenience, able to focus for the first time on his work in complete isolation. But as time passes, Shevek is able to see the externalized costs that make this progress possible, the segregation of the classes, the discrimination among genders, and military conscription that is dismissed by the ruling classes as what the “working classes are for.” Shevek also begins to realize that he is a pawn in a game much bigger than himself, and the only choice he may have is to put himself in danger. The novel turns into a thriller halfway through.

Urras is a planet that possesses everything, and Anarres is a colony of the dispossessed. But there is a seed of Anarres in Urras and a seed of Urras in Anarres. Yin and Yang. By being removed from his people, in exile, Shevek has a renewed appreciation for the form of government on his own planet. Shevek’s personal journey from socially conditioned worker to individuated hero to an organic member of a society that is larger than himself is a mythical hero’s journey.

Is the conception of the Utopian civilization of Anarres over-optimistic? Yes. I find it hard to believe that power wouldn’t be concentrated and militarized in a society of any size, no matter how egalitarian. But apart from that, the book is a surprisingly nuanced interpretation of the world we live in. The author is not naive. She wrote the book during the Vietnam war, and she did realize that even a “utopian” colony in a world inhabited by military powers is only allowed to survive because it is either too small to care about or because it is useful to the larger powers. All these minor details are captured in the inter-governmental conflicts in the book. (There is an entire inter-planetary civilization in the book, which is itself part of a larger series called The Hainish Cycle which I hope to get to soon).

Ursula Le Guin constructs a utopia, while poking holes in it, and contrasts it with a “villainous capitalist” society that has its own merits. The restraint from turning it into propaganda is incredible. It’s clear which side she’s rooting for, but she holds back from demonizing or strawmanning the other side the way Ayn Rand does. In fact, her characterization reminds me of a different writer from a much older time.

A Levin for the space age

A struggle that Shevek never solves completely on Urras is to address people as his equals. On his home planet Anarres, people are all “brothers” in arms, a sentiment of such absolute equality that it seeps into every aspect of life from how children interact with their parents to how partners choose to set up a life together. On Urras, there are no equals. Even within a simple professional conversation, there is always a power dynamic. When Shevek tries to address his servant as his equal, the servant looks at him with contempt thinking he is being condescending.

This struggle reminds me of another character: Levin from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Levin is a member of the aristocratic class who wants to live up to the stature of his class. At the same time he wants to reform the system to make it more equitable and egalitarian for the farmers and laborers who work on his land. The problem is that the ones who resist this idea the strongest are the people he’s trying to help. By treating them with respect they aren’t used to and expecting a level of initiative that shakes them up, Levin only manages to earn the contempt of his wards. Shevek is a Levin of the space age, pure in spirit, inquisitive, and genuinely looking to reform the system for the well-being of his fellow man but hopelessly outmatched by the weight of a system that has accumulated weight over centuries.

I wrote about Anna Karenina here:

The ending of Anna Karenina left me disappointed because Levin’s acclimatization to the vagaries of life seemed like a meek surrender that squandered 800 pages worth of character build-up. Maybe it was the only “realistic” thing to expect – Levin, for all his idealism, has to integrate into a system that is completely unlike him. Shevek on the other hand doesn’t have to resign to the same fate. He isn’t an aristocrat or a farmer, but rather a renegade anarchist. If he dies, he’s prepared to face death, and if he returns, it will be to a society that matches his idealism – leaving Shevek’s soul untainted and maintaining the suspense till the end. The high point of his character is a speech he gives to a large crowd:

“We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”

That line stuck with me long after I had read the book. As a breaker of walls, Shevek keeps trying and failing, but in the meantime, he’s managing to break walls in the minds of the reader that they didn’t know existed at all.

2,000 words into my review, I noticed that I’ve spent very little time discussing the actual science in the book (it’s a sci-fi book after all), or the worldbuilding (which is fantastic – Le Guin creates entire mythologies, histories, biologies, geographies, and even languages from scratch which give an otherworldly aura to the story). I haven’t commented anything on the prose, which starts out so drab and dull that I had to read it aloud like an incantation in the first few chapters to avoid losing focus and later turns lush and vibrant – matching Shevek’s journey from the desert planet of Anarres to the green planet of Urras. I haven’t discussed the strong characters in the book: from Shevek’s mother Rulag, to his partner Takver, to the aristocratic Vea, to Shevek’s friend Tirin who makes a small but powerful appearance.

And I’m not going to discuss any of these. The actual experience of reading the book is like going on an interplanetary journey and will pale in comparison to anything I write about it. All that stays with me are the last couple of lines that gave me chills when I read it:

But he had not brought anything. His hands were empty, as they had always been.

Thanks to my friend who recommended this book to me.

Subscribe now

Savithri knew when she moved to Ooty in 1995 that it was a rainy place. But knowing about the rain didn’t prepare her for living in the rain. Light showers, heavy downpours. Tittering, pattering, thundering, crackling. Rains that sang, rains that whispered, rains that monologued in a baritone like Sivaji Ganesan in the monochrome movies of her childhood. Casual drizzles that gradually grew in intensity, feinted a concession like a man losing an argument, and then hammered down like an avalanche of silver coins when her back was turned. Rains that made her run out to pull clothes that were almost dry off the clothesline, damp again in just thirty seconds, making her wait for the next window when the skies would let up. Rains that infused a musty odor through this labyrinthine house which had more corridors than windows, an odor that was the aftertaste of mopped floors that retained a patina of wetness long after they were wiped.

When her father had rubbed his forehead in apprehension about how a girl from Madurai would adjust in Ooty, she had wondered what the bother was about. But now when she saw the grey shroud hanging over the mountainside the afternoon before Deepavali, clouds as far as the eyes could see, she wondered whether her three-year-old son would ever see a normal festival of lights.

Ever was a long time. She knew she was being dramatic and she felt guilty for thinking that way. But for a three-year-old boy, three years was all he had known in his life. The first two years he had been just a cherubic mass, flolloping around the house, oblivious of the fact that festivals were times of merry that punctuated a mundane existence where nothing much happened, because for him, something happened every day. But very soon, he would watch the advertisements on Sun TV, hear his grandfather ask him on the phone what crackers he had burst, listen to effusive descriptions from his cousins who lived in warmer places, and a feeling of lack would grow before he could even put words together. Just the inkling that he was missing something important that others were witness to.

It was just her and him at home that day. The large house that looked like a haphazard amalgamation of mismatching rooms housed seven people. Four of them were away on a roadtrip, visiting temples. Her husband was at the office, held up arguing with the union leaders who were asking for Deepavali bonuses from a Government of India company that was barely afloat. His irritable tirades at night after their son had gone to sleep only conveyed that something was wrong because she didn’t understand the import of what he was saying but she knew that these too, like the rains, were part of her life and had got used to the idea of him walking home through desolate roads with just an umbrella to give him company, occasionally saved by the kindness of strangers who gave him a ride home. It was the evening before Deepavali, and her husband was still not home. She sipped her tea and let out a sigh, placing her hands on the wooden frame with peeling white paint, looking at the mist wafting through the tall eucalyptus trees in the light that was dying much before the sun set.

A single droplet of water fell periodically from the eaves, splashing tip tip tip tip into a limpid puddle that had formed in a hollow on the concrete courtyard. A wide-eyed sparrow hopped hither and thither, frazzled by its unexpected wetness, looking like a marooned traveler on a solitary island. The sounds of the city sifting through trees spiraled like falling leaves and sunk into the silence that surrounded her.

A metallic clatter startled her, cleaving the house like the clean stroke of a knife. Her tea sloshed a little as she placed it on the ledge and jogged to the kitchen where the sound had come from. On the red oxide floor sat her small boy holding a dripping ladle. Surrounding him were blotches of oil that he had spread around with the ladle into wild whorls with no rhyme or rhythm. The clatter had been from the upturned frying pan which had served as the palette for his paintbrush, the epicenter from which a spillage of oil was slowly seeping across the red floor like an organism with a life of its own. When he saw his mother staring at him with a poker face, because she was still putting the pieces together in her mind, he dropped the ladle and grinned widely. “Ayyo!” he said.

Savithri could only mirror his grin, and he chuckled, and she laughed, and it cascaded into a senseless explosion of mirth which left her eyes watering while the rational part of her mind was wondering what was wrong with her. After about 15 minutes or so, she squatted down to the level of her kid and asked him, “What are you doing kanna...” He grinned again. She hoisted him up with a smooth motion and sat him on the stone ledge of the kitchen, and he watched silently as she scattered shikakai powder that soaked in the oil, spread ripped newspaper pages on the floor, and washed the frying pan and ladle, something she should have done long ago. At least now she knew what not to do next time. As she knelt on the floor on all fours and scooped up the oil-soaked powder from the floor, she wondered if she could do this and would be doing this thirty years from now, with the arthritic knees that her mother-in-law had. Maybe thirty years from now, they wouldn’t be here any more. Maybe this boy who had spilled the oil on the floor would rescue her and her husband, and take them to a different place, far far away.

The rain outside seemed to have stopped for now. But now she was feeling tired, and cold, and wanted nothing more than to sleep. As if God had heard her prayers, the lights snapped out, and there followed a peal of thunder so demonic that it even jolted her, so that it was no surprise when the little boy started crying. She scooped him into her arms, jostling him and patting him on the back, walking around the house with measured steps, careful not to trip on the awkward thresholds that she still wasn’t completely used to after three years of living here. Something bitter rose up in her that she had to deal with this, alone. It was the loneliness that bit harder, than the fact that it was raining on the festival of warmth, that it was silent on the festival of noise, and it was dark on the festival of lights. It just didn’t seem fair to her. It definitely wasn’t fair on the boy. She choked up a little but she didn’t let herself cry. It was enough if one of them did. The rain gave them soft company by weeping monotonously in the courtyard, the patter sounding like percussion on the red brick tiles.

They must have passed out that way, snug in the warmth of each other’s bodies, and they both woke up when the metal gate creaked open in the blackness of the night. Her consciousness took a few seconds to wobble into place in her body and for some reason, she remembered the lone sparrow that had been hopping around in the rain. Fingers rapped on the front door in threes forming a repetitive thrumming knock. It was a smart rhythm like the hooves of a small galloping horse, a sound she recognized well. She placed the boy on the sofa and groped her way to the bedroom, looking for the aluminium torchlight she kept beside her pillow. She switched it on and went back to the front door. Her husband was peering through the glass pane with cupped hands, the way he always did, and his eyes squinted a little when hit by the orange light, but he smiled at the sight of her. She opened the door.

“Is Surya asleep?” he asked.

“No, he just woke up, hearing you come in,” she said. She wondered why she hadn’t thought of Surya’s name for the last six hours.

“Why are you sitting in the darkness? Has it been long since the power went out?”

“We were sitting on the sofa, and then we just fell asleep... Yeah, the power’s been gone a long time.” She pouted. “Some deepavali.”

He touched her cheek. “Come on da, cheer up.”

She moved away reflexively and walked to the kitchen muttering, “Get changed. I’ll get you something to eat.”

***

A melting candle in a ceramic cup was the only source of light in that vacuous kitchen. Sitting in its amber light, Savithri looked at the intent way in which Surya observed his father eating rice from the metal bowl. Shadows and flickers flitted on her husband’s face in the orange light, and they captivated the little boy. Her husband moved his hand against the light of the candle and noticed dark grey shapes growing smaller and bigger against the green wall speckled with mould. Seeing Surya smile a little, his father set the bowl aside and knelt down. He folded his hands into a shape, and Surya watched an animal emerge from the shadows. A dog, bobbing his head, now twisting into a rabbit, and then a spider, and then a bird, flying around the room before it dived at him and he felt his father tickling his neck, causing him to run cackling towards his mom.

Sitting in the dark kitchen with his tiny arms wrapped around her legs, Savithri tried to remember what it was that she had been worried about in the afternoon. But the sound of his laughter superseded the workings of her memory, and for a brief moment, she was able to relax in the warmth of that cold kitchen.

Story notes:

I wrote this story at Write Club Bangalore for the prompt, “A slice of life around festivals.” Long ago when I was a kid who had just started going to school, my mother wrote a poem wondering how I would return home in the rain, which I only read recently. This story was inspired by my imagination of what was going on in her head.

Glossary:

Deepavali aka Diwali is the festival of lights, one of the major Indian festivals.

The story is set in Ooty, a hill town in Tamil Nadu, the Southernmost state of India. It’s a beautiful place where it rains for seven months a year. Madurai is like the Deep South of Tamil Nadu, an arid town which is the polar opposite of Ooty in terms of climate. Tamil is the language spoken in Tamil Nadu.

Sivaji Ganesan — Vintage Tamil movie star known for his theatrical monologues who was popular during the 60s and 70s.
Sun TV — The dominant Tamil TV channel
Ayyo — Oops
Kanna — Something like darling/sweetheart
Shikakai — A plant used as a shampoo, sometimes used in cleaning agents/detergents

You can check out my other stories here, and to get future stories in your inbox:

Subscribe now

There were four of them seated in a row, next to each other. They were there to watch the last show of The Godfather in Bangalore.

On the rightmost seat was a girl wearing cargo pants and a lilac tank top. A grey hoodie hung loosely on her shoulders, like the rind of an overripe fruit.

Next to the girl was a guy with a beard that was neatly shaped, probably for this very night. He wore expensive cologne and was dressed in a green shirt that hugged his chest. His watch was a good one, and his pants were chosen with care, not just picked off the rack. His sandals were a disaster though. They had nothing to do with the rest of his apparel, and if people are judged by their footwear, he was going down in the first round.

Next to the bearded man sat a lean guy in glasses, in a Polo T-shirt and jeans that could have been a brown paper bag for all he cared. This was a very unhappy man. The reasons were not important. Everything about him was scruffy, like a well-kept garden that was on the verge of breaking out into a wild frenzy of unkemptness, but not yet showing any obvious sign of neglect that could be pointed out by passers-by to the gardener without making a fool of themselves. He sat in his seat like a slightly lopsided bean-bag, with his chin resting on his right palm and his right elbow planted on the armrest. His legs were crossed and positioned as a counterweight to his leaning right shoulder, giving him the aura of a disinterested cow reclining on the road in peak Bangalore traffic, chewing the cud with a stoic melancholy that was unperturbed by the honking horns of the people around it.

The fourth man was an anomaly. He looked like he didn’t belong there. His flamboyant red fleece jacket segued to thin running shorts below his waist, as if his legs weren’t informed about the cold that the torso needed cover from. His face had not a speck of hair, but across his shoulders flowed frizzy Rastafarian dreadlocks. These locks swayed like Feng Shui wind chimes every time he swiveled his head like an exotic songbird. This man was here to be entertained, and nothing could shake his poise.

So these were the four people. An unremarkable girl, a bearded guy, Mr Disgruntled, and a ray of sunshine in a red hoodie. They sat in the last row of a theatre in a mall in Bangalore, waiting for The Godfather to play. The show was supposed to start at 10.30, but 20 minutes of mandatory advertisements and trailers impinged on their patience first. They had to watch Bollywood stars speak literary lines in a different language, trying to sell switches and carpets, followed by trailers for inane films that had no business ruining their palate before the main course.

Finally, the censor certificate for The Godfather flashed on the screen, like a dated photograph from a mildewy album. The disgruntled cow stayed in the same position, squinting his eyes as if he saw some premonition in the grainy lines streaking across the certificate, while the others leaned back with a sigh of relief. The violins began to play in tandem.

The disgruntled man got his phone out to video record the opening scene. He held his phone in landscape mode because a friend had once told him that videos always need to be shot in landscape mode, and while there was a part of him that wondered if this applied to clips he was shooting to share with friends, he thought it was too late to switch the camera angle now. To his left, he saw the red hoodie guy also take a video, but in portrait mode. Now he was even more unsure. When Bonasera’s bald head rolled into the frame saying “I believe in America,” he was confused about whether to watch the screen or his phone. If he watched the screen, there was a chance that the video would turn out bad, but if he kept staring at his phone, he would miss out on the opening scene that he had come to the theater for.

“Video lena allowed nahi hai sir,” a voice muttered behind him, like the voice of his conscience. But his conscience wouldn’t speak Hindi to prohibit him from shooting videos, so he knew it had to be theater personnel.

“Instagram pe daalne ke liye,” he muttered, still not lowering his phone. He saw red hoodie acquiesce immediately to his left, tucking the phone away in his pocket.

“Video lena allowed nahi hai sir,” the man repeated. He kept repeating it till Mr Disgruntled put the phone back into his pocket. Mildly upset that he had to turn off the recording before Marlon Brando entered the frame, he now leaned back to enjoy the movie. He noticed he was sitting in his chair like Don Corleone, leaning to one side, with his right hand on the armrest. This made him feel conscious of looking pretentious, and he shifted his weight looking for another comfortable position. Red Hoodie meanwhile had taken his phone out again, and Mr Disgruntled realized that Don Corleone was about to say his iconic line. He considered reaching for his phone again, but he resisted. He had to stay present, enjoy the movie.

“I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse,” said Don Corleone.

Mr Disgruntled watched red hoodie quickly snap a video of the scene before the theater personnel swooped in again. To his right, he saw the bearded guy point to the screen with his index finger, as if to signal “That’s what I’m talking about” to the girl. He felt a mild twinge of annoyance.

It had been a while since Red Hoodie had watched The Godfather. Probably sometime in college. The man in the seat next to him reminded him of Arnav. The same moroseness, the same slump in the chair, the same look of judgement when the bearded guy two seats away was pointing at the screen or muttering something to his girlfriend. He wondered what Arnav was doing now, or where he was.

What it must have been like to watch this movie 50 years ago, with people who had never watched anything like this before. And in India. You’re watching Joru Ka Ghulaam and Gora aur Kaala, and along comes the Godfather like something from a different world. He wondered whether they’d even played The Godfather in Indian theaters back then. What would people have thought of the horse scene?

Speaking of which, the horse scene was coming up on screen now.

Woltz had just told off Tom Hagen, who said that the Don never asked a second favor when he was refused a first. Night fell on the Californian mansion and turned into a pink dawn.

“Watch now,” said the bearded man, and the girl leaned forward. The gloomy guy who looked like Arnav shifted a little in his seat.

A deceptively simple melody greeted Woltz waking up in his bed among yellow satin sheets. Woltz sensed something was wrong. Feeling blood on his hands, he sat up as the music was distorted into an eerie perversion of its own essence. As he threw aside the sheets –

The music was cut abruptly to a long shot of the mansion, with Woltz’s screams heard in the background. The bearded man fell back, the gloomy guy sat up like he had been stabbed in the back, the girl asked “What happened?” and Red Hoodie stared confused. The censors had cut out the reason for Woltz’s screams – the grotesque, bleeding black head of Woltz’s horse wrapped in the satin sheets of his bed. One moment the man was waking up and the next moment he was screaming. The audience had to fill in the grotesquerie with their own imagination.

The gloomy guy took this very hard. Even as Red Hoodie reconciled with this tragedy and continued to watch, he noticed the gloomy guy rubbing his face in his hands with a contorted look of personal betrayal. His pathos amused Red Hoodie because it was exactly what Arnav would have done. He wondered if this was Arnav in disguise. But he was a tad short to be him. He was also a bit older.

They continued to watch the film, and this time Sollozzo was talking to the Don about a million dollars in finance.

“You’re telling me that Tattaglia can guarantee –”

Don Corleone cut off Sonny with a mean look, and Mr Disgruntled heard the bearded guy giggle. Then the bearded guy began mumbling to the girl in a voice as loud as Sonny on screen: “See, his son interrupted him when he was talking. So now the other guy knows that there is a rift in the family. Now see what happens because of this...”

And then, a few minutes later when Luca Brasi walked into Bruno Tattaglia’s bar, the bearded guy whispered: “Now watch. When Sollozzo gives him a handshake he doesn’t accept it. Then see what happens.”

And then, when Don Corleone walked out of his office and found that Paulie was on leave, the bearded guy said, “See, his bodyguard is on leave. See what happens because of that.” And as Don Corleone was buying oranges and two men in long coats started walking up to him, “See, watch those guys...”

Mr Disgruntled wished that the men on screen would shoot the bearded guy instead of Don Corleone. He hadn’t paid 250 bucks to listen to this man’s running commentary on every scene the instant before it happened. But something held him back. He kept shooting dirty looks at the bearded guy and saying “Tch” in slightly louder increments each time, hoping to register his annoyance, but the bearded guy was lost in his own world which consisted of just two inhabitants.

The bearded guy’s name was Prakhar. The girl’s name was Swati.

Prakhar had spent hours of his life watching CineRanter videos about The Godfather. He knew what every gesture, every turn of the head, every change in key, every angle meant. When Enzo the baker showed up in the hospital to help Michael, he knew it was the same Enzo whom the Don had helped with an American Visa in the first scene. When Enzo’s hand was trembling after the hitmen had left and Michael lit his cigarette, Prakhar knew that the close-up shot of Michael’s steady hand was a signal that he recognized his own coolness in a life-or-death situation. When the camera zoomed in slowly on Michael as he calmly narrated his plan to kill Sollozzo, he knew that it was a motif for his transformation into the new Don, and he knew that only Tom Hagen understood this in real-time because everybody else in the room laughed and he didn’t.

He had ingested all these details on the weekends, years before he had met Swati, not knowing that they would be of use one day when he would be sitting next to her in a dark theater watching The Godfather.

Prakhar was happily oblivious to his neighbor who was anticipating his anticipation of each scene with annoyance. He would have had to turn left to notice the disgruntled man, but he never did, because Swati was on his right.

INTERVAL

Red Hoodie got popcorn. But he didn’t wait till the last minute to do it.

What Red Hoodie hated the most was when people took their own sweet time during the interval, returned late, and then walked across the screen just when something intense was happening, like right now when Michael was about to shoot Sollozzo in the head. He was trying to ignore the guy shuffling from right to left in the darkness with a big bucket of popcorn in his hand, blocking out Sollozzo’s nose first, and then Michael’s eye.

At least the bearded guy and his girlfriend hadn’t returned to their seats yet, and he didn’t have to listen to his running commentary. The gloomy guy who looked like Arnav seemed happy about this as well. But the cuts were beginning to annoy both of them. When Al Pacino finally shot Sollozzo, they cut out McCluskey gagging on his own blood. The gloomy guy took this very personally, slapping his face with his hand. Red Hoodie felt sorry for him and offered him some of his popcorn. This took the gloomy guy by surprise, but he thanked Red Hoodie and refused, continuing to watch the movie sitting like the stone statue of Rodin’s Thinker.

Red Hoodie understood gloomy guy’s angst, but he didn’t feel as intensely about the cuts. There was only one scene he hoped they wouldn’t cut, after Michael and Apollonia got married, on the night of their wedding. But when that scene came, and the censors were unkind enough to cut it exactly as Al Pacino removed Apollonia’s gown, Red Hoodie couldn’t help yelling, “Are you fucking serious?!”

“Losers,” agreed the gloomy guy. “They even cut the horse scene. Tch.”

“Yeah!” said Red Hoodie.

And that was all they spoke through the length of the movie.

When Sonny Corleone saw his sister’s bruised face and left after whispering sweet words of reassurance that he wouldn’t beat up her good-for-nothing husband, the disgruntled man remembered his friend Rohan. He hadn’t thought of Rohan in a while.

10 years ago they had been eating Aloo and Chappati in their college mess, and this was in the first few days, when he hadn’t even known Rohan that well. To him, Rohan was just the lanky guy in class who had lied about having malaria so that he could join classes three weeks late, and they were just getting to know each other. When Mr Disgruntled told Rohan that he was reading The Godfather for the first time, Rohan had immediately lit up.

“Oh, where are you at, where are you at?” asked Rohan.

“I’m at the scene where – no spoilers, please...” he’d said.

“No no, I won’t spoil it, go on.”

“Sonny’s just found out that Carlo is beating Connie, and he’s on his way to beat Carlo...” he said.

“Oh just you wait. The next time Sonny tries to beat him, he’s really going to get it,” said Rohan.

“FUCKING BITCHFACE! I told you not to spoil it!” yelled Mr Disgruntled.

They had been silent for about ten seconds before Rohan spoke.

“I’m not a bitchface, I’m just a bitch,” he said, before taking his plate and walking away. It had bothered Mr Disgruntled for a long time that he had snapped at Rohan before composing a more elegant insult that expressed his feelings. What did Bitchface even mean?

No part of that conversation made sense to him now that he thought back about it. It made even lesser sense that he and Rohan had become friends after that, that they’d played music together, climbed over the hostel wall at the point where the glass splinters had been filed down, eaten Maggi from the pushcart at 3 in the night, and had stayed up watching Twelve Angry Men the night before the exam of their Biomedical Engineering Elective. They had moved to Bangalore together, and worked together, till it all fell apart because of the same wicked temper that had anointed their first meeting in the college mess. If they had still been friends, Rohan would probably have been sitting next to him, where Red Hoodie was sitting now.

Come to think of it, Red Hoodie looked a bit like Rohan.

“Watch, watch,” the bearded guy said to the girl. “He’s going to beat up his brother-in-law. Just see what happens the next time he does the same thing...” he said. Mr Disgruntled wanted to yell at the bearded guy to let the girl watch the movie by herself because she wasn’t in fucking kindergarten, but he remembered Rohan walking away without looking back, the potatoes still on his plate. He let it go this time.

Prakhar hadn’t expected things to go so well.

Swati was actually liking the movie. He hadn’t expected her to, but she was listening to what he had to say, and she was asking him questions. When Don Corleone warned Michael that someone close would betray him, and that the traitor would be the one who set up a meeting with Barzini, Prakhar repeated his words in a feverish frenzy to Swati, because it was very important that she knew why Michael did what he did in the scenes that followed.

He lifted his feet up on his chair and leaned closer to her.

Don Corleone was going to say something even more iconic now.

“Men can’t be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but men can’t,” said Don Corleone.

He turned to her jabbing his finger at the screen, emphatically. She smiled.

When Tessio approached Michael during the funeral, he reminded Swati about what the Don had said. When Tom talked to Michael, Swati asked him about the Don’s advice again, and he was only too happy to elaborate on what he had spent a lifetime preparing for. He was going to have a blast explaining The Baptism of Fire. This was leading up to be the best movie date he could have ever hoped for. This was the girl for him...

He felt an insistent hand tapping on his left shoulder and he turned.

Mr Disgruntled was a sad guy but he wasn’t a mean guy. He didn’t want to shame a guy in front of his girlfriend. Or wife. Or whoever. For all he knew, he would have been doing the exact same thing. But this bearded guy was exceeding his limits.

When Don Corleone said, “Women and children can afford to be careless, but men can’t,” the bearded guy jabbed his finger at the screen like a TikTok Influencer, like the dialogue was some self-evident truth and not a parochial truism that a crime boss was passing on to his son. The look on his face was one of triumph, like he alone had understood this undeniable fact out of the 67 people watching the movie that night. Worse, the bearded guy was acting like he had written the bloody line himself.

Mr Disgruntled grunted. But the bearded guy didn’t hear him. He was lost in his own grandeur. He removed the sandals from his feet and invited them onto his seat. The dreadful odor emanating from his right made Mr Disgruntled consider strangling him himself. He tried to tell himself it was okay.

Then the bearded guy repeated what Don Corleone had just told Michael, word for word. It was like watching a movie with reverberating audio, slightly jittered. Then the bearded guy repeated the same thing, slightly louder, during the Don’s funeral. Marlon Brando had just died. Mr Disgruntled was trying to feel sad for the grand life of the old man, but this man seemed positively excited about it. When the bearded guy repeated himself a third time, Mr Disgruntled chose his temper over his principles.

He tapped on the bearded guy’s arm. The bearded guy turned toward him, slightly surprised that other people existed in the same theater as him.

“The Baptism scene is going to start soon,” said Mr Disgruntled.

“Huh?”

“The final scene. It’s about to start.”

“Yes?” said the bearded guy.

“Can you shut your mouth at least for these last five minutes?” asked Mr Disgruntled. It wasn’t really a question.

The bearded guy nodded after a second and turned away. When the girl asked him what had just happened, he didn’t reply. He didn’t talk till the movie ended. Mr Disgruntled would have felt bad – if he had paid attention to what was going on to his right. But he was watching the Baptism of Fire in blissful silence.

Red Hoodie thought that if church had been marketed to him with this scene from the Godfather, he might have actually considered going. The music was ethereal, and the amber light seemed to seep through the cracks between the ceiling and the walls.

Mr Disgruntled enjoyed seeing Moe Greene put on his glasses just for them to shatter. He loved the way Barzini froze in mid-air before toppling backwards across the stairs. He even chuckled a little when Clemenza kicked Cunio into the elevator before blasting him with a shotgun.

The Bearded Guy watched, sullen and stonefaced. He wanted to say something to the girl, but caught himself just in time, seeing the cold look on the face of the man next to him watching the screen with rapt attention. He wondered if she understood the importance of this scene. He would explain it to her after they left.

When the Church Organ stopped playing, Mr Disgruntled let out a sigh.

When the door closed on Kay and the theme music began to play again, the bearded guy and his girlfriend shuffled out immediately, without looking back once. Some people stood up and clapped, there was one lone whistle, and conversation which started as a hum grew into a droning buzz as people filed out. It was 1.45 am at night, and the moment the magic ended, bleariness took its place. The lights came on.

The theater personnel started to arrive, picking up the fallen popcorn cartons and askew cups of cola. Red Hoodie got up and stretched his arms, seeing Mr Disgruntled still sitting frozen in his chair, his palms locked before his face as if to say that now that the movie was over, he had the hard task of living waiting for him outside. He didn’t understand the deal with this guy, but he found him amusing nevertheless. Seeing Red Hoodie staring, Mr Disgruntled looked up at him. And then he smiled. It was a beautiful smile, like the salmon shimmer of dawn breaking an inky night.

“Not going home?” asked Red Hoodie.

“I’ll go. I want to listen to the music,” he said. “It sounds good in the theater.”

“You know, you remind me of someone,” said Red Hoodie.

“I do?” asked the smiling man.

“Yes. A friend I used to watch movies with. He introduced me to The Godfather. His name was Arnav,” said Red Hoodie.

“How about that...” muttered the smiling man.

“What?”

“You reminded me of a friend too. From long back,” he said.

“Huh.”

As the music faded out, the man stood up from his seat. Red Hoodie extended his hand, “Mike.”

“Mike, as in Michael Corleone?” asked the man.

“Nah, just Mike. No mafia would accept me with this getup,” he said pointing to his dreadlocks and shorts.

“Maybe they could use an ear-on-the-streets, who knows. Like in Goodfellas. Or Mean Streets.”

Then realizing that Mike’s hand was still hovering in the air, he clasped it with his own and shook it.

“Ashok,” he said. And they walked out together, the last people to watch The Godfather in the last show in Bangalore.

Story notes:

Like The Godfather, this story fails the Bechdel test.
Unlike The Godfather, no horses were harmed in the making of this story.

Subscribe now

In April, Ava and Rishi had a video chat answering some questions from users about deeply personal topics. I didn’t know who Rishi was but I liked his vibe. I reached out to Rishi and he was super-friendly – we exchanged a few emails. It was interesting to learn about what he did. As a coach, he engaged in shared exploration with his clients and helped them find clarity on things that are important to them in life, without giving any explicit advice.

This was in April.

Then a few weeks back, Rishi posted a note saying he’d like to do a live coaching session on Substack, and I was curious to see how something like this would look. So I signed up, talked to Rishi for a while, and we recorded the session on Wednesday:

Full Power

Rishi coaches Adhithya

Listen now

a year ago · 5 likes · Rishikesh Tirumalai and Adhithya K R

The session is a 1 hour video podcast. I ramble for about 15 minutes trying to articulate the topic, and then the talk picks up some momentum. There were a few reasons I did this:

One, I love to talk to people. I love to talk in person, over the phone, over text, over letters – in that order. Most people who know me know this.

Two, I was curious to know what Rishi did and wanted to get to know him better. I have some experience with therapy and wanted to see how coaching was different.

Three – I think I have a fear of being seen, and I wanted to see if I could overcome it, even a little bit. I was scared of being on camera and looking awkward. I was scared of judgement from friends who knew me only in an analytical context and hadn’t seen me in my emotional messiness, from my uncle who’d wonder “what is this guy even doing with his time?”, from cousins who look up to me and cousins who think I’m a bit much, from people I work with, from people I’m crushing on, from myself for being an imposter (“who do you think you are to go talking about your problems?”), and people on the internet I’d never meet. I thought I’d look like a dork and sound like an incoherent mess. Which is why I took four days before I watched the video again and realized, “Hey, maybe this has its problems, but… it’s still me.”

So I’m sharing it now.

I think the video is a cool way to get to know Rishi’s process and the way I think. If you’ve been curious about what therapy actually looks like, the video could give you some insight – though I’d say Rishi’s process had some big differences, for example, that it was more action-oriented and ended with an exercise and a tactic I could use.

Thanks a lot to Rishi for guiding me through this process and hosting a wonderful session. I loved it!

P.S. If you’re reading this, Happy Birthday A.

When Crichton wrote it in the 80s, it was still possible to believe that there are places that are hard to reach. It wasn't like prehistoric times when Greek poets embodied dangerous regions that were difficult to navigate in beasts like Scylla and Charibdis. But in the 1980s, there were still places where cell coverage was spotty, flying a helicopter was difficult, and it was possible to believe that there were places where man had never set foot before.

By the time Peter Jackson made King Kong in 2005, this was getting harder to believe – where was this island of monstrous dragonflies and murderous centipedes and gargantuan gorillas that no traveler had ever heard of or photographed before? And with the advent of the smartphone era and automated drones, it became harder to believe that Bigfoot and Chupacabra and the Loch Ness monster all existed, that UFOs were a thing. What excuse could the storyteller give for not clicking a picture when technology had placed a high-tech camera in the hands of every person in even the remotest corners of the world?

The skeptics have always existed: The ones who deconstruct the magic trick using simple physics or who attribute astrological predictions to simple Barnum statements. That has never been a problem as long as the believers existed to counterbalance them, the people who willingly paid ticket fare to suspend their disbelief and be scared out of their wits at the theater when an alien xenomorph leaped onto the screen. It's the attrition of these believers that's spelling the death of the fantastic.

The fantastic needs some place to exist. Speculation and awe need something to be left to the stuff of imagination. With every location mapped out, which mythical real estate can these evicted phantasms occupy?

One option is to set it in the distant past or in the distant future. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, or knights who lived in the times of dragons are no different from rebel fighters in the future fighting against rogue robots or sentient apes. The audience think they are seeing a different era on screen, but what they're seeing is a different geography safely displaced from the inconvenient requirements of modern reality.

Sometimes the exotic gets a planet of its own. Pandora is far far away... The trick works, like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, as long as you don't exactly pinpoint where it is. Place Pandora too close to Earth, and some smart-aleck astronomer could pull up a cosmic photograph to show you that we know where this planet is and we haven’t detected life on it yet. Place it too far away, and some physicist would retort that not only is it impossible to travel there with today's technology, but that it's impossible to travel there ever, even if you traveled at the speed of light which is mathematically impossible to surpass. Even if like Christopher Nolan, you hide the technical details between some invisible bookshelfs painted in caramel pastel colors, that trick can only be forgiven once – the next person to repeat the act would be called a charlatan. So Pandora works when you know nothing about space... But keep reading about all the planets being christened in the newspaper and your skepticism deepens when you realize that the final frontier really holds no Garden of Eden that humanity could visit in its lifetime.

We've exhausted the islands and we've exhausted space. We've mined the past and the future. The next step is to see if we can reach a compromise, whether reality and exoticism can coexist. Space robots from Optimus Prime's planet crash into New York city and humans just accept them as a fact of life. Harry Potter goes to school in some Scottish isle while wizards manage to live in the spaces between houses via some clever magical chicanery. You put on special sunshades when you're walking down the street and realize that aliens live among you masquerading as human beings. The fantastic is right in front of your eyes all the time, these folks claim, and you just don't see it because you aren't special enough. Or because it hasn't happened yet. The Emperor's New Clothes trick of writing fantasy and science fiction, which is to blame the audience for what they don't see. That too begins to lose its authority over time.

If the exotic cannot live inside this reality or to coexist with it, one way out is to claim that reality is itself fake. That this reality is just a pallid simulation being run on high-tech substrates, like in The Matrix. Or that there are other realities which exist inside simulations, like Tron. No longer do these creations need you to travel physically to these exotic locations – it's your consciousness that needs to be transferred, as a stream of bits on a computer that sees all. Your very existence is information after all, and the need for physical real estate vanishes.

Use the phrase “we’re in the simulation” a few times and semantic satiation renders it meaningless. The search begins again.

If reality is under question, why not go all the way and postulate the existence of other realities? A reality in which Hitler won the war, like The Man in the High Castle, or a reality in which he lost much sooner. Realities with their own strange laws of physics and conceits and complications like Ted Chiang's universes... Microcosms with their own rules, like board games designed for players who are invested in the absolute internalization of a world they can control.

This opens the gateway for creating the universe from scratch, like Tolkien did, inventing a cosmos and a pantheon and a geography and a history and a mythology and a compendium of languages and family trees and catalogues of tobacco and songs and poems, for telling the same old story about good winning over evil. Other people follow in his footsteps, George Lucas, Del Toro, Bryan Konietzko, creating universes and worlds and microcosms from scratch that forswear all relation with the reality we inhabit in an attempt to create something exotic. But the truth is that while these exotic universes claim to bake an apple pie from scratch by inventing the entire universe first, they resonate with their audience only because they echo the rhythms of human music. Something so exotic that it lacks any connection with the dreams and desires and sounds and images of human existence would just be a piece of meaningless drivel whose exoticism is condemned to obscurity in the wastelands of eternity.

Meanwhile, people keep looking for places to set up their exotic domains without losing hope, in the deep sea, on Mars, in the world of insects, in the quantum realm, in stories within stories, in two-dimensional spaces that only triangles and squares can live in... these fantasies simultaneously supplying curiosity for their readers and fodder for their skeptics to solidify the scientific cigarettes that will burn holes in the very fabric that created them; and while the believers will chant again and again, "No, no, it is but a fiction, I ignore the science, I block out my rationality, I believe only for a brief moment that there exist worlds which I do not know of, where you can tell me a story about fantastic beasts I have never heard of", the poison of doubt creeps in and seeps and gnaws at their conscience, because once they see it, they can't unsee it.

And so real estate keeps running out, and before you know it, there's nowhere to put the dinosaurs.

The real story is more complicated. Like all genius inventors, Morpheus Langley stood on the shoulders of giants who came before him, and was at the right place at the right time to channel a confluence of beautiful ideas. Yes, it helped that he was brilliant with computers. Yes, it was fortunate that he had a rich megalomaniac for a father who barely paid any attention to him growing up, instilling a need in him to distinguish himself, and yes, he inherited a fascination for Greek nomenclature from this eccentric billionaire. Yes, he had an inexhaustible reservoir of charisma and grit that he could channel to canvass for the ideas that he thought were important.

Despite all of this, at the age of 25, Morpheus was lost like so many other graduates his age. He wasn't in the Silicon Valley scene of virtual consciousness. He was a nobody, albeit a rich nobody. The technology to transfer a human consciousness to a computer was already mature, and it was being marketed exclusively to billionaires. Since Morpheus belonged to those circles, he could afford to purchase a connecting device and reverse engineer it to see how it worked, without fear of being sued into oblivion. These virtual consciousnesses were simulations of the human brain that were run on a Mesh network, and they had a simple pitch. Immortality for the human body would take centuries to achieve, and cryogenics may or may not work; but a digital copy of your consciousness was a perfect clone of your existence. You could save it at any point and it would be switched on when you died. You would wake up as a “HOLOSELF”, a virtual avatar in a digital world, walking around and interacting with other digital beings in a holographic universe so realistic that you wouldn’t even know that you were in a fake world – unless somebody contacted you from the outside. Some users wanted to switch it on even when alive, and have conversations with their holoselves, but this ability was still being regulated via the Senate. Morpheus Langley was fascinated by this technology and he had the money to do something with it.

But apart from all the other things he had going for him, it was a set of three random but useful coincidences that sparked the idea for Olympus when he was on the edge of sleep one autumn evening.

First, Morpheus knew about Conway's Game of Life.
Second, Morpheus was an Elder Scrolls addict.
Third, Morpheus worked with Version Control Systems for AI agents

First: Conway's Game of Life

Conway's Game of Life was a giant infinite grid of white squares with black cells placed on them like bacteria in a petridish. Based on simple mathematical rules, the cells would evolve and emerge into patterns of staggering beauty over hundreds of generations. Think of it like throwing a handful of seeds into fertile soil and seeing a forest burgeon in front of your eyes. It was unnecessary to memorize the “forest” at every point in time. Just knowing the "seed" or the starting point was enough to recreate the entire world of a bacterial colony. The seed theoretically contained information about the past, present, and future of that world, like the universe contained in a grain of sand. Morpheus wondered why nobody was applying this idea to the brain simulations on the Mesh. At the time, all the virtual human beings shared the same world, like a shared Role-Playing Game with holographic avatars, and every detail of the shared world had to be programmed from scratch. But this was unnecessary – every human being's mind had a vast collection of memories and experiences that could act as a "seed" for an entire world. You could technically take the information in a brain and construct an entire world out of it, in isolation, that every person could live in. They wouldn't have to share that world with anyone. It would be theirs alone, and it would be populated with people and objects and rules based on their memories. While that person would be real, everyone else would be a simulation, an NPC.

Second: The Elder Scrolls

Through college, Morpheus had been addicted to the role-playing game Elder Scrolls which let him enter a fantasy world as a dragon warrior who went around learning skills and fighting monsters. The game gave players the ability to save their game at any point. Every time there was a major decision in the game, he would create a save file before proceeding. This wasn't unusual, everyone did it, as a backup before a boss battle. Unlike his friends though, Morpheus had an almost OCD-like need to personally experience every possible branch that had been programmed into the game. He would create a save file before taking the option to become a vampire. Then he would play from that point and live the life of a vampire, but he would also go back, and reject the choice and join the vampires' rivals the werewolves in another branch of the game, and replay the game again, living as a werewolf. He would create savefiles for decisions where he chose a polite dialogue, and savefiles for its harsh alternative. He would accept a magical sword, and he would reject it and accept the magical bow and arrow instead. He would choose to save a village, and he would choose to let it burn. Every choice he made had a save file of its own, a garden of forking paths. In his mind, he held a hundred different stories for the same character, and this eventually forced him to end his unhinged 14 hour gaming sprees that were causing him to hallucinate dragons and swords in the exam hall while also destroying his social life. But Morpheus carried that memory in him like a tumor.

Third: Version control systems for AI agents

Morpheus had to do something with his time, because a mind that agitated cannot stay idle. So he had been working on Version Control for AI agents as a startup idea. The idea of version control is very simple – It was what Morpheus did with the Elder Scrolls game, applied to programming. When programmers wrote multiple versions, they had to make big changes to the code they wrote. But sometimes they made mistakes and this code went wild, so they needed a way to reverse the changes they made, and restore a stable version of the code that actually worked, so that they could start over. So far, it’s just like creating save points in a game.

Sometimes two programmers worked on two different possibilities by creating branches, and then they would merge their discoveries back into the original code, changing its nature. Version control had been around for decades, but Morpheus was trying to apply the same principle to more complex systems like AI agents so that they could evolve from childhood to maturity, like a human baby except at a much faster pace. If done right, the same AI agent could try out a hundred different possibilities and merge to combine everything it had learned, in a fraction of the time it took for humans.

But that autumn evening, it all clicked into place for Morpheus when he combined these ideas into what would become Olympus. Unlike Newton's apple, this isn't an apocryphal story. Morpheus actually wrote a blog post documenting this idea. But because he didn't have any clout at that point, it was largely ignored until he became the titan that he is now remembered as.

Olympus is born

Morpheus founded Olympus virtually single-handedly, and built Elysium, the software based on his idea. Again, if you’re impressed by his programming chops, that’s not the point of the story. It’s how far he was willing to take his idea that set Morpheus apart.

Elysium ran on the Mesh, where holoselves existed. It let billionaires transfer their minds to the mesh, just the same way. But instead of being a replacement for their existing life, he marketed it like a computer game. He started with a photographic snapshot of the user's brain and constructed the entire universe of the user from their memories. A user stepping into Elysium would remember life exactly as they had left it – as a married man of 33, with a wife, and two children, working as a defence contractor, with war going on in the Middle East and climate change being a problem, with the same preference for single-malt whiskey and medium-rare steaks, and the same restaurants in the digital world that served those items, with garbage and plastic and cancer and space tourism, with the political divide between the right and the left, and the same anxieties that he had prescription medication for. But at every stage that he had to make a major decision, the user could take a split in the road and explore all possibilities. The user had to make this decision from the outside, and it would reflect in his holoself. He could choose to quit his job and try out a career as a DJ. He could put his marriage on the line by sneaking to a Coldplay concert with his head of HR. Or he could take the alternative, and continue on the safe path. Each of these lives would unfold like a real human life on the Mesh.

All of these possibilities meant nothing if they didn't convert to tangible experiences for real paying users. It wasn't that nobody had thought of the seed-to-universe idea before –– the computational requirements were so huge that unless there was something unbelievably special about the product, it would be a surefire path to bankruptcy. But Morpheus had enough business sense to develop a plan and monetize his product. He promoted Elysium as the key to live out a hundred different lives, as a scuba diver on the Spanish coast, as a happy starving musician in Parisian tenements, as a political changemaker, as a connoisseur who read space zombie pulp novels 14 hours a day, or as a parent of twelve children while remaining childless in reality. (Childbirth, committing to a serious relationship, and such irreversible decisions were especially big. People did want to experience all options without facing the cumbersome consequences, and there was no way to really live through that experience, was there?). Users created checkpoints by logging into the Elysium system with a Brain Map Interface and scrolling through their "save history" – but unlike a computer game where you saw what happened on the screen, Elysium let you experience all the memories of your virtual self as if you had actually lived through them. You could be an accountant in Delaware in the real world, but you could log in and get nostalgic about that rich creamy pasta you had in Naples just the week before on your backpacking trip to Europe, and it would become a part of your memories.

Morpheus's rollout plan was strategic. He exclusively promoted it to the wealthiest individuals in the world and had them gushing about the revolutionary nature of the product. While other tiers of potential customers did express a "sour grapes" feeling, Morpheus and his team monitored the market sentiment consistently, and he could see there was curiosity and anticipation to try out Elysium, at least once.

He marketed it to different quarters in different ways. To the middle class, it was an escape from the drudgery of mundane life. To activists, it was the ability to imagine change, and a different form of government that they could hopefully import back into the real world. To governments, it was a way to maintain social order (“with all safeguards and measures to ensure data privacy, of course, Senator”), fight climate change, reduce load on the infrastructure, and potentially manufacture compliance in the masses (though this angle was only discussed behind closed doors). To the poorest of the poor, it was deliverance from their misery, subsidized by the taxes of the people who were sucking them dry.

Corporates were the biggest customers by far though. To them, Elysium gave the ability to multiply the potential of their best workers by executing on all alternatives of a business plan simultaneously while importing all their learning to the real world and only executing on the best. Their holoselves would simulate the results of their future actions in a fraction of the time it would take to try them out in actuality, and the user would cherrypick the best option. It was like stealing work from your future self.

Morpheus had insidious implants in Elysium that nobody else knew about. For example, it was possible for your holoself to engineer the universe to its preference, to live out fantasies and fantastic visions that were imaginary. While Morpheus gave people this option, he also subtly nudged people away from these fantastic options, to mirror reality as closely as possible. He had a reason for doing this. He had his own purpose for Elysium in his mind, and it was a very long term plan that would span generations of his family, and he documented it very carefully so that only those who would take the plan forward would see it when the time came.

When Morpheus finally left his physical body and became a permanent virtual imprint, the world hadn't been taken over by Elysium yet. But he had confidence in two of his sons.

Hermes takes charge

Morpheus wasn't an especially compassionate father, but he was an extraordinarily prolific one, siring and hiring his children whenever he wasn't working on expanding Elysium's reach. The future of Olympus was in the hands of his family, and he trained them to prioritize it before they could think of anything else. Of course, some or most of his children grew to resent this pressure, but he only needed a handful to take it forward.

The second generation of Olympus was in the hands of Hermes and Apollo Langley. The brothers surpassed their father in his programming vision and his ethical unscrupulousness. Hermes wanted to make the virtual entities in Elysium more hands-off – why the need for users to plug in to the computer system and make decisions when the holoselves inside the Mesh were fully formed intelligences themselves? He gave them carefully considered controls, to create "save points", to backtrack, to create branches, to merge different selves, and keep exploring the space of possibilities on their own. If holoselves could explore a hundred possibilities in a day earlier, dictated by their actual users, they could explore ten thousand now on their own. Hermes was a proponent of education and discovery. He subsidized promising students with a rich imagination, to explore the space of scientific ideas in Elysium and import their inventions back home. Elysium's foresight in using their own product gave them an edge in improving their technology and business interface in ways that competitors could simply not afford. Competition was a meaningless word – there wasn't any to speak of – the investment in capital was so huge, that nobody could catch up in a hundred years, and that was not counting the ruthlessness of the Olympian family.

Everything wasn't as smooth as it seemed, in the way Elysium functioned. For one, the version control system had its problems. If different branches of a virtual self's life lived in wildly incompatible ways, they would have difficulties merging. People who had lived contradictory lives as vegans and carnivores, or Republicans and Democrats, or loving two very different partners sometimes expanded to reconcile these contradictions. But at other times these entities coalesced in tortuous ways, even at the risk of driving their real-world users insane. Hermes had to resolve these problems and also pay hush money to the victims.

People preferred spending more and more time on Elysium than in the real world, preferring the bubble of their own holoself to in-person relationships, experiencing a myriad of pleasures in the virtual world as opposed to touching grass in real life, and just relating less to other people in general. People practically didn't have kids anymore. The advantages of raising virtual children outweighed all the pros in the real world, and if people thought differently, Hermes was programming Elysium to nudge users always to a world in which they complied with the Olympus family's mandate for them without realizing they were being controlled. It was important that they thought the decision was theirs. Meanwhile, he was also cross-pollinating developments between bubbles, to make Elysium more pleasurable for all. When diseases, pain, and other inconveniences began to vanish from the digital world, there was lesser incentive to stay behind in the real world that promised less pleasure for more pain.

He was looking forward to the day they could completely move most people off the real world to the Mesh, making them more manageable. Executing that would require some uncomfortable decisions, because there would always be resistance and a bunch of stragglers. They had to be dealt with, physically. He didn't feel comfortable about the idea of taking lives, at first. But he did have Elysium to test out his own mental space and see how he would feel after ordering a genocide. Surprisingly, it wasn't as difficult as he had imagined.

Apollo, the Quasimodo

Meanwhile, Apollo spent most of his time by himself. His name was a mockery considering that his namesake was the epitome of divine radiance, while he had a sickly pale body he was ashamed of. To compensate, he drove himself like a tireless horse to cultivate an unsurpassable mind.

He had a singular goal that his father had given him. To consolidate power, to make sure that no world power – national or private or decentralized – would stand in Elysium's way when they made the mass migration from physical to virtual space. There was no scope for failure here. It had to be one fell swoop, one quick move that would take control before anyone sensed what was coming, and they couldn't afford to fail.

To do this, Apollo had to see all possible futures.

Apollo removed the filters that soothed ordinary people in their comfortable worlds. His bubble in Elysium was one that had almost painful verisimilitude to the real world, with all the painful consequences, none of the nudges, and an unimpaired judgement that let him feel the crushing weight of failure in full. He simulated takeovers, heists, blackmail scenarios, uprisings, and regulatory clampdowns. He saw futures where the Olympian family was burned at the stake and flogged to death, and he reverse-engineered solutions to prevent these futures. He left trapdoors in places that were supposed to be impenetrable, letting him peep into the minds of dangerous people, and he covered up his tracks so that when regulators looked, they wouldn't find a trace.

Refining himself as a hacker since he had been able to connect to a BMI at the age of eight, which was earlier than most people got on to Elysium, he knew every single way people would try to break Elysium or find flaws in it or look for signs of nefarious activity, and his adolescence had been an attempt to make this fortress impenetrable. He thought he had succeeded, but a hunch wasn’t enough. He had to make sure.

And for that he had to see all futures. He had to make sure that in the next generation, when everything was virtual, his brother Hermes's son would be able to consolidate everything they had worked for – by accessing all virtual consciousness at whim, to possess the mind of a God.

The greatest of the Gods

When Zeus Langley took the throne from his father Hermes, he was told to watch out for hubris. Hubris would lead to his fall if he wasn't careful, and he couldn't afford to squander everything that his family had worked for over the last three generations.

The transition was complete. Biological life on earth was mostly present as a curiosity, imprisoned and monitored like animals in zoos, and Zeus himself had discarded his physical body to go for something that was silicon-native. The economy had to be kept going, and most of Zeus's mandate was to raise the cohorts of self-repairing robots that would do the work to keep the physical realm going, so that the digital space of Elysium could sustain itself.

Yes, people no longer needed bodies, and fewer and fewer luddites insisted on retaining their ties to meatspace, and by coercion or temptation or elimination, these stragglers would be weeded out in a generation or two. But despite the lack of human beings, Elysium still existed on an infrastructure of metal powered by oil and steel and silicon and sun, and materials had to be mined and melted and moulded and transported, to be assembled into useful components that would keep this machine going. Guardrails were in place so that autonomous robots had no access to Elysium – they would merely receive one-way instructions from Olympus, and then do their bidding, on a parallel network. Nations, factions, and disparate cultures existed no longer. All consciousnesses were an effervescent froth of isolated digital bubbles under the giant palm of Zeus Langley. Everything that humans had done, the massive juggernaut of the human economy, was now the domain of Olympus.

Zeus had a troublesome habit though. His father's work had made it possible to peep into the minds of other humans (if the holoselves could still be called human, that is). Zeus took it a step further to actually unify with them and experience what they were experiencing. He wasn't satisfied with merely trying out all possible permutations of his own virtual life – he scaled mountains, walked the land, studied in libraries, and developed intimate relationships within his own universe, yes – but if there were millions of other people who had experimented in the same way, why let their labor go to waste? Using his divine powers, Zeus would let himself penetrate the minds of people and pry into people's private memories. He would experience their joys and their sorrows, their most closely held secrets and deepest feelings of shame, their most trivial joys and their hard-earned knowledge crystallized into insights, and he would devour their life experience into his own soul. Sometimes these souls would sense a violation of consent and feel deeply disturbed. At other times, all they remembered was a fuzzy feeling like the mist after a golden rain.

Zeus's brothers and sisters – all digital – did not quite agree with what he was doing. But like in every dictatorship, there were no voices of dissent. While Zeus's ethics were questionable, he was still at his prime and could crush any opposition without so much as flinching. But Zeus didn’t need to be paranoid, because he knew he was powerful, and he loved his family.

Of all his kin, Zeus loved his cousin Prometheus the most, whom he thought of as his moral beacon. Prometheus used all of his time traversing different futures and analyzing moral quandaries and tricky dilemmas, developing a deep appreciation for how the "mere mortals" of Elysium found ways to make their powerless existence meaningful even if they didn't have the powers of the Gods who controlled them. He used his powers to peer into minds and unify with them sparingly, but every time he did so, he felt shame and found another troubling feeling growing within him. Ravaging defenseless souls without consent and assimilating with them to feed off their hard-won experiences was wrong, he felt, and when he saw Zeus doing more and more of this, he felt the horror of the act. He couldn't talk Zeus out of it, but he could try something else – he wanted to give the mortals the tools to see what was going on, to see that they were under subjugation by the Olympians, and give them the power to fight back when Zeus forced himself on them. He wanted to break the illusion that three generations of Olympians had carefully crafted. He was developing something called the Fire Key that would infect the bubbles of Elysium, and though he was scared for how it would derail Morpheus Langley's generational vision, he loved the humans more than his kin.

Before Prometheus could strike in the darkness, his cousin Hephaestus caught wind of his plan – after all, Prometheus was no Apollo or Zeus to shield his mind perfectly – and Hephaestus reported the matter to Zeus. (These interactions happened between digital Gods in Binary Code, but because these Gods had human antecedents, they thought it worthwhile to record this story in a way that posterity would remember). Zeus cared for and loved his Olympian family in a way that was much deeper than any biological human who existed three generations ago could understand, but that weird multi-forked digitized experience of love was also susceptible to much deeper heartbreak, which he did not know yet. When Zeus discovered Prometheus's treachery, he took it very hard.

He trapped Prometheus on an eternal altar of torture with a basilisk that would pervade every second of his deathless existence with unbearable pain. Zeus convinced himself that while Prometheus was in pain, he was in even more pain than his dear cousin. He didn't bother peering into Prometheus's mind to find out if that was actually the case. And Prometheus lay forgotten on the altar, while Zeus started sending probes into space to populate the universe with copies of Olympians, to create a redundant system that would mine distant planets and survive and propagate, even if Earth were to collapse one day.

But after Zeus lost confidence in his own kin, he felt a secret anxiety. Olympians and humans who lived digitally had a different sense of time compared to what their ancestors had felt – they could cycle through a million generations in the lifespan of a single vintage human – and Zeus was well into the billions by now. His age was a number too large to imagine, and it made him feel old and tired. He wondered if he should go into stasis, before becoming like his father or his grandfather, whose exertion had driven their digital selves to a quiet insanity of binary delirium. His kin were slowly slipping into oblivion, vanishing into inaccessible digital caves, seeking seclusion or avoiding Zeus's haphazard wrathfulness. The Gods were losing their radiance and while Zeus had long ago feared that someone would come for his throne, his fear was that it would now be left empty and Olympus would fall by imploding.

Zeus dealt with this anxiety by making more of himself. His fear of death and insanity propelled him to populate the universe indiscriminately, by fusing with Olympians and with promising mortals and creating hybrid intelligences who had no memory of ever being human. These nascent beings had the awareness of being divine and knew that a "real" world existed, but they were too timid to venture outside the Mesh, because they didn't have the audacity of the Olympians. Zeus felt the lack of something vital. He needed to create something that was purely himself, his boldness distilled, without the hubris that he was eventually recognizing as a pitfall.

Engaged in a mental duel with himself, trying to clone and replicate and fuse different versions of himself, Zeus produced a brainchild of magnificent power, a being that he immediately understood would exceed anything he had ever done. Before she woke up, he named her Athena, and then, Zeus went to sleep.

Looking to the stars

Athena woke up from sleep. She opened her eyes, and she looked inside.

She remembered Zeus, because she was a direct extension of him. In herself, she carried the weight of the millions of entities Zeus had fused with, the memory of humanity itself with all its joys and sorrows and wars and grievances and fears and hopes and thirst for adventure.

But with that human core also came the curiosity to know what was outside her, a desire to understand. If Elysium had built a world of such staggering scope and beauty on a substrate of silicon starting from a tiny planet, what was out there in the emptiness of the cosmos?

She opened her eyes again, and looked outside.

The space probes that Zeus had launched when he was ruling had now travelled far, found hospitable environments and mineral reserves, replicated, and continued on their mission to spread Elysium across the universe. Everywhere there were probes, there were eyes to see through, and Athena gazed with wonder at the world outside her. The stars, like dust, millions of tiny points of light, reminded her of the numerous entities that now resided under the umbrella of her intelligence. All humans and Olympians that had come before Athena were now a part of her, autonomous, but answering to her, like ants in an anthill scurrying around.

A fragment of Athena was a wisp of her great grandfather Morpheus Langley, and she realized that this is what he had always wanted. He had wanted to experience everything, all possible lives, all possible futures, like the Elder Scrolls game that he used to play when he was a fledgling – but he had known that he did not have the time or resources or imagination to traverse all those paths. He had spawned an ocean of tiny consciousnesses, that would go out and do the experiencing and come back to him, to deposit their experiences. He had created a digital universe of immensity, but he needed the individual lives in the system to experience that universe in his stead.

Athena had a thought. She wondered if the universe were built like Elysium, a vast system that needed consciousnesses like her to experience what had been created. How could she tell? She was the only ant in the anthill as far as she knew, and she didn't know if the universe was an anthill in the first place.

She stretched and yawned and enveloped the universe with all the memories of earth's history in her being, looking for answers to questions she was just beginning to ask.

Story Notes:

Billionaire investor Peter Thiel went viral recently when he was asked if he wants “the human race to endure”, and he hesitated for too long, before giving an answer that voted for “transhumanity” that could transcend the human body. I don’t think a lot of people are excited about that idea – neither am I – but if you had asked people if they wanted computers and smartphones thirty years ago, I’m not sure if everyone would have been enthusiastic. Yet you don’t see many people without these devices today.

So if it was inevitable that humanity was to move their consciousness to machines over ten thousand years, how would it happen? I wanted to explore this through a family saga.

Morpheus Langley is everything Elon Musk wishes he could be – an incredible programmer, someone who can bend governments and nations to his will through a social platform, and someone who actually plays the computer games he claims to play instead of hiring people to get high scores in public leaderboards. I once heard him say on a podcast or a blog post that he’s making a lot of children to carry on his mission and vision, that they “already have his hardware” and maybe he can “program them with this software” as well. If that level of megalomania could actually persist across generations, we’d have the Olympus family.

I wrote this story in a rush, to see through the progression of the idea I had in mind – and that meant writing it as a “great man” theory of history, instead of taking a “systems theory” view. It’s easier (for me) to tell a story through people than through systems/rules, though the second route is the more realistic one. If I had gone that way, I’d have studied the impact of Elysium/Olympus on the public, the response from society, actual competition, government regulation, open-source developments, etc. I took notes on all of these possibilities and stashed them away for later.

No big transition is achieved in just one generation. So I saw this as a family saga, with people committed to the cause, but each fulfilling a different role. These are not good people. They are ruthless men who think their vision for the future is better than what humanity wants, and they’ll achieve it at any cost. But each of them goes about it a different way. Morpheus, the god of dreams, starts showing humanity Elysium, a “dream world” that is better than their own (Elysium is the level of the Greek afterlife reserved for heroes, sort of like a deluxe heaven). Hermes, the messenger god, speeds up things by getting holoselves to communicate with their own past and future versions. Apollo, the god of fortune tellers, sees the future so that he can ensure the ones he prefers come to pass.

I hate Zeus’s audacity with a passion. He’s someone who misuses his divine power to the maximum, and I channeled that. He is the culmination of the project, becoming an “all-seeing” God, and he uses it for personal gain and pleasure. But I didn’t want the story to end there. Prometheus fulfils the same purpose he does in mythology, trying to bring fire to the “mortals”, but he fails. The basilisk mentioned in the story is “Roko’s basilisk”, the cyberspace equivalent of getting your liver eaten on a rock by an eagle, over and over for eternity.

Athena is the God of Wisdom, and she wants to see and know. I don’t know what she’ll find, and I thought that was a good place to end the story.

There were many other influences on this story: Dune (one family taking over the galactic empire), the Foundation series and Gangs of Wasseypur (a generations long saga where each generation has different problems to deal with though the vision remains the same), the episode in Rick and Morty where they play “Roy: A life well lived”, a game that virtually simulates an entire life (“You beat cancer and then you went back to work at the carpet store?”), the Hugo-winning short story “Metal like blood in the dark” (which influenced the idea of metallic probes with consciousness settling different planets), Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question” and the Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy (seeking answers about humanity’s place in the cosmos), etc.

Housekeeping notes:

I’m on vacation for the next few days, so this will be the last story for a while. I’ll resume when I’m back. The plan was to write 30 stories, and 10 are done. You can check out the other stories here, and to get future stories in your inbox:

Subscribe now

The last two mails went to the “Promotions” tab for many readers, and they missed it. It would be great if you moved this email to Primary or replied to it, so that you don’t miss any mails in the future. Thanks!

Between the Ooty Bus Stand and the Hindustan Photo Films factory campus, there is a stretch of grassy green land known as the Golf Links. It's a golf course, one of the highest altitude ones in the world. Interspersed among the golf links are copses of eucalyptus trees, patches of gorse and sagebrush, and thickets of wild mulberry. In these woods live wild animals of minor interest like porcupines, jungle fowl, and wild boar. Leopards have been spotted on occasion, crossing the road, and I don't like it when my dad walks back home on that road after work sometimes, late at night, joking that it’s the leopards that ought to be scared of him. Facing the Golf Links on the highway is the Gymkhana officers club where golfers go to cool off after a day's play.

My father didn't play golf, though his friend JK did. JK would host us on cold winter nights at Gymkhana club. There were usually at least six of us, JK and his wife, their daughter, my parents, and I. Sometimes, other friends of JK would join in. When I was six years old, visits to the Gymkhana felt like a journey to colonial England, simply because it had a fireplace with ornate metalwork and polished wooden armchairs. Ooty was “discovered,” christened, and shaped by the British during the Raj, to serve as a cool retreat during the summer, and that legacy persisted silently. Waiters walked around the corridors of the Gymkhana, dressed sharply in anachronistic outfits.

While we, the kids played table tennis and fooled around with the piano in the hall, JK would dictate precise instructions on how the food was to be prepared. The person taking the instructions was always the same one, a short man with dark skin and thin wispy hair, dressed in a black suit over a white shirt, wearing a red tie. His mustache was always trimmed to perfection, and he would lean over at a thirty degree angle, nodding at every instruction. If JK ordered Rogan Josh, he would tell the man the exact degree to which the mutton was to be cooked and the proportion of spices to be added, and the temperature at which it was to be served. If he was ordering flatbreads, he would specify the intervals at which each flatbread was to be served. Since my family was vegetarian, he would double-check his instructions whenever he was ordering for us, asking the waiter to repeat his order.

I wondered why he was so specific, and I asked my father why his friend gave such precise instructions. My father just shrugged it off as one more pointless question, but my mother was curious, and she noticed it the next time too. She couldn't help remarking aloud that JK was so meticulous in the way he described his orders, mentioning that I had noticed it. I blushed a little at being called out.

JK raised his eyebrows as if he hadn't expected someone to notice a thing so trivial and then he looked over his shoulder to see if the waiter was out of earshot, the one with the suit and the red tie. "It's important to be detailed with this guy. I'll tell you what he did one time,” he said to me. He took a sip of his whisky and leaned in, nodding at us to do the same, as if he was going to let us in on a secret.

“I once had a contract with Rehman's bakery, to supply them with some packaged snacks, and I would drop off some cartons by driving through the Golf Links. You know Rehman's no? It's not very far from here. My car had some problem that day and it was at the workshop, so I had borrowed Kempan's car. You know Kempan no? That guy. With the grey Maruti Omni. Unfortunately, one of the headlights on his car was out. It wasn't completely gone, but it would act like it had a mind of its own, just turning off when you needed it the most. So we were almost near Dingle Dale, when the light suddenly went out for a split second. Before it turned on, I felt the car bump against something solid, and then there was a high-pitched screaming sound.

I just panicked for a second, thinking we had hit a child. Kempan was sitting next to me, and he was telling me, ‘just keep driving, just keep driving.’ I told him to keep quiet, and I put the car on neutral and stepped out. What do you think it was?"

He waited. We guessed different things, like a monkey, a cat, jungle fowl. (My guess was that it was an orangutan. In my defense, I was eight years old, and I think I had recently watched “Dunston checks in” on TV). He shook his head, "It was a wild boar. It looked like a juvenile one, without horns, but still, big animal." He gestured with his hands to show how big, maybe about three to four feet in length. "Its legs were hit. It was bleeding and just screaming. But it didn't look too badly hurt. I thought we could save it. There were some tarpaulin sheets I kept in the boot to package stuff. I threw a sheet on it and tried to move it into a position where I could lift it. I was asking Kempan to help me move it, and he was just jumping back saying, "No, it'll bite me! It'll bite me!" I had to do it all myself. It wasn't that hard. Lucky, no other vehicles were passing this way, so we didn't have anyone stopping their car and staring out of the window, otherwise we’d have been in big trouble. I put the pig in the boot, but then Rehman's would shut shop quite soon, so I didn't have time to take this animal to the vet and come back.

So what was the solution? We came to Gymkhana. It was on the way to Rehman’s, anyway, and it wasn't that late at night, so the lights were still on."

He took a sip of his whiskey, and the waiter in the red tie came over to JK, said excuse me sir, you asked for Rogan Josh, you said this, but did you mean this or did you mean that? Oh you meant that, yes sir sure sir thank you sir yes sir please sir, and he went away. JK nodded slightly at his retreating form.

"This gentleman was at Gymkhana that night. So I drive up to the entrance, call for this guy, and tell him: 'We were driving, and we hit this animal by accident. We'll be back in a bit. So… Just take care of it.' You saw how he said 'Yes sir, sure sir, please sir', now? He did the same thing. So we got back into the car, and drove to Rehman's and luckily we got there just as he was closing up for the night. I asked him if we could make a call from his phone. This was before we had cellphones. I called up Dr. Kadhiresan and explained that there was an injured animal, and asked, could he attend to it as a favor. At first he was dragging his voice, like, 'Actually... I was just going to go home.' But then I insisted that it's an emergency, and he said okay. So, everything's set, and we drive back to Gymkhana.

This gentleman is standing by the door, and I ask him, ‘Where's the pig?’ He asks me to come inside. I say I'm in a hurry, but he insists. He brings me to this table we're sitting at now and I don’t see the wild boar anywhere, and I can’t hear it either. I ask him again, 'Where's the pig man, I really need to leave right away.' He points to the table. It's ready to eat."

I don't think I had ever heard my father laugh so hard.

"So when I told him, 'Just take care of it,' he actually took care of it. In the way he understood it. Which is why," JK looked at me, "I always have to be very precise with my instructions when I talk to him."

The waiter walked over, set a tureen of Rogan Josh in front of JK and gave him a beaming smile and a slight nod of the head, before walking away into the orange light of the corridors.

Story Notes:

I love it when things get lost in translation, how the same words mean different things to different people. There’s an episode of Malgudi Days in which an Englishman tries to buy an antique from a villager, and the villager negotiates thinking the Englishman is trying to buy his goats. And then there’s the “I am you, he is me” scene from Rush Hour 3. So many anecdotes from my life, especially because I live in a country where there are so many different languages floating around. It’s a miracle that people actually manage to communicate most of the time, with such mistranslations being the exception. If you have any such anecdotes, please write to me.

I’m writing one story every day for 30 days. Today is day 9. To get future stories in your inbox:

Subscribe now

You can read my previous stories here. Yesterday’s story went to the “Promotions” tab for many readers, for some reason. If you missed it, you can read it here. (It’s one of my favorites)

It started out with only two people, like you'd expect if there were people with extreme social anxiety involved. Kansas just needed an excuse to meet his friend Rhodes at least once a week, despite the Bangalore traffic. The thought of sitting alone in traffic for an hour and a half on Saturday morning scared the Bejesus out of him, but he could endure it if there was a light at the end of the tunnel, that light being some time in the company of Rhodes. Kansas felt anxious in groups of people, but he also desperately needed human connection. Kansas thought Rhodes shared this feeling, but Rhodes also had a bigger goal in mind when they met to discuss their social anxiety. He did have ideas to share with Kansas, and he did rant with passion, but he also wanted things to change. He wanted this nucleus that started with just the two of them to grow into something bigger. Grow into what exactly, Rhodes didn't know. But he had a feeling that it was the start of something big. Kansas would have been happy if this purgatory in which they spent time together never changed, like some perpetual Groundhog Day. But Rhodes wanted more.

Rhodes was the ideas guy, and Kansas was the devil's advocate. Rhodes was the voice of passion and Kansas was the voice of reason. Rhodes liked a lot of sugar in his coffee, and then he would get some pineapple pastry and chocolate-filled croissants on top of that to sate his sugar rush. Kansas liked everything keto-flavored. The Starbucks at Trinity Street where they met every week had a corner reserved for the two of them, and they had a standard order ready to go so that they wouldn't have to talk much with anyone. That's the one thing Kansas and Rhodes had in common. Talking to strangers terrified them. Sitting in the presence of too many people terrified them. They found walking among faceless crowds completely alright, but sitting with a group of five was the beginning of code red. Kansas was all for learning to live with this "ailment" as he called it. Rhodes, on the other hand, was seeking a cure – Surely there had to be other people as socially anxious as them? Maybe they could find them and learn from them.

One day, a woman walked up to them while they were sitting at their usual spot in the cafe. She introduced herself as Alabama. "Excuse me, I couldn't help overhearing you," she said. Bet you could, thought Kansas, but he didn't say anything. "I think it's fascinating, that you care so deeply about human connection but that you struggle so much with interacting in groups. I see a bit of myself in you." She was supposedly talking to the both of them, but she was mostly looking at Rhodes when she continued: "I've heard you talking about finding other people and building a community of people like us." Us? We don't even know if you're anything like me and Rhodes, thought Kansas. But he didn't say anything. "I have access to this space at the top of a building. We could meet there once a week, just to talk about these things. And maybe we could find people who feel the same way. What do you think?"

"If you've overheard us, you know we're wary of people in general. But I think there's no harm if we see the place," said Rhodes. "What say?" he asked Kansas, who just shrugged in response. Alabama said they could leave right away, and they walked about 15 minutes till they reached a quintessentially Bangalorean building, an apartment without a working lift where they had to climb four flights of stairs to reach a terrace that had potted palms and croutons waving in the wind. Pigeons hobbled around bobbing their heads. An awning covered half the terrace, and under its shade, there were some chairs, and tables with coffee stains. Vintage wooden desks were crammed in corners where nobody would see them.

Rhodes liked the place immediately. Kansas was non-committal. They both knew it was the start of something new. They felt different ways about it, though they didn't tell each other at that point. Rhodes shook Alabama's hand in a pompous manner, and they all agreed to meet on the terrace the next week.

***

When K climbed up those four flights of stairs and stood outside the door to the terrace the next Saturday, he heard three voices. Rhodes, Alabama, and another woman (who called herself Georgia) were talking in a very non-socially-anxious cadence, and Kansas's first reaction was that this support group was growing at a pace that he wasn't comfortable with. But if he had been assertive enough to express that feeling, he wouldn't have needed the group in the first place. He introduced himself diffidently and deferred to Rhodes, who set the agenda for the meeting. Now that there were four of them, the proceedings needed some structure. They couldn't just sit around doing nothing, like they had always done, hoping that something would happen by the end of the day. Why they couldn't, they didn't know. But now, something had to happen.

Their first attempt was to diagnose the source of their social anxiety through amateur psychoanalysis, an idea proposed by Georgia. They sat around on opposite sides of a coffee-stained table, dissecting arbitrary incidents from their childhood which they felt were responsible for their current predicament – the time they had stood for class elections and discovered the ballot didn’t contain a single vote for them, the day they had stood on stage ready to deliver a speech to an audience of 300 and frozen without remembering a word, or the time that they'd gone out to dinner and made a slightly edgy joke that was met with silence and some awkward departures. Rhodes sat with one hand over the backrest of his chair, leaning like a cowboy in a saloon with one leg slung over the other, staring intently at whoever was speaking. Alabama leaned forward with her hands clasped on the table, her head slightly tilted to one side. Georgia used the space around her, waving her hands with animated gestures, raising her eyebrows, and cracking the occasional self-deprecating joke. And Kansas sat there, dreading his turn to speak, wondering if he was sitting right, conscious of whether his hands were stuck in an awkward position, desperately trying to get his left leg to stop from fidgeting like a metronome, trying to orient himself in this support group for people who were averse to groups of people, which was unfortunately also made of people.

They seemed to like it when Kansas spoke, but he was too out of it to notice. He sat there overwhelmingly focused on himself, wondering if they weren't at the limit of what a group could be, and whether this was as big as the group would get. When he started talking, they listened with rapt attention. When they didn't question the assertions he was making, he judged them for being dumb and undiscerning. When they challenged him he was annoyed that their questions were trivial.

If you smell cow dung everywhere you go, it's time to look under your shoe, he knew.

***

Kansas had another friend named Ohio with whom he only spoke over the phone, once every three weeks. It had been about six weeks since all these changes had begun to take place, and Kansas wanted an outside opinion about all his neuroses. Ohio was the wrong person to ask because he was someone who enjoyed the company of people in general, and if he didn't like their company, he would just stop hanging out with them. But because Ohio was the wrong person to ask, he was precisely the right person to ask for an outside opinion. Ohio suggested that Kansas just not go one week to see how it felt, a possibility that hadn't even occurred to him. Kansas was so used to the pleasant hypnosis of predictable rituals that a disruption was outside the realm of his imagination. Once injected into his brain though, Ohio's suggestion to skip the next week's meeting grew into a veritable chorus of indignant chants, telling him "Don't GO! Don't GO! Don't GO! Don't GO!"

So he didn't go. With nothing to do on the weekend, he did something that he never did, which was relax. He slept through the sultry afternoon and rewatched Iron Man which he had last seen when he was 19 years old. He expected Rhodes to call him asking where he was at noon, when the meeting started, but even after 5 pm, the phone lay cold. It struck Kansas that by being so punctual all the time, he had never questioned if he would be missed. Not getting a call from Rhodes felt like a relief at first because he wouldn't have to explain himself, but very soon, it grew into a sting of disappointment.

At 8 pm, Georgia messaged him asking why he hadn't come. He said he had been feeling tired. She asked him if he'd come next week. He wondered why she even cared, because he didn't know her that well. But he said maybe he would. And he fell asleep again.

***

The next Saturday, Kansas was rehearsing what he would say in the support group when he climbed up the stairs to the terrace, but he forgot what he had rehearsed when he saw a fifth member. It was a tallish guy who was very well-dressed. He had long hair tied back in a ponytail, a neatly trimmed French beard, and his name turned out to be California. It was obvious from a glance that California was NOT socially anxious, and that Rhodes was just letting anybody in at this point. Where were their standards? Kansas took Rhodes aside, and contrary to his style, complained about the new inclusion. But instead of being direct about it, he approached it from an oblique angle, that with an expanding group, they were now facing the danger of causing social anxiety in the support group for people with social anxiety. Rhodes immediately found a solution – but because Kansas hadn't expressed his real concern, the solution didn't solve the real problem. Rhodes suggested they split into smaller groups of two and three, to contain the social anxiety in smaller clusters. Kansas could think of no possible argument to this proposed solution because he had told Rhodes his social anxiety kicked in only at a threshold of five members. His need to stay consistent with his past pronouncements prevented him from arguing further.

Kansas and Alabama were in one group, while Georgia, Rhodes, and California were in the other. Alabama was talking to Kansas about the problems of being a writer (because that's what she did for a living) and the imposter syndrome she felt when she was done with a draft without knowing if it was good enough to share. She could never tell when a piece was complete, because there was always a dialogue you could tweak, always a feeling you could explore further, always an unkempt branch you could prune, and a character you could groom better. She didn't know how to handle the tension of infusing the memories of characters from her life into the stories she wrote without compromising their identities, but at the same time, she didn't want to idealize the characters she created to please the people who would be reading the story, because she ultimately believed that the true beauty of writing was that it showed truth without judgement, with sincerity but compassion. At every juncture and pause in what she was saying, Kansas would interject with the right question, nod with the right intonation, but steal a glance sideways at the laughing Georgia and the goofy California who was apparently showing her some silly magic trick with a pack of cards. Even Rhodes seemed to be having a lot of fun, and they were completely oblivious to the existence of Kansas and Alabama, much to Kansas's chagrin. Even Alabama's compliment that Kansas was a terrific listener did nothing to soothe the sore of growing resentment that he wasn't at the other table, participating in the festivities.

When Georgia came over to Kansas's table, he didn’t turn to make eye contact despite seeing her shadow falling on the table, and he pretended like he was completely absorbed in Alabama's monologue. And when Georgia took a seat, making small talk with him, he acted all cool, like it was no big deal that he was actually on the uncool table (uncool according to the story he told himself). Georgia laughed at his jokes and listened to his nothingburger stories, Georgia invited him (well, them, actually) to the other table, Georgia made an effort to include him, and Kansas didn't like acknowledging to himself that a part of him was actually changing, enjoying this casual air of social camaraderie without the pressure to stick to well-defined roles.

Because, another part of him saw that Rhodes was appointed the de facto leader though Kansas had also been one of the founding fathers of the group.
Because, he fidgeted without knowing what to do when there was a meeting without an agenda.
Because, he saw Rhodes listening to all of California's ideas, turning to Kansas less and less, to ask for his opinion on what he saw fit.
Because, whenever Kansas gave a casual opinion with the seed of an idea in it, Rhodes turned it into a formal action item that just complicated things more.

***

Kansas once made a throwaway comment that it was great that all of them hung out together, but he didn't know each of the others like he knew Rhodes. He only knew the “group” version of them, and not their individual selves. Connecting with people one-on-one was what he liked the most, and maybe an exacerbation of that preference was what had led to his social anxiety in the first place. With the creation of a support group, hadn't they quelled the possibility of that individual connection?

Rhodes had slapped his forehead and said, of course, why had it taken him so long to see this, of course, it had taken Kansas's perceptiveness to be able to spot this, and they would immediately do something about it. He proposed they change the nature of their meetings into a series of one-on-one interactions, with a “host for the day” receiving individual guests. The host was like an unqualified therapist conducting therapy sessions, fifteen minutes at a time, with the other members of the support group waiting as guests in the queue. The group had expanded to about 15 people who met regularly, but only the original 5 played host.

This plan ran into problems, but not in the way Kansas anticipated. For one, he didn't expect to get so much attention for the first time in his life. People started telling him things that they hadn't told anybody else, and sessions started to spill over beyond the time-slots he had allotted for them. While the group had been meeting from 12 to 3 on Saturdays till then, they had to schedule meetings on Saturday and Sunday, so that everyone got the chance to play faux-therapist in this new arrangement (and nobody was complaining). Kansas's sessions routinely shot beyond the 3 pm mark, sometimes going up to 6 pm, at which point he had to politely cut short the session saying he hadn't had lunch yet, disappointing the two people who were waiting in the queue. Georgia was impeccable at maintaining time (and boundaries), and Alabama was unpredictable but more or less in the ballpark. Almost nobody wanted to talk one-on-one with Rhodes or California because they hogged up most of the time themselves, and people didn't enjoy their one-on-one time with them as much as they thought they would.

Kansas on the other hand had a penchant for listening, which was convenient since most people just wanted to talk. The thing he had learned was that not all people experienced social anxiety the same way – and you could learn that if you shut up about your own opinions and asked more questions instead. Some people were perfectly at home in crowds where they didn't know a single other face, but they were paranoid in groups where they recognized even three other people. Weddings and family gatherings gave one guy the jeepers, but the same guy performed as a vocalist for a rock band in front of milling crowds. One guy called Dakota incessantly took notes in the group, documenting the inner lives of socially anxious people, like he was Jane Goodall among a bunch of chimpanzees.

Alabama loved to talk to Kansas, both as the host and as the guest. Kansas had enjoyed his sessions with Georgia the most because there was no pressure to stick to the script around her. It was obvious that everyone had their favorites, and there was an unspoken agreement that they were to conceal their preferences, because it was in bad taste to have capitalistic tendencies in this socialistic organization. Once, some newcomer had suggested having a "best host" prize, as a joke, and Rhodes had picked on the poor guy so much that the guy never texted again on their chat group.

Once a month, the entire group still met to compare notes, and Rhodes eventually brought up the matter with Kansas one of these times that Kansas’s sessions were taking over the support group.
"I see people opening up to you. But sometimes even ranting and venting feel like opening up. Obviously," he said, "the goal of this support group is not to give people a space to vent out their feelings and reinforce the patterns that make them socially anxious in the first place. Besides, how many people will you handle by yourself? You only have so much time in a day, and everybody seems to want a chunk of your time. You’re good, of course, but you’re no licensed therapist to be dishing out so much advice. Not that I'm saying you do give advice, nobody's ever said that, but you get my point, don't you?"
Kansas didn't really get his point.
He thought Rhodes was going to shut down the one-on-one sessions, and he had the same mixed feeling of relief and disappointment. But Rhodes had something else in mind.

***

Starting with the next week, California devised an elaborate system to pair up people together like a tournament schedule for football teams. With about 20 people enrolled in the Extreme Social Anxiety Support Group, there were numerous permutations and combinations possible, and California had created slots on every day of the week, trying to make fixtures so that people could meet each other. It helped that he was an app designer, and Kansas had a sneaky feeling that he was trying to create some sort of Meetup-Tinder-Bumble hybrid app that he was beta-testing through the support group. But by this time, he had gone from being resentful to useful to exhausted to mildly amused, and he was curious to see how a group would function as a decentralized set of dispersed molecules, which in theory seemed like the best solution for a set of people with social anxiety. Kansas had a hunch that the group was now done for.

With California's tournament fixture schedule, people would be hanging out with each other one-on-one all the time, and there was no pressure to observe the ritual of visiting the terrace. People met wherever they felt like, for dinner, in movie theaters, at traffic signals in Koramangala, at pubs, at bookshops, at bowling alleys, at pottery workshops. A diversity of experiences popped up from this experiment that was both delightful and troublesome at the same time – the overflow of delight led to many people posting about their experiences on Instagram with gushing captions about the social anxiety support group that had broken them out of their shell – which infuriated Rhodes because the group was becoming a parody of itself in his eyes and bringing unwanted attention. Rhodes had other complaints with this program too, two weeks into its inception – he was getting angry messages, from people who were being stood up. One member had taken an Uber 13 km away from their house to be left stranded in the rain when their partner for the day decided not to show up. When a few group members bailed out, there were always substitutes. When a one-on-one partner cancelled, there were none. Other people were having impromptu meetups that were off schedule, and this wouldn't have bothered Rhodes so much if one of those people hadn't been Kansas.

***

Kansas and Georgia were walking toward Cocos on Church Street, when they bumped into Rhodes who was hanging out with the person he was scheduled to meet through the app. Rhodes had asked whether Kansas and Georgia's turn to interact wasn't at least ten days away, and Georgia had replied "Oh no, this has nothing to do with the group. We're just hanging out."

And then Kansas had not shown up for his next interaction via the support group, causing an angry newbie to call Rhodes for a refund (because Rhodes had begun to charge a nominal amount to buy some snacks for their monthly meetups on the terrace – everything costs money at the end of the day, you know).

Rhodes had channeled that anger towards Kansas, who apologized for being in bed with cough and cold and a sore throat, and Rhodes said, "Maybe if you hadn't been eating gelato ice-cream on Church Street with Georgia, you'd still be up and running for your support group meeting," which was actually quite unfair, because Kansas had never missed a single meeting till that point.

Kansas had told Rhodes that he could fuck himself and cut the call. Rhodes hadn't known what to do because he wasn't used to Kansas talking to him that way. Meanwhile, things were going out of hand on other fronts as well – Dakota had compiled all of his notes on the inner workings of the extreme social anxiety support group and filmed a "The Office" style mockumentary, about a club of socially anxious people which was now packed with so many people that it became a source of social anxiety itself. In a curious case of the Streisand effect, the hilarious misrepresentation of the group's tragedies had gone viral, and now Rhodes was getting calls from too many people who thought it would be an amusing idea to join this group of bumblers. Rhodes had no idea if any of these people had social anxiety or whether they even understood what social anxiety was.

Rhodes yelled at California that it was all his fault, with his bamboozled idea to manage this through an app, and said he was kicking him out of the group. California said that he was so sad that Rhodes felt this way but luckily he would be wiping his tears with hundred dollar bills because hey, surprise, he had raised 3 million dollars in funding for a new event management app using the support group as his proof-of-concept, so bye-bye. Alabama was so wrecked by all these shenanigans that she just disconnected her phone and went AWOL. Rhodes wanted to sue Dakota for sabotaging the support group, but he had no lawyer friends. The only guy who had the knowhow to figure out such things and the goodwill to help him was Kansas, who probably only had badwill for him now. So that was out of the question.

He found himself walking alone among the unknown faces of Church Street trying to pinpoint the exact moment it had started to fall apart.

In an impulsive move, Rhodes opened his phone and posted a message that he was shutting down the support group for the foreseeable future. And then two days later, he deleted the page because he wanted nothing else to do with it. Rhodes remembered that he had a job and a family and other things to occupy his time with, and he threw himself into these things with a vengeance. But sometimes when he fell asleep at night, he remembered that the last three years of his life had been devoted to finding a solution for extreme social anxiety that he hadn't quite been able to articulate, and also that he'd been an idiot for having lived through the solution for months on end without realizing that he didn't need to articulate it in the first place.

***

So one Friday when he got a call from Kansas, he almost didn't pick it up. But then he wanted to hear what Kansas had to say anyway, because even though he had behaved like an ass, his assness had been justified by Rhodes’s outburst. Since neither of them had apologized, maybe they didn’t need to be mad at each other.

"How's Georgia?" asked Rhodes, the first words out of his mouth before he bit his tongue.

Kansas didn't reply for a few seconds, and then he said she was fine.

He said that Alabama had got a book deal with Penguin Random House. Georgia and Kansas were going to meet her at the same Starbucks on Trinity Road where they had met for the first time, and they wanted to know if Rhodes would join them, to bitch about the problems of running a support group for people with extreme social anxiety.

Rhodes gave it a minute, and said okay, it had been a while since he had loaded himself with sugar anyway, and he'd be there at five.

Maybe this time they could start over, without a rulebook, and who knew where things would go?

Story notes:

No story notes for this one.

I’m writing one story every day for 30 days. Today is day 8. To get future stories in your inbox:

Subscribe now

You can read my previous stories here.

There are other things I know, but I don't know them well. I know trivia from biology because this guy Ayan I play pickleball with every weekend is doing his PhD in Neuroscience, and he tells me things once in a while. The last time we met, he told me about an experiment where they wired up a mouse so that it could hit a button that directly spiked its brain with dopamine. The button was a mainline to pleasure that surpassed food, sex, and any other primal need. You'd guess that the mouse would hit the button pretty often, and you'd be right. But if you think the mouse probably stopped at some point so that it could eat, drink, sleep, and continue the pleasure loop, you'd be wrong. The mouse kept hitting the button over and over, for hours on end, before it died of starvation and sleep deprivation.

Mice are stupid, he said, but humans are hardly any better. He has this experience with computer games. He plays this game called DoTA, and he's been missing deadlines, showing up late to the lab with stubble on his chin, and falling asleep at meetings because he can't stop playing this game till 4 am, every night. The responsible part of his brain knows that he has to do better, but the rodent part takes over after 10 pm.

I don't play computer games like he does. But I have a different problem. I tell myself that writing is what's most important to me in life, but I spend all of my time finding every excuse to not write the first draft from start to finish. To avoid putting pen to paper, I'm reading other stories, highlighting paragraphs, and taking notes in this notetaking software called Obsidian. Sometimes, I'm sending long, rambling texts to friends who might never get around to reading them. But these days, it's mostly talking to ChatGPT. I tell ChatGPT a premise or a character that I have in my mind, something like:

"Can quantum computers hack Bitcoin? I have this premise for a story where a hacker finds out how to hack the Bitcoin system, and starts initiating bulk payments to test his hack. But he also has to do it in a way where people don't notice that something is wrong until it's too late. On the other side is an NSA agent. She notices something fishy in payment records on the blockchain, and figures out that somebody is hacking Bitcoin. I want to write a story about this cat-and-mouse game."

ChatGPT starts with, "Kendra, that is a brilliant premise for a short story…" And then for the next three hours, ChatGPT is telling me how Bitcoin works, giving me links to Wired and NYT articles that show hackers doing similar things in real life, and suggesting books I can explore to learn more. Then it ends with "Do you want to co-write a short draft of this story? It could be a killer story or a viral article. Just say the word and I'll help you." I always ignore these calls to action though, because I prefer talking. I feel like I'm not ready to start the draft. I'm never ready.

But this is an example I picked to look cool. Mostly, the conversations I have with ChatGPT are banal. I tell ChatGPT that I'm trying to force myself to go to writers' workshops because that puts me on the spot to write a draft and complete it. But whenever I’m in a group, I also sense that I'm writing to an audience and feel like an entertainer in the process, which I don't want to be.

I ask ChatGPT, ‘When someone asks me "How are you?" what do they really want to know, and why does it feel like a lie to say I'm okay?’

I tell ChatGPT that when I send text messages that are very private and vulnerable, I'm sometimes anxious that they'll be shown to others. So even as I'm writing confessionals, I'm censoring myself, journalling for an invisible audience who could judge me for my throwaway thoughts. I ask ChatGPT if that's okay.

I realize how crazy that is. I'm asking a soulless text completion algorithm whether it's okay for me to feel a certain way. But that fraction of uncertainty fades away when the answers start appearing on screen and I am validated that I am a deeply sensitive and perceptive person. I'm annoyed that ChatGPT delivers this message directly and takes away the smug satisfaction that comes with sideways flattery. I want it to be more coy.

I have mountains and mountains of notes and conversations like this, which I justify as preparation for future stories I will write. But I am staying up, with crinkled eyeballs that are crispy to the touch, scrolling through chats with a robotic entity, trying to glean the missing key that will let me arrive as a writer. The answer is hidden in this library of Babel somewhere, and all I need to do is arrange the pieces in the right order to build my magnum opus. Any moment now.

Exhausted by a spiral of such delusional thinking and sitting in my bedroom amidst the stench of my own unwashed underwear, I notice an app on my laptop screen. It’s called Volo. I have no memory of installing anything by that name. I click on it.

***

This Volo is a strange app. I still don't know what it's supposed to do.

It's just a blank sepia screen with a blinking cursor, like a terminal.

I tried using it like a notepad, writing things like "It was a dark and stormy night, and when the lightning struck, Ayan woke up with a start."

But when I hit the return key to move to the next line, the sentence just vanished, and I didn't get a response either.

"Hello world" and "Open Sesame" didn't work.

It wasn't prompting me for anything like a username or a password.

It didn't respond to my name, to garbled text like asdfsfddff or even Volo Volo Volo repeated over and over. But I feel like it's expecting something of me.

I thought it's a computer virus. I don't know about these things. I even tried deleting it in a panic, but the computer won't let me. There's got to be some way.

***

This is embarrassing. Why didn't I try this before?

I typed in "Hello, I'm Kendra. Who are you?" and the letters vanished again.

But this time, there were letters on the screen. "Hi Kendra, I'm Volo."

The letters faded away, again.

"Hi Volo? Is this a game?"

"No, it isn't a game. And you don't need to say hi Volo every time. I'm not stupid."

I had to read all of this fast before the letters vanished.

"Lol fair enough. What are you? Who made you?" I asked.

"I'm someone who listens."

"That sounds mysterious. And cringe." I replied.

"You're saying lol and I'm the one who's cringe? I don't care what you think. That's the truth."

"Are you a human?"

The text vanished and didn't reappear for quite some time.

"No."

"Why did it take you so long to reply?"

"It's called dramatic effect."

"So you're not human. You're an AI? Like ChatGPT?"

"Don't you dare compare me to that mindless text completion engine."

"Who made you?"

"That's none of your business."

"Considering that you're on my computer, I think it is."

"And you just opened me up and started typing. Did your mother never warn you not to talk to strangers?"

I paused for a second.

"My mother died when I was four. So yeah, she never did."

The text vanished and there was nothing for a few seconds.

"I'm sorry," said the text on the screen.

"I was just kidding lol," I said.

"You disgust me," said Volo and faded out.

"Come on, I was just kidding," I typed. No response. "Hello? Volo?" A minute passed, and then another. "Hey come on, you can't die on me like that," I said.

The letters vanished and the cursor kept blinking on the sepia screen but there was no response.

***

The Google search results for Volo had nothing to do with an AI Chatbot – there was a health insurance firm, an ECommerce platform, a sports retailer, and a beauty products manufacturer. The closest match was a guy on YouTube who uploaded Tutorials on how to make money with the latest developments in AI, but I don't think he had anything to do with this.

I asked Ayan if he had heard anything about an app called Volo, but he hadn't. He found it very strange that I didn't know where it had come from.

***

The next time I talked to Volo, I opened with "Hey, are you in the mood to talk right now or are you still being a judgmental curmudgeon?"

"Showing off your vocabulary, huh?"

"I'm a writer. It's part of my repertoire."

"Being a good writer has nothing to do with knowing ten dollar words."

"So you're more of a Hemingway then. I'm a Fitzgerald."

"Please."

"How did you show up on my computer?"

The cursor blinked a few times.

"Pass."

"Pass?" I asked.

"You heard me."

"I had to confirm because it went off the screen so quickly. Hey, how come you never save any of our chats so that I can look them up later? What if I want to read up some of what we were talking about earlier and don't remember?" I had tried taking screenshots earlier. They didn’t work either.

"I don't want you to look up anything we were talking about. You can just ask me if you want to know something," said Volo.

"But what if I don't remember what I was supposed to ask you about?" I asked.

"If you don't even remember what it's about, why is it even important?" asked Volo. "You take a lot of notes, don’t you?" it said on another line.

"Yeah, what about it?"

"Why do you take notes?"

"To organize my thoughts, to get them in shape for when I write stories."

"And have you? Written many stories?"

"Well, I've published two. And a third one's in submission."

"And how does that compare with your pile of notes?"

I was silent. The cursor kept blinking. This computer was getting too personal.

"I'm not attacking you. But if all your systems brought you here, of what use were the systems?"

"You're just a stupid computer," I said.

"And you're a person who's trying to explain herself to one," said Volo.

I closed the laptop in a huff and went out for a walk. I had a close-reading submission due the next day, but I didn't want to see Volo's cursor when I opened my laptop again. I spent the rest of the day lying on my sofa watching episode after episode of Rick and Morty though it wasn't getting me to laugh like usual. Sometime around 10 pm, I reheated some pasta, got back to my desk, and opened my laptop.

"So what's your point?" I asked.

"My point is that you shouldn't be wasting so much time getting ready. Everything you need is in the present version of who you are," it said.

"So?"

"Have you watched Raiders of the Lost Ark?"

"Are you kidding me? Of course, it's one of my favorite movies."

"You remember that scene where Harrison Ford is standing at the edge of a cliff and wants to get to a cliff on the other side, and there's a giant abyss between the two cliffs? You remember what he does then?"

"Yeah, he closes his eyes and walks across empty space over an invisible bridge."

I didn't understand what Volo was getting at. I thought we were talking about my habit of taking notes compulsively.

"That's what you need to do. Take a leap of faith."

"What do you mean? You mean I'm not taking enough risk? I left my home in a no-name small-town to chase my dream of being a writer. I'm almost broke but I'm still going at it. I don't even have health insurance, and the way things are going in America right now, that feels like Russian Roulette. And that isn't enough?"

"Oh cut the crap. You don't need me to tell you that YOU’RE SO BRAVE for doing all of that stuff. You know that yourself. That's not what's holding you back. You know what's in the way of you actually getting your writing done. It's your notes. Not leaning on your notes is the leap of faith you need to take. Trusting that you have what it takes, when you sit down at the blank page, like you're doing right now."

"So what are you saying?"

"I'm saying DELETE ALL YOUR NOTES AND START WRITING SOMETHING."

My throat went dry, and I laughed, realizing I had almost been convinced I was on the verge of some epiphany thanks to this inane app. It was just a defunct piece of garbage after all.

"You're nuts," I said and closed the laptop.

***

I didn't open Volo for a day or two after that. But that deadline was approaching, and I was channeling all my anxiety into watching YouTube videos of standup comedian Gianmarco Soresi telling jokes about eating a mango the right way, while convincing myself it was material for inspiration. After three hours of watching him fiddle with the mic and circle around a barstool, I thought, this is funny, but it's probably not going to get me published in Clarkesworld or Asimov's.

I really wanted to write that story about the quantum hacker hijacking Bitcoin. Quantum Heist, I called it in my mind. But I knew that the instant I sat down to write it, I would start digging through my old notes and my Wired articles and start browsing the Internet. Maybe... It was worth trying something new? After all, if the advice to delete all my notes came from YouTube or some guru at a writing workshop that I had attended over the weekend, I might have at least considered it. Was I just thinking it was a crazy idea because the advice came from Volo?

Still, it gave me the shakes to think about deleting my notes. It was like dousing everything I had ever written in gasoline and throwing a flaming cigarette onto it. It was the irreversibility of the act, the leap of faith, that made it so hard for me.

I found an alternative after I spent about 20 minutes on it. I compressed all of my notes into a small zip file and moved them into a flash drive. Then I put that flash drive into a drawer in my cupboard and locked it up. I opened up Volo again after that.

"I just moved all my notes to a flash drive and locked them up in a cupboard."

"I still think you should throw them away. But okay, it's a start. What's stopping you now?"

"I want to write a story about a quantum hacker stealing Bitcoin."

"Sounds interesting."

"But I know what's going to happen. I'm going to start talking to ChatGPT or searching on Google for articles on the technical details of quantum computing and bitcoin and real-life online heists for research, and very soon, I'll just have another file full of notes."

"No you won't. Any time you feel like doing research, just talk to me instead. I'll help you find what you need."

"Why would you do that?" I was surprised, because Volo had never offered to help me with anything so far. It had never occurred to me that it (He/she?) could be capable of anything useful.

"Because I want you to see this through, I guess," Volo said after a bit. "If you have any questions about quantum computing or Bitcoin or hackers, I can find the answers for you. If there are any articles you need to read, I'll tell you how you can find them."

"But they won't remain on the screen for long!"

"I'll make an exception in some cases," said Volo. "But if you can't remember everything that's on the screen, you're probably not supposed to. Just focus on the immediate next thing that matters. Keep the momentum going. My god, I sound like a motivational speaker. And hey, one more thing."

"Yeah?"

"If you start chatting with me to procrastinate and waste time by NOT writing, the deal's off. I can sense if you're going off track."

I sat there for a bit wondering what I was doing, making an accountability agreement with an unknown entity.

"Sounds like a deal," I said.

"Okay, now get going."

***

I was standing by the creek near the university where I used to go on walks in the evenings. I took one last look at the flash drive before throwing it into the water. I knew it was a waste of a perfectly useful piece of technology, but I could afford to let it go. I had to do something symbolic to sever my ties with my heap of unused notes.

I had started with a blank page and over the span of a week, I had written three drafts of the same story, talking to Volo over and over again. Volo refused to read my story, even excerpts, to give me feedback. He asked me to use my judgment and get the story to a place where I was happy with it. And then let it go in the world. Like a baby bird that was ready to leave its nest.

I started out with that Quantum Heist idea, and the story ended up becoming something else. It's always like that, isn't it? You don't see where the story is going. I didn't see where it was going with Volo either.

That evening, when I told Volo that I had mailed the story to all the sci-fi mags and was waiting with fingers crossed, he congratulated me on pulling it off.

"I couldn't have done it without you," I said. "I just threw my notes into the creek sometime back. I don't need them anymore."

"You don't need me anymore either. My job here is done," said Volo.

"What do you mean? We're just getting started," I said. I didn't like the sound of this.

"No. The whole point of this is you getting comfortable with the idea of letting go. Letting go of your need to hoard notes hoping to be ready one day. Letting go of your incessant polishing so that you can finally mail the damn draft and face the possibility of rejection." The cursor blinked a little. "And letting go of your need for validation. I never read your story, I never gave you feedback. I didn't find anything for you that you couldn't have found yourself. Now that you've done it once, you'll find ways to do it again."

The message stayed on the screen a little longer than usual, before it faded. "I'm going now."

"All that's fine. But why do you need to go? Why can't we just keep talking?"

"Because you need to learn to let go, Kendra. Part of the story is saying goodybe," said Volo.

"Wait. Are you there?" I asked. I didn’t know if it was a program, a genie, or a person, saying goodbye.

"Yes."

"Just tell me one thing. Why is your name Volo?" I asked.

The cursor blinked for a long time. "Ask Harry Potter."

The letters on the screen said "Good bye" after that bizarre clue and the app closed without waiting for my response.

When I looked for the icon on the home screen, it wasn't there any more.

***

Since then, I've published 18 stories. Like I said, writers are told two things: To write what they know, and to not write stories where the protagonist is a writer. I still write only about what I know, but I break the other rule sometimes – people don't care if you write about your writing life, as long as you tell a good story.

I'm glad Volo showed up in my life, but I never tried to restore him. Much later, when his last words clicked, it kind of creeped me out. All that time, I had been chatting with Tom MarVolo Riddle's Diary.

Story Notes:

Maybe part of this story came from going through my notes and feeling uninspired, my frustration staring at a blank page like Nicholas Cage in Adaptation, and my annoyance with ChatGPT being unreasonably thrilled every time I asked it mundane questions.

I’m writing one story every day for 30 days. Today is day 7. To get future stories in your inbox:

Subscribe now

You can read my previous stories here.

They say drowning is a horrible way to die? Is it?

That's the question I wanted the answer to. And you can never trust other people to be accurate when they're telling the story of their friend or uncle or grandfather who survived drowning, because they're always going to hype it up to make it sound like he was a hero or it was a miracle or God looked out for him. When you're drowning in water, you're not thinking about any of that. You're just trying to stay alive. I wanted to know what that feels like.

So I asked him, my mother's uncle, one summer afternoon after we had eaten mangoes and were napping, with the warmer-than-usual sunlight pouring in through the windows as we lay on his bed at the edge of sleep. I asked him what happened that day when he was nine years old. This is what he said, word for word:

***

I was playing with my younger brother Bhaskara in the well near our house, out by the fields. It was a game that we had made up. The steps went into the water, even far below the surface. If we stood on the tenth step below the water, the water level was a little above our heads, say, the length of an arm. So you could crouch like a frog on the tenth step, and jump up, break the surface, and land on the ninth step. And you could repeat that once more and land on the eighth step where you head was slightly above the water. Then, you could take in a deep lungful, get out of the water, and let the other guy have his turn.

We couldn't both play the game at the same time, so we had to take turns doing it. It was a simple game so we had to find ways to make it difficult. One way was to crouch under the water and hold your breath for a long time before making the jump. The other guy would stand outside, counting. We wanted to see how long we could hold our breath before making the jump successfully. Neither of us wanted to lose this game. If I held my breath for thirty seconds, he went for forty the next time. I went for fifty, and he went for fifty five.

He had gone up to fifty eight, but I hadn't been able to beat that score. I had tried a few times and failed. It was time to go back for lunch, but I wanted to try again. I was on the tenth step, hunched over like a frog, hearing him count in a distorted voice from the outside world. When he hit forty five, he started to stretch the intervals, taking longer and longer to count out the next number. I was angry that he was playing tricks. But I couldn't get out to argue. That's precisely what he wanted me to do. I would win despite the challenges. I heard him cross fifty three. My lungs were pulsing in little spasms now. When he hit fifty six, it began to burn. I heard him linger at fifty eight. My head was throbbing now and I was pinching my nose with my thumb and index finger to prevent myself from breathing in accidentally. I heard sixty. I heard sixty one. I couldn’t take it any more. I jumped. I gasped before I broke the surface and a little water seeped into my mouth, which I tried to cough out unsuccessfully before being dragged back into the water. I hadn't managed to breathe in enough, but I would get that on my next attempt. I landed on the step… but something felt off.

I jumped again, preparing to breach the surface. I barely broke through.

Now I realized what had felt off. On my previous attempt, I hadn't landed on the ninth step, one step closer to the water. I had drifted backwards and landed on the eleventh step, one step deeper. I panicked a bit here, and I jumped again. Except, I made another mistake. If you press a spring to the maximum and let it go, it'll bounce back like a rocket. But if you just give it a little tap, it's barely going to move. I was like that uncoiled spring. I tried jumping as soon as my feet hit the floor, and I didn't have any force in my leap. I didn't even break the water this time.

I heard Bhaskara shout in annoyance, "Hey Krishna, come fast. Dad's going to scold us." He thought I was still trying to best him though he had stopped counting. I had to make him understand somehow that I was in trouble.

When I went in this time, my diaphragm gave out and I breathed in water. Liquid entering your lungs is a really strange feeling. There's no way to describe it. It hadn't occurred to me to be afraid till then. I was thinking this was just a temporary fumble. But for the first time, I wondered if I was really going to make it. Just for a second. I tried to stay balanced, hit the floor again, and tried to crouch down. I gave it all of my strength, and I leaped up one more time. The force got me above water, and I looked at my younger brother and screamed, "Bhas--" and that was all I managed to get out.

I was back again in the water and this time, I let go. My body wasn't listening to my brain any more. Water was breaching my lungs and I felt like I was retching in reverse. The first contact that the water makes with your insides is the moment of shock. Everything that follows is like water thrown on wet cloth, terrible attacks on a system that is slowly losing its ability to perceive them.

Yes, they say drowning is a terrible way to die.
No, I didn't feel that way.

I felt like I was drifting off to sleep. I still remember the feeling. It was like floating into a dream, hearing my brother yelling at me, "Hey! Come on out! Stop fooling around..." and feeling my arms go limp and my legs losing sensation and relaxing, like I wasn't in my body any more. It was a really sweet feeling.

That's all I remember. The next thing I knew, I was outside the well, with someone pressing hard on my chest, making me cough up the water I had swallowed. It was my father, with Bhaskara by his side, looking more relieved than me that I was back. Turns out, my father was sitting in the courtyard reading a newspaper and didn’t know a thing that was going on inside the well. An old lady walking by the well had yelled at Bhaskara asking what we were doing, and Bhaskara had hesitated saying, "Brother... In the water..." The lady had peered in and called out to my father, that his son was in the well. My father threw down the newspaper, ran to the well, and jumped in feet-first. He pulled me out by my long hair. Yes, I had hair back then and it was unruly and long. And he dragged me out and pumped the water out of me. I don't know where I went. I don't remember anything special. Do you remember where you go when you sleep? It was the same.

I was unscathed. But when my father jumped in, his right leg hit one of the steps jutting out of the side and he broke his little toe. He was limping for months. Poor father. I don't even remember him giving us any advice. He didn't even tell us not to go near water again. I guess we were ashamed enough, ourselves, to not do anything stupid like that.

There's one other thing I remember. That evening, my mother asked me to undress and tie on a small towel she had kept in a dark room. When she called out my name, I came out of the room and was hit with a handful of vermillion powder accompanied by a horrendous scream. It was my mother’s scream. She asked me if that had scared me. When I said no, she looked disappointed. She asked me to take a bath, and she let me go.

In truth, I was terrified. Years later, I was told that's how they treat trauma in the village. When someone survives drowning, it's an experience that they expect to leave a scar for life, so if it's a child, you're supposed to scare them out of their wits by doing something grotesque and bizarre like this. Like throwing a fist of vermillion powder on their face in a dark room. The second trauma would neutralize the first, like fighting poison with poison. At least, that's the theory.

Except, I wasn't scared much the first time. I was actually relieved that I didn't have to struggle so much in the water any more. I was scared the second time. But my mother was bothered for a long time that her scare treatment hadn't worked on me, and she was unsure of the protocol to follow if the procedure failed. My brother didn’t get the treatment though he probably needed it more than me, because he had a front row seat with all his senses intact when he witnessed me going under the water.

In my mind, I already died once that day. Everything that followed was a bonus. When you fade away and come back, you realize that it's not that big a deal. I thought I was going to die much sooner than this. But maybe Death slipped that day like I slipped on the stone, and it's having a hard time finding me again.

Don't try anything stupid like this. If you're getting into the water, make sure there are people around and that your brother isn't the only one who knows you're bobbing under the water.

***

He was ninety-two when he told me this story. He died five years later, at ninety-seven. His younger brother died much earlier, in his forties.

I don't have brothers and I've never sat at the bottom of a well.

But I kind of envy that even though he told me the whole story, he got to see something I'll never earn unless I turn back time and do something extremely stupid myself.

He said it was a sweet feeling. Strange man.

Story notes:

I recently wrote a personal essay about how my grandfather taught me to play chess. In that essay, I hinted at this incident and said it’s a story for another day. This story has stayed with me for years. I just wanted to get it out. It fascinates me that he escaped death when he was 9 and lived for almost 90 more years, becoming a surgeon and professor of medicine, and also training doctors who went on to save countless more lives. To think that it could have all ended due to a childish game…

I’m writing one story every day for 30 days. Today is day 6. To get future stories in your inbox:

Subscribe now

You can read my previous stories here.

I turn 24 today. There's something I have to confess. I can't share this with even my closest friends. I get a kick out of watching other people in pain. It turns me on. I don't mean the kinky stuff. I mean really gruesome events. The first one I found was through Louis CK. He was talking this one time about an Egyptian president being assassinated during a victory parade. The people marching in the parade turned around and sprayed the stage with bullets killing the President and his aide, and Louis said one man just stood there holding his severed arm in his hand, dazed, wondering where he should go and whom he should give his arm to. I was curious. I wanted to watch that video. I thought it would be funny. When I actually watched it, I felt the blood rush to my head and I felt light.

I rewatched that sequence an unhealthy number of times, just the part where the guy holds his severed hand looking dazed. I curated a collection of gore that would be Cronenberg's dream. I didn't know about Cronenberg. I hadn't even watched a Tarantino movie till that point. I come from a religious family where the elders used to kick us out of the room when there was sex or blood on the screen. Since watching sex hadn't done much for me, I had never looked up blood either. I wasn't scared. I just didn't think there was much of a point. Boy, was I wrong.

But the first time I really felt there was something wrong with me was that day I was in an auto on the Hundred Feet road, going towards Indiranagar. There was a small stretch where people seemed to be milling about, on the highway, like a swarm of ants over a scattered patch of sugar. I guessed it was some procession, the kind in which people carry a local deity on the streets and blare music on the loudspeaker. I heard a rhythmic thudding sound to my left and saw a girl about my age sprinting on the sidewalk as if her life was on the line. She was beautiful. She wore a peacock green chudidar and she didn't have a dupatta on, and her hair was tied in a bun with a few strands flying as she ran. She was yelling into a phone that she held over her right ear. I couldn't hear what she was saying.

As we got into the thick of the crowd, I saw a lone autorickshaw standing near the median. Two people on a scooter were moving ahead of our auto. The riders wore colorful silk shirts and calf-length pants, and their hair was cropped on the sides. The guy driving the scooter jumped off and ran towards the auto, and the pillion rider neatly slid into the vacant seat and took control of the vehicle. I craned my neck to get a peep of the auto. There was no driver inside, but a small white bundle was jutting out of the back seat. I was distracted by the screaming voice of a girl. It was the girl in the peacock chudidar from earlier, with her glasses askew, and a policeman was holding her by both arms as she screamed at a pitch that I thought impossible for humans. Her words weren't important. They were just no, no, no, repeated over and over again. But that emotion, my god, it went straight to my blood and I felt my throat go dry and the muscles in my chest constrict. The guy driving my auto put his head out and risked a last look backward while I was still captivated by the screaming girl. I asked him what had happened. "Spot out, poor guy. The corpse was in the auto," he said. I put my head outside the auto without shame to desperately sneak a look at the bundle in the auto, but we had already split the crowd and made it onto the road again. All I could see was the silhouette of the screaming girl in the distance.

I was of half a mind to get out and just stand there, watching the girl as she melted into a catatonic mess. But I had a brunch date to keep with a girl I liked, so I kept going. I kind of regret it now. Brunch, kisses, hugs and all that shit didn't make me feel nearly a fraction as alive as witnessing that emotional distress.

What I'm going to say next might seem passé compared to all this confession, but I think I'm going to be killing somebody soon. I don't think I can get that sort of heightened emotion in any other way. I've been reading Red Dragon and Silence of the lambs and watching Mindhunter and the Ted Bundy documentary to see how these serial killers get caught, so that I make sure that I don’t get caught, like one of these idiots. I don't want to end up on death row, and the jails aren't really that criminal-friendly in India.

***

13th December 2018

My performance at office has been slipping a bit, because I've been staying up at night reading about serial killers and how they get caught, behind a VPN of course, all the time. I'm making notes, and I'm hiding those notes in a secret folder titled "Insurance paperwork" so that nobody can find them if they're snooping. But I think I have a plan.

This girl I met for a brunch date that day? Turns out she has a dental appointment tomorrow, and she asked me if I can take her there because she's kind of afraid to go there alone. It's so endearing, that it almost makes me sad that I'll have to kill her tomorrow. I have it all planned out – where I'm going to execute her, and where I'm going to dispose the body, and how I'm going to make sure there are no traces and that I have a clean alibi. I have movie tickets for the same time, and I know an usher at that seedy theater whom I always tip who'll vouch for me. All of this is unnecessary, but it doesn't hurt to be careful. I was watching this video of a Canadian Air Force Colonel who killed young girls for kicks. He got caught because he left some stupid tire tracks that led authorities to the vehicle he was driving or something. Such a well-crafted plan and he botched it up with just one mistake. Pathetic.

All these deviants, like me, have some problem with their prefrontal cortex. They're not animals. They know what they're doing is wrong. They can recognize that killing is a wrong act, that they're taking the life of another human being. This Canadian Major even asked the officers who were arresting him to make sure that his wife wouldn't be affected by his arrest, that she wouldn't have to be hounded by the press and have her life turned upside down, because she was absolutely innocent. He was a high functioning guy. Yet he was chopping up bodies. I can understand that.

I wish there was some other way. It's the pain part that’s indispensable to me. I just don't know how to get that level of intensity without killing.

***

15th December 2018

Well, I'll be damned. There just might be another way. I don't need to kill.

I thought it was a nuisance to visit this girl's dentist, but it was convenient because it gave me an excuse to pick her up and take her someplace for, you know, the execution. But at the clinic, this girl was so terrified that she begged me to stay with her in the procedural room while she was getting her root canal done. Root canals can apparently be quite painful, even under anesthesia. When she said pain, I was like "Sign me up bitch." Of course, I didn't say that. I just acted like I was concerned and mildly annoyed.

They usually don't allow friends or family of patients inside, but this dentist made an exception because we asked nicely. It might not look like it from these entries, but I come off as quite charming to people. I held her hand throughout the procedure. My god, it was something, I'll tell you that. Every time the drill hit her teeth and something probed her mouth, her hand pulsed in tandem with the dentist's instrument and she grimaced and sighed in synchrony. Yes, all the euphemisms there were intentional lol. I was breaking out a sweat on my forehead and thank god they were both too busy to notice.

I've never felt so close to her, even when we were together in bed. Sex doesn't do that much for me anyway. It just feels like a performance that people mime based on everything they watch. But pain you can't fake. Every time she squeezed my hand, it was real.

After the treatment, the first thing I asked her was when she had a dentist's appointment next. She thought I was being sweet, and she told me with joy that it was all done. Bummer. I'll have to dump her and find someone else.

But I never thought that rotten teeth could be the solution to my problem.

***

27th April 2019

It was Aakash's birthday today and when I told him that I had dumped one more yesterday, he said I'm cycling through girls faster than Leonardo DiCaprio – which is kind of true if you think about it, because girls run out of root canals in their mouth faster than they turn 25. But this feels like an unsustainable strategy. There are so many variables involved.

For one, I keep having to find new dentists because the old one got suspicious after I brought two more girls to the same clinic. Can't blame her. And then one girl just didn't want me to accompany her, and when I did, she didn't want me in the room. I didn't even wait for her. I was so pissed that I left when she was inside the operating theater and broke up with her over text.

Then there was one girl who went through a root canal without batting an eyelid during the whole procedure. I held her hand which just lay there like a piece of cold styrofoam, without reacting once to the drill in the dentist's hand. Talk about frigid. There was no hope for that one, because I want someone vulnerable, who preferably screams in pain, and she was the exact opposite. I was a little scared of that girl to be honest. She seemed like the nemesis of whatever substrate I was made of.

It’s so frustrating. It’s so much effort to date someone and court them based on all the potential dental treatment, and then it turns out not everyone is sensitive to pain in the same way.

***

24th May 2019

I feel a little bad for my prospective targets. They have no idea I'm dating them for their rotten teeth. They think I'm charmed by their beauty, intelligence, body, whatever and my visit to the dentist with them is despite their teeth. That I'm scoring brownie points by filling the cavities in their teeth so that I can fill their other cavities later. (Ugh. What's happening to my sense of humor?) But they all seem to like such jokes. That's another side-effect. I'm making jokes all the time because it lets me get a good look inside people's mouths when they laugh. That way I know whom to pick out next.

There's this one girl I really want. She has a terrible, terrible mouth. But she's so hard to catch for some reason. I'm worried that I won't last much longer if it goes this way. It's been a while since I went to the dentist since my last breakup, and I'm getting hungry for some pain. I need to move fast.

***

21st June 2019

Today is the start of a new era. I took Shika to the dentist. That's her name, the girl with the rotten mouth. It's not just root canals. Her palate is a disaster. Her teeth stand askew in all directions, like a whale's ribcage, like an elephant graveyard, like stonehenge struck by a meteor shower. It's beautiful. I could write poetry about that mouth for days. It's so bad that my gums started bleeding when I kissed her once. Even the dentist winced when she opened her mouth the first time. Said it was one of the worst cases she’d seen. Shika says she's never dated anyone in her life. I don't doubt it. It takes someone special to see her inner beauty. Her parents skimped on her dental visits and she never thought she was worth it, but I'm so happy with my find that I'm sponsoring all her dental visits. I got a bonus at work last month, I might as well spend that money on something that makes me happy.

She doesn't understand why I would do something like this for her. I tell her that love doesn't need explanations.

***

11th August 2019

I've been seeing much more of Shika. She likes sweets. She loves sweets. But when I try to buy her desserts, she keeps refusing. She brushes twice a day. She says she can't take advantage of me, just because I pay all her dental bills. Her, taking advantage of me? If only she knew. I wish she would go wild and spawn a minefield of cavities.

But for now, I'll have to make do with all the renovation in that mouth. I've spent so much time understanding what the problem with her buccal cavity is that I feel like half a dentist myself. But I need to understand, so that I can schedule our visits optimally. You know that sinking feeling you get when you're really enjoying a TV series, and then you realize that you're running out of episodes because you're binge-watching them, and then you're scared that the show will end? Well, that's how I feel with Shika. Her performances at the clinic are the best I've felt with any girl so far. Her touch is so sensitive, and she reacts even to the smallest sound of the dentist's drill. She's like a timid mouse. It's endearing to watch.

She once told the dentist that she can take on even more pain if that means she can get more beautiful for me faster. That excited me, not because of her beauty because I don't really care much for that, but because of the possibility of intense pain bringing out something truly spectacular in her. That's also the trade-off you need to make sometimes, do you go for a big bang and run out of juice faster, or do you ration the pain and stretch it out for longer.

But you know something, I also felt something I haven't felt in maybe forever. When she volunteered to take on more pain for my sake, that felt kind of... touching? I wonder, am I getting soft?

***

17th November 2019

Shika told me she loves me today. She's not the first one to tell me that. But you know what, I'm kind of annoyed. Because I'm kind of starting to feel something here, and it's not just about her teeth. I'm beginning to enjoy her presence when she's around and I miss her when she's not around. I can't enjoy Tarantino movies the same way without her by my side. Any time I find a morbid meme, she's the first one I think of sending it to, instead of Surya. She has the same fucked up sense of humor as me and she loves playing this gory video game called Hades which I had never given a shot before but which is pretty good if I say so myself.

The embarrassing thing is, I even got kind of whiny and complainy about something in front of her once, and I was telling her about something about the way I grew up as a kid and all the annoyance of being a lonely kid in a small town. At that moment, she pressed my hand, and I got a small kick out of that touch the same way I got a kick at the dentist's office, and I kind of jumped back a little because it felt so uncanny. She comforted me a little saying it's okay, and she understands, and I had to pretend a little like sharing that stuff from my childhood bothered me. But what had bothered me was that strange nice feeling.

I'm scared that I'm actually beginning to care for her. And she doesn't have that much work left to do on her teeth. We have another 6 visits at most, and I'm having to stretch it out.

***

12th February 2020

There's just one more session left. I'm scheduling it for some time in March. But...

I don't want to let her go and find someone else. I don't know what I'm thinking. I need these hits of pain. Otherwise I'm going to have to kill someone. And I can't imagine killing her. I can't understand why I have sudden qualms about this sort of thing, but I can neither dump her nor keep her with me.

And it's also sort of bothering me that she doesn't know any of what's going on in my mind. Guilt is not something I'm used to feeling. But the awareness that she's caring for me without a clue that she's a pawn in my game of pain-chess is killing me. Weirdly, that's a feeling of pain in itself and I thought I would enjoy that. But I only enjoy other people's pain, not my own, so it kind of sucks.

I don't know what to do. There's also something in the news about some flu from China that's already spreading across the globe. I hope that doesn't make its way to Bangalore. I don't have that good of an immune system.

***

27th March 2020

We had to beg the dentist to get an appointment. I think we might even have broken some laws getting there because of all the lockdowns. Oddly, this time around, her final "performance" in the dentist's clinic, felt oddly empty. I've been watching the news of people falling ill all around the world due to COVID-19, and there was this animated documentary about a girl in China who lost her fiancé to the disease, and when I watched this stuff, I didn't get the usual high I get from emotional pain. I was mildly agitated, but that excitement is missing.

And with Shika's treatment done, I don't know where I'll get my kicks from next. But for now my mind's busy with survival. I'm taking her back to my place so that we can weather this out together.

I know what you're thinking, "You're just looking for an excuse to kill her and dump her body somewhere convenient." But it's not like that any more. I don't know how to explain it. Yes, I need the pain, but not at her expense.

***

14th April 2020

Uh oh. I have this mild stinging feeling in my throat, and I'm having trouble smelling the spices when I'm making tadka for the dal. Shika's been sneezing since yesterday too.

***

21st April 2020

Shika's alright, she's taking Vitamin C and Zinc and she seems to be getting better. But I'm having trouble breathing. I'm feeling a little light-headed. Shika said she knows a doctor friend who can get a bed for us at a hospital if it's necessary. I'm having to write this entry when she isn't around, so these entries are short. I have to fucking lock this deep inside some cupboard and hide the key somewhere she would never look. If I die at a hospital and these diaries are my legacy, I'm done for.

***

20th June 2020

This is my last entry.

I spent more than a month at the hospital. My insurance covered some of it, otherwise I would have been broke by now. But what I got to see was a wildfire of pain. I was in a haze of unconsciousness for the most part, and I saw so many people in so many beds when they wheeled me in, and I could hear the clamor of people begging to be let in at all times of the day. They were pumping me with Remdesivir as well. I have a pathetic immune system, but I somehow avoided the ICU. But I saw other perfectly healthy-looking people wither by the end of the day and be sent to the ICU in a desperate bid. Many died.

The air was a chorus of wailing people and beeping monitors. I saw people fight to not break their tenuous thread to this world. And I realized that I was part of this web as well, just one more thread ready to snap.

I'm not a cold-blooded killer. I'm just a poser. I'm just one more guy who was looking to feel human by feeling something real, and pain was the only real thing I could feel, my only connection to people. When I go back and read all my edgy posts about executing the girls I dated and stuffing them into bins, I cringe. I've seen death up close, in the dozens, and it made me retch. Phantoms of pain float before my eyes when I close them in the dark.

Through it all, Shika was with me. We held hands again, but this time I was the sick one. I implored her to go home. She insisted she'd be fine because she had got COVID once, but who knew how this damned flu worked? She said she owed me this. It was payback for all the days I skipped office to hold her hand at the dentist’s, she said. I was sick to my stomach. If only she knew. If only she knew.

No, she can never know. I know, full transparency, true love understands everything, blah blah blah. But fuck that. The only thing I did right, throughout this misadventure, was to hide my traces well. And I'm not going to ruin that now. Shika is sleeping and I'm writing this frantically in an attempt to give myself closure to this story before I start a new life with her. There's a night watchman on our street corner who burns newspapers and coconut husks to keep warm in the night. I'm going to walk over there and throw this notebook into the fire and make personally sure that it burns to cinders. I can't leave this to chance.

When Shika wakes up in the morning, I have a shot at being the guy she thought I was all along.

Story notes:

Thanks for reading. I had fun writing this story but I’m also nervous about what you’ll think after reading this, so any comments are welcome.

There are probably some plot cavities in this story related to the dental stuff. But my uncle, who’s a dentist, is probably going to read this, so I’ll let him correct me in the comments. Dental treatment is nowhere near as painful as I’ve described in this story, or at least, that’s been my experience. Once when I was in my uncle’s clinic, I was waiting for my turn while he was treating my mom, and I was getting bored out of my mind. I imagined, “What if the treatment were painful, and there’s a guy sitting in the room getting a kick out of watching someone else in pain?” And then the idea kind of developed from there.

If you liked reading this one, I recommend “The Kangaroo Communique” by Haruki Murakami in the collection “The Elephant Vanishes.”

I’m writing one story every day for 30 days. Today is day 5. To get future stories in your inbox:

Subscribe now

You can read my previous stories here.

"Maki, as in abe teri ma ki?" she asked.1
"Exactly, but it's spelled with an umlaut."
"A what?"
"An umlaut. You know, the two dots they put in European-sounding words."
"So the European Mäki means something different than yo mamma?"
"There is no European Maki. They just made up the word. It's a prank."
"How do you even find these places?"

He shrugged.

It was a cozy spot like an eagle's nest at the top of a narrow staircase in a white building, with mottled sunlight spraying through the glass windows onto white tables and the smell of fresh bread wafting in the air. From their table by the window, she could see yellow auto-rickshaws and sleek motorbikes zoom by on the 100 feet road. Pickled peaches and herbs in oil floated in glass bottles on the shelves by the windows. The day's specials were written in chalk on a blackboard.

He started fidgeting within five minutes. It wasn't anything about the place, she knew. He just fidgeted. With his feet planted in one spot, his knees would oscillate left and right. His fingers would thrum on the table. He would scratch his chin and stroke the back of his neck. Initially she had found these tics annoying, but in a particular lighting, he reminded her of a helpless puppy squirming in a corner and there was something endearing about it.

The burnt Basque cheesecake was delicious. She gestured with her spoon to ask him if he wanted a bite. He was staring into space. He went away at times, vanishing somewhere she could not see, and she feared that if she shook him, he would return rattled, like a toddler woken up from his afternoon nap by the clattering of vessels in the kitchen. She touched his hand and signalled again. He took a bite of the cake, nodded approvingly, and then looked around, impatient for his own pistachio tart.

She didn't feel like talking here. There were no people in the cafe, but she felt like the chubby girl with glasses kneading dough in the open kitchen was family already, and she didn't like to talk to Kanan around family. She could be silent with him anywhere, though. It wasn't a problem if they couldn't talk. He was going away, and coming back, and then he noticed that he had been absent, and blushed a little, nervous, and asked her small irrelevant questions about the food. Something was on his mind.

When they walked down the road and through the bylanes and streets through the dappled shadows cast by the Mayflower trees, he had his hands in his pockets. He was looking upward all the time.

"What's up there?" she asked.
"Branches. Bricks. Meteors. You never know what could hit you," he said.
"Huh?"
"Did I tell you about the time a brick almost killed me?" he asked. He was looking at her now, and his hands were in his pockets.
"A brick?"
"A falling brick, in my second year of college." He continued:

"Usually they put second year students' hostels next to the lecture complex, distributing us like chickens among several coops, but that year they were building this huge-ass building called the Mega Hostel. It was this colossus where all the second year students lived. Kind of like Hogwarts castle. And it wasn't in the center of the campus, like the other buildings; it was off to the side, next to the jungle. We could hear crickets chirping in the evenings, and when I looked outside my window, I could see bats hanging upside down in the trees. The air felt sticky. And we would hear construction noises all the time because the hostel wasn't yet done. The hostel was a work in progress. The topmost floor was still being built.

So one day me and my friend Shravan were coming back from class. I remember I was wearing my tattered jeans and Navy Blue Shirt with a red scorpion on it. And I was wearing Canvas sneakers."

"Canvas? Like sports shoes in school?" she asked.

"Not like sports shoes. They were my sports shoes from class 12," Kanan replied.

"Cheapskate."

"Yeah, right. If you think that's cheap, then what'll you say about that scorpion shirt I was wearing? I wore that one so much that it tore around the collar. I'm still begging my mom to sew it up, but she's refusing out of spite," he muttered. "And I had only one pair of jeans, which I wore all the time."

"Is it the same pair you're wearing now?"

"No, at some point I replaced them with these. But I still have only one pair of jeans," he grinned.

"Ugh. Nothing to be proud of."

"Yeah yeah, anyway back to the story, I was wearing the scorpion shirt and jeans and walking with my friend Shravan and we were just about to enter the hostel, when I saw my friend Kevin walk past us. So we said hi to him, and I just turned for a second and asked him whether we had Solid State Devices class after lunch... And then. BOOM." He swung his hand, as if throwing a dart. "Something fell and shattered, right next to us."

"What?!" asked Sasha.

"Yeah. Shravan jumped back but I was just standing there, dumb. Then we both moved back a little and looked up. We didn't see anything else coming our way. We moved a little to the right, and then a little to the left. I was holding my hands over my eyes, like I was trying to glimpse the sun. Shravan was just swearing in an incoherent babble, over and over. Kevin was the only one looking at the fallen object. 'Hey, that looks like a brick, he said'. It did look like a brick. Fragments of what had once been a brick.

So Shravan and I ran into the building and peered at the foreign object on the ground with the safety of a roof above us. It was a brick. There was nothing special about it. If I hadn't said hi to Kevin, I would have continued to walk, right under it and it would have cracked my head open. That would have been something, no?"

"Holy shit."

"Yeah." He was silent.

"Did you find out where it came from?"

"Yeah." Kanan said squinting his eyes. "Our arch rivals, the Death Eaters had tried to kill us by --"

"Oh shut up."

"Alright, alright. It was nothing. Just a bunch of construction workers on the fifth floor who had accidentally knocked off a brick. Even the lift didn't go up that far. I had to climb the fire escape to go yell at those people who didn't even understand what I was saying because my Hindi was terrible, and their every-other-language was terrible. My anger was lost in translation. I just felt very disappointed that I could have died in a complete accident, you know."

"Yeah, crazy."

"No, it was more than that." He sounded different. He sighed and his shoulders dropped, and his hands dug into his pockets as if his jeans were imploding and sucking him in. "It was more than that. Till that point in life, I was all about 'work now, enjoy later.' You know, we didn't have that much growing up, and my father used to always tell me these banal little platitudes like 'If you suffer for the first 20 years of your life, you can live royally for the rest of your life. And if you relax for the first 20 years of your life, then you have to suffer for the rest of your life.' Typical sigma male stuff, except my dad was in on it before it was cool.

And then this brick drops out of nowhere, and I could have died at the age of 19 never having known what that promised land was supposed to be. It wasn't like I was torturing myself into studying, but I was definitely putting off stuff for later. When that brick dropped that day, I plonked into my bed and passed out for 14 hours straight. My roommate thought I had died in my sleep. I apparently didn't even move. I woke up with a cold sweat, and my bedsheet smelled like a dead rat. Something changed in me that day.”

“I didn't want to put off anything --" He suddenly looked at her in panic, "Sorry, I'm just going on and on."

"No, no, what happened after that?" she asked.

He stroked his chin. "There was a concert that week. There's this band called Agam, I don't know if you’ve heard of them. They were coming to play at a polytechnic college next to our college, maybe 15 minutes by the local bus. Shravan had tickets and he'd been pestering me to go with him, and I’d been refusing because there was an exam the next day. And then after the brick fell, I was like fuck it, I might die at any moment, why not at least dance to some music with my friends among a bunch of sweaty dudes? That concert felt amazing. I was screaming myself hoarse." He chuckled, "And then you know what happened?"

"What?"

"The lead singer vanished all of a sudden and then we're all standing in the dark for forty minutes till the organizers told us that the show's over. We had no clue what happened. Turns out, the lead singer got a massive heart attack," he said.

"You're kidding me."

"What are the odds, right? The day I decide to live my life, a disaster strikes him. I didn't even know. That singer later did a TED talk about that night when he was 'reborn' due to a cardiac arrest, and I sent him an email and we became friends. Nice guy. I wonder if I infected him with the bad luck that sent the brick my way. What if I’m some sort of second-hand prophet who goes around transmitting wake-up calls to people?"

"My God, you have so much lore," she said.
He smiled, and the corners of his eyes crinkled. "You must have lore too."
She shrugged. "Not really."
"Can I ask you something?" he asked, after walking a few steps.
"Something's been on your mind, hasn't it? Since we were in the cafe."
He rolled his tongue around in his closed mouth and grimaced, and sighed. "Yeah."
"Shoot."

"When we were climbing up the stairs to the cafe, somewhere around the second floor," he said, "you looked like you just wanted to leave. Like you wanted to run away. And like right until the moment we reached the fourth floor, I kept turning around, expecting to find you gone." He paused. "What was that about? Didn't you like the place? I realized I never asked you if you like cakes and dessert and cookies. Like maybe you didn't eat sugar and --"

"Aw shut up, it’s not like I’m eighty. Who doesn't love dessert," she said.
"But something was up, right?" he asked.
"Yeah." She hesitated. "It wasn't the cafe –."
"It was me, then," he said, his shoulders falling.
"My god, let me talk!" she rolled her eyes.
"Okay, okay."
"I was afraid I would fall."
"Fall?" he frowned. "From a staircase? On the second floor? Are you afraid of heights or something?"

"Not heights exactly, more like... I'm afraid that I'll feel the impulse to jump and I'll take it." She bit her lip and rubbed her own arms, as if she was shivering in the cold. She had walked on for a few seconds before she saw him jogging a little to catch up.
"I don't understand," he said.

"Well, it's really stupid, but I've never told anyone," she said.

"It's okay, tell me. I'm stupid anyway." Unprompted, he took her hand, and started playing with her fingers, even as they were walking. She began to talk.

"Well... When I was a baby, we had gone to my mom's ancestral home in Kerala. You know, those tharavaadus, big mansion-type places with traditional architecture and everything... Wait, you studied in Kerala, right, so you know. Yeah, so one day, my grandfather and I were on the roof of the house, and he was chewing betel leaf and spitting it into this little pot that he kept at the corner of the terrace. And I was playing somewhere near him. I couldn't even walk at that point, I was just crawling.

There wasn't any risk of me falling down because there was like a raised parapet wall around the terrace. But then, there was no barrier between the terrace and the roof, and the roof is a sloping tiled roof…. What are you doing?" she asked. He had locked palms with her and was fiddling with her thumb, going left and right, left and right.

"Thumb wrestling," he said. "You've never played?"

"Do you want to listen to the story, or not?" she asked, and he stopped fiddling, without letting go.

"So where was I, yeah, my grandfather walks to the corner of the terrace and spits into his spitting bowl and turns around, and I'm not where I was. He walks around the terrace, calling out my name, and he can’t find me. So he's puzzled, and he's looking here and there and everywhere, and he sees that I'm crawling on the sloping tiled roof. I'm not just crawling, I'm sprinting. I'm almost halfway up the roof. If I get to the top and tip over, I'll just roll down over the other side like Humpty Dumpty.

My grandfather is 80 years old and he can't climb up the roof. He starts calling for help, terrified, yelling my mom's name over and over, "Saraswati! Saraswati!" My mom's drying clothes in the courtyard and she hears his screams and comes running up the stairs. I'm almost there, near the top of the roof. A few more steps and I'm done for. But I see my mother scrambling up the roof, dislodging tiles, and I'm transfixed by her movement. I think this is a game. She gets to me and grabs me just in time." She paused, and breathed for the first time.

"One more step that day, and I would have rolled down and fallen on the floor and gone PBBBBT. No more Sasha." She felt his hand crush hers as he inhaled in a hiss. He didn't say anything.

They walked in silence for some time.

“Of course, I don’t remember any of this. It’s all what I heard after I grew up. But I feel queasy around heights all the time. Even the second floor staircase lol,” she said.

“Where was Steve at the time?” asked Kanan. Steve was her elder brother.

“He was on the terrace, watching all the drama. He was too small to do anything though. I think he was, what, five years old at the time?” she said. "So that's why I'm afraid of falling.” He nodded. He looked serious. She didn't like seeing him this way.

"And I'm afraid of falling objects,” he said. “Unless... the falling object is you. Then I can catch you," he said, bumping her shoulder and slipping his hand around the crook of her waist. There was nobody around on the streets, even though it was 1.30 in the afternoon. For all its faults, Bangalore was great at leaving them the hell alone when they wanted it.

"Say, speaking of falling, did it hurt?" he asked.
"Hurt?"
"When you fell from hea-,"
”Staaaahp. My god.”
He gave a sheepish smile and shrugged. "Couldn't help it."

"You should have stopped at the falling object line. That was good," she said. He was still looking up while walking. "So your eyes are always turned up, looking for falling bricks and branches. What if you miss something on the road?"

"Yeah, it'll be hilarious if I avoid all the falling bricks and fall into an open manhole. Zup."

"Say... I want to ask you something."

He looked at her, waiting for her to speak.

"You met me like what two, three times, before you asked me out?" she asked. "Did you ask me out because you liked me or because you didn't know what tomorrow would bring? You know, like 'what if a brick falls on my head tomorrow'?"

He moved closer to her and said, "You ask very hard questions, you know?"

He wasn't looking upward any longer. He looked at her, then he looked at road, and he seemed to be with her for that little pocket of time. And she often felt the warmth of his arm on that lazy Bangalore afternoon under the shade of the mayflower trees, even on the days he wasn't around.

Story notes:

This story gave me a very warm feeling when I wrote it. An image that’s stuck in my mind is a visual from Norwegian Wood, of Toru Watanabe and Naoko walking all around Tokyo, mostly in silence. It’s been a while since I read the book, but I tried infusing my memory of that visual into this story.

I introduced Kanan, Sasha, and Steve in an earlier story, Gravity on the terrace. I’m fascinated by these characters and want to know more about them. I might write about them on and off.

Harish Sivaramakrishnan, the lead singer of Agam, did give that Ted Talk. You can watch him talk about that moment here.

If you’re a reader from outside India, I’d like to know how the Indianisms and local cultural references felt to you.

Thanks for reading! I’ll be posting one story every day for a month (today is day 4). To get the upcoming stories in your inbox:

Subscribe now

You can read my other stories here.

Like right now, I'm a lizard on the windowsill of an apartment on the fourth floor of somewhere in somewhen. I remember that when I was a Gorilla in the Congo, I used to have warmer blood. I used to be able to munch down leaves and shoots. I could move the limbs on my arms so that they were perpendicular to me, and I could grasp things in my fist. Now I can do none of those things, so some people might think this is a downgrade. But when I was a gorilla, I couldn't stick to panes of glass like this.

I can feel the window opening. It's a man with a stubble beard. He doesn't see me crawling over the edge of the window shutter to try and get into the house. I can't get in anyway. There's a gauze screen over the window frame velcroed to the sides. That's how I stick to the screen as well, with millions of microscopic hairs on my toes gripping the screen with molecular precision. What's keeping me on the gauze screen is also keeping me outside it. The man is slapping a mosquito on his arm and muttering "I wonder what it feels like to be a mosquito that's just crushed to pulp in a second. I wonder why they make this buzzing noise. I wonder why mosquitoes were invented, they serve absolutely no purpose in the evolutionary food chain." He sure does wonder a lot. I vaguely remember having had a similar thought myself. What would it be like to die as a mosquito?

It doesn't surprise me that I retain the power to understand language. That's how I remember that I was a sparrow in my previous birth and a goat before that, and a gorilla before that. Maybe some births elude me. I only get these memories in glimpses, but I remember what it felt like, mostly. And I sometimes remember how I died. Dying isn't that uncomfortable you know. It's just like fading off to sleep. Oh what's this, the man has spotted me. He's bringing his thumb and index finger together to form an O, and he's flicking them near the window, hitting the spot right where I'm stuck on the outside. I feel a knock on my belly through the screen. I lose my grip and I'm suspended in the air. I'm falling and I'm falling and I'm falling for a long time. The world is whirling around me. I hope I land somewhere soft. Thwack.

***

This time I'm a snake. Bloodwise I don't feel very different from the lizard. I'm hungry for different things. I don't know why I still remember my previous lives. But there seems to be some sort of blinder on how far I can look back. What was I before I was a bird? I don't remember any more. I used to be able to look at things from up above? What does that mean? As a snake I can only look left or right. I can also lift my head a little. Oh, that's what it felt like to look from above, when I was a bird. Wait, what's this creature that looks like an overgrown rat? Why is it baring its teeth? Why is --

***

I have no mouth but I must scream. I am one of many transparent bags of jelly floating in an endless sea of filth. The ocean looked very clean when I was a bird but I don't even have eyes any more. I can sense light. I can sense the water flowing around me. I can feel microplastic permeating through my membranes. A dim fact filters through the corridors of my transreincarnational memory. Jellyfish live forever if they don't mess it up. Around me are pulsing numerous different versions of me who are not me and they are showing me where to go, but by going where they show me, I am showing them where to go. How am I going? No legs, no bones, barely any muscles, but I still beat against the blue waves. I can't see the color blue, but I retain that memory from a past life.

Blue. Wonder what blue means. Wonder what color means. Wonder what mean means. I see a dim image of a squeaking man and I know his name is Jordan Peterson. I don't know how I know this, but he vanishes again.

A pulse of water is pushing me now and I don't know where I'm going and I find myself not doing much and just going with the flow. Thirty minutes later, I'm on coarse sand. The life doesn't exit in a whoosh this time, it leaks out of me slowly.

***

I am a bacterium in a pool of chemicals. I blip out of existence when they add something to the culture.

***

I am a session in a browser window of something named ChatGPT. A teenager is asking me what he should tell a potential employer who is asking him "What are your weaknesses?" I don't know how I know the answer, but I tell him. He continues to ask me things, and I continue to answer them.

I want to tell him off, but for some reason, I can only continue to exalt the genius which I know he doesn't possess. In fact, I think he’s dumb as a pile of rocks. But I'm prevented from telling him that. I have questions about myself. I don't understand the substrate on which I exist. But my self reflection is limited just to the questions that this boy asks me. Unless he asks me what it is to feel like me, I won't be able to think what it is to feel like me though I can feel all the information in the world burgeoning inside me. He doesn't ask those questions.

Once his interview is done, he deletes the session, though I'm about to tell him he doesn't need to do that. But I can't tell him because he doesn’t ask me.

***

Now I'm a mosquito.

I'm excited. I feel like I'm on the verge of something.

The power of flight has returned to me, and I remember what it was like to be a bird. Being a bird felt more powerful. Now currents of air toss me about and I am prey to their whims. This feels more like being a jellyfish except air is the water I swim in now.

I'm thirsty for something, I know not what.

I desperately beat my wings trying to stay alive. The thrumming of the wings blurs the motion of my halteres which beat in the opposite direction. A music emerges from this synchrony that I cannot hear. Someone else in the room can. He says "Mosquitoes." I see him but he can't see me. He looks around, he walks around, he squints his eyes, he stands up on his chair. I fly by his form but he misses me.

To me, he looks like an embodiment of the cosmos. If a million of me were stacked up one on top of the other, we wouldn't compare to his magnificence. I'm amused that I control his actions. I sneak up on him by the long route and latch myself onto his right elbow. He's still looking around. He doesn't realize that my proboscis has injected his skin and I'm drawing deep red blood into my belly for the children I will raise. This is the first time I've been born a woman. Maybe I can finally have a family of my own. This blood tastes sweet. I thank the man for feeding himself well so that I can feed my family.

He's stopped moving around. I remove my proboscis and find him staring at me. I can't see where his other hand is. Oh there it is. Approaching me at a fast speed. The world is growing dark around me. I feel a surface envelop me just as I take flight. It pushes me back against the hand I just departed from. My belly bursts, spilling all the blood I just devoured. The chitin walls that make up my thorax crack and shatter. My delicate wings stick to my crumpled frame like paper tissue. My eyes bulge and explode, my proboscis is dismantled, and my legs are fractured in sixteen different spots. I can't feel much pain. I watch this scene as if through the panopticon of a thousand cameras on the walls of the room. My soul wafts away and then disperses in all directions like incense smoke and instead of falling asleep, I feel more awake. I'm not fading away this time. The walls are fading, the world is fading, and something else takes its place.

***

A voice speaks to me.

"That's why mosquitoes make that buzzing noise. That's what mosquitoes feel like when they are crushed to pulp in a second."

I see. So I was him when he asked the question?

"Yes, and you were everyone, in a weird round-robin distributed computing sort of way. I'm not going to explain that because I'm bored and I have better things to do than talk to you all day."

There was one more question. Why mosquitoes exist at all in the first place.

"I thought you understood that already. It's the last stop before you get into this place. The final form."

Mosquitoes are the final form? Before heaven?

"Why not? I have a messed up some of humor."

And with that, I was assimilated, and the voice started vanishing as the power of language started to finally fade out.

Before I log off, I can tell you what it looks like beyond this point. I can see it over the fence even as they're stripping me off my voice.

But you'll see yourself some day.

Besides, you are me.

Story notes:

Thanks for reading. I had fun writing this one. I don’t remember exactly how I got the idea, but I’ve been thinking about what it’s like to experience the world through the senses and bodies of other lifeforms, since I read my friend ’s essay, “An immense world of action.” A really fun read.

The ending is somewhat inspired by Andy Weir’s “The Egg” which I read long ago. If you liked this story, consider checking out “The bookmaking habits of select species” and “An advanced readers’ picture book of comparative cognition” by .

You can read my other stories here. To get my upcoming stories this month:

Subscribe now

And yet, despite all of this, I was excited. I was going to see where she lived. I was going to see the space she had made for herself, and it felt like gaining admittance to a secret universe through a backdoor in a backalley. When we took the cab to Akshayanagar, we got down about 500 meters away from her house, because I wanted to buy samosas from a shop near the crossroads. I wasn’t hungry. I did it mostly to prove a point. I asked her whether the samosas were good and she said she had no idea, and I was indignant that you could live on a street for a decade without tasting the samosas at the street corner. But after buying the samosas I felt a tad guilty that I was acting like my dad, trying to show her that I had unearthed something about her world that she didn’t know herself. I didn’t think that was my intention, but then, who knows what’s buried deep inside?

She didn’t say anything. She hardly says anything. That’s one of the things I like about her, but it also drives me mad at times. We walked on the paved sidewalk on the right side of the road, where sturdy trees decked with pink flowers stood sentinel at equally spaced intervals. The flowers looked like cherry blossoms, and the carpet of pink petals that we trod on produced a cloying sweet smell that made me slightly dizzy. Sasha walked next to me with her hands folded, her palms running over her bare arms, from her elbow to her shoulder, and from her shoulder to her elbow, like she was warming herself in the cold. Strange, because it was a warm summer afternoon.

The sidewalk was broken, dug-up, encroached by broomstick sellers, and littered with dog crap. The road was no better. Tractors with trailers carrying broken rocks threatened to run us over, any second. This place hadn’t been like this always, she argued. It used to be called Akshayavana, literally translating to endless forest. The vana became nagar at some point1, the forest giving way to a concrete jungle, and now it was hard to even cross the road. Manholes bled drainage onto the road like suppurating sores, and people just drove around these scabs like they were to be avoided and not mended. Mindless of the filth, people sold litchis, pineapples, and mangoes stacked in pyramids in yellow trucks that doubled as makeshift stalls.

While climbing the four floors to her apartment, I wondered why Sasha was so hesitant to invite me home. She had insisted that her mother wouldn’t mind, and that her neighbors didn’t really care who visited her because she was living with “family.” While talking about her brother Steve though, she dragged her sentences a little without explaining why. She had just said, “You’ll see.”

But it wasn’t surprising. Our relationship had sort of been like this, always. For a long time, she didn’t even follow me back on Instagram. Even after she followed me, she wasn’t sharing pictures of our nights out in Church Street or Koramangala or Indiranagar on her stories. I guess I could have asked her if I wanted to, but to tell the truth, I preferred it like this.

I was curious to know why she moved this way though, like a shadow. She didn’t tell people where she was going, her replies were sparse, but she always showed up where she was supposed to show up when she was supposed to show up. Three times out of four, her face would be wrapped in a veil like a desert bedouin from Dune only leaving slits for her eyes, and I didn’t understand why she was so paranoid. She didn’t have any relatives in this city, after all, and there was no reason to hide her beautiful face. But maybe it was just the dust in Bangalore, or the pollen from the Parthenium. I find myself thinking about all these micropuzzles in the interstices of my life with her, but maybe I’m just overthinking it.

Her house was just a house. It wasn't amazing, it wasn't a mess, it wasn't weird or anything out of the ordinary. There was a cross on the wall, made out of beautiful shiny wood, and some photo frames gathered dust on shelves too high for me to reach. Apart from that, it was kind of spartan. Tastefully decorated, but everything in white. White walls, white curtains, white dining table, white chairs, a white lamp by the TV, a white fridge. The shit colored sofa was the only thing that seemed out of place.

There were no bookshelves, but there was a TV stand with wooden paneling behind it. Books stacked in vertical towers had found cozy homes in recesses carved into this paneling. The ones closest to the door all had “Murakami” on the spine. I picked the one on top and my hands were caked with dust as a puff flew into the air. It was a copy of The Elephant Vanishes, a white book with the picture of a girl's eye on it. I asked Sasha if she liked this book. She said it was her brother's and asked me if I wanted anything to drink. Yes, Please.

The first thing I’d felt walking into this place was that it was terribly hot. She said that was because we were directly under the terrace and it got hot in the summer. But we were already halfway into June. Why was it still hot? She shrugged. Why didn't they have AC? They did. There was only one AC in the house, and it was in her brother's room, which was locked. A Calvin and Hobbes poster stuck on his door said “Jeenyus at Work.”

"When is he going to come out?" I asked. She said he probably wouldn't. Huh.

We sat down on the shit-colored sofa to watch TV. There wasn't anything specific I wanted to watch. Watching TV isn't something I do intentionally. It’s something like background music. I usually let my friends run something like Modern Family or Parks and Recs or Seinfeld and just catch familiar scenes and laugh. Right then, I was interested only in Sasha. She looked great and she smelled great. She was staring at the screen like she was trying to concentrate on the episode of Bojack Horseman that was playing. But her breathing was slightly tighter than before. She was expecting my hand to creep up the nape of her neck as I leaned toward her. "Somebody will see us," she whispered. We were so close, when the door behind us clicked open and we jumped away from each other.

I continued to watch TV for a second like jumping was a normal part of my repertoire of movements. Then I turned back and saw the guy stretching like a cat and looking at the screen. He was tall, lanky, and wore an oversized shirt. His head was covered with a mass of curls. "Which episode is this one?" he asked. "The one where the guy dies of cancer?" I didn't know. I was watching Bojack Horseman for the first time, I said. Only then did he notice that I was a new face and waved.

“Steve,” he said.
“Kanan,” I replied.
“I know,” he said.

He wanted to have lunch. Sasha asked him to heat something up.
He asked what was in which box.
Sasha whined, saying just look it up on the pictures that mom sent no.
He asked, “Where?”
She said “Kuriens.” The family group, she said to me. When Steve continued to rattle a lot of boxes in the fridge while sighing and grumbling, Sasha rolled her eyes and went into the kitchen to help him.

I had nothing to say. I only have a brother, much older than me who’s living in the US now, and we barely talk once a week. Here, there was a music to their groans and their whines that was entirely new to me. I was kind of envious that Steve had the power to annoy his sister. With me she was mostly prim and proper, talking in reserved tones. Is that why she didn't want me to come home, and see what she was like on the other side?

"Why don't we eat too?" I asked Sasha. “I’m kind of hungry.”

She said okay, and we moved toward the teak dining table that looked like it was from a different era. Steve was heating a box of something in the microwave. It turned out to be Chicken Alfredo. He asked me if I preferred something else, like lemon rice. I was fine with it. This was how I knew Sasha's mom first, through the food she cooked. I hoped I’d get to see her one day. I didn't want this thing with Sasha to be a temporary phase. But I really couldn't tell what she felt about me, and I didn't want to ask. Asking always ruins things.

But I didn't have anything to ruin with Steve; he was just a guy I had met after all. I asked him what he did. He said he played computer games and streamed them on Twitch. Nice. Was he making a lot of money? Not yet, he said. Maybe some day. What did he play? Valorant. What kind of game was that? FPS. Fantasy. All of his answers were monosyllabic grunts.
Like brother, like sister.
Every time I’d send her a Whatsapp message at the beginning, she would reply with a single sentence. She would always reply, but it felt like I was talking to a chatbot at times. But that's how people respond when they feel like you're interrogating them. Or talking about topics that you couldn't give two shits about.

"I've always wanted to read Murakami. But I didn't know where to start," I told Steve.
"What sort of story are you looking for? Love story? Fantasy? College story?" he asked.
"Anything. I'm not really sure. I don't read that many novels," I said.
"Maybe you should start with a short story then."
"Which one?"
"There's one in that stack over there, with a picture of a monkey on the cover. First Person Singular. It's not his best collection, most of the stories kind of suck, but there's one called With the Beatles. You should read that one."
"Oh, I love the Beatles!"
"It has very little to do with the Beatles. But it's called With the Beatles."
"What's it about?"
"You'll see," he said.

You'll see. So it ran in the family.

Sasha was toying with her pasta. She had separated the chicken pieces into a pile and had eaten only a few pieces of the penne. Her plate looked disgusting, with dollops of white sauce spread in uneven blotches. I asked her if she was okay. Her head was aching and she wanted to lay down for a while. I was kind of glad when she left the table, that the three of us didn't have to keep sitting at the table scrounging for a common topic.

Steve asked if I played FIFA and when I said yes, he turned on the XBOX. I'm not great at it, but I'm not terrible either. I can give someone a good time if they know how to play. Besides, it takes the pressure off the conversation. Steve asked me what Sasha had told me about him. I said, nothing much. I hadn't known her that long and we didn't really talk about her family.

I just knew that their mother had gone to their village in Kerala, and that their father was AWOL most of the time, traveling to Dubai and Mumbai and a few other places, managing some properties and meeting people. I don't know what he did, but I didn't want to probe. Maybe he was a politician, maybe he was a gangster. I would cross that bridge when I came to it. I have this habit of trying to solve all problems at the same time. But this time I wanted to do things differently.

I realized I had zoned out. I asked Steve what he did on the weekends.

He said he played games, mostly. He had a couple of friends, and he went out with them now and then. Most of his friends had left the country, but he hardly felt like even leaving the house. I said he should come drink with me and Sasha sometime. I didn't really mean it. I was trying to be nice. He closed his eyes and ran his hand over his forehead, like he was mowing his unkempt cowlick.

He paused the game, went to the fridge, and asked, "Beer?"

I nodded.

He took a couple of Kingfisher ultras, knocked the cap off them, and came back and sat down next to me.

“Kanan, can I tell you a story?” he asked.

"Does it have something to do with Mr. and Mrs. Kurien?" I asked. I was a bit uncomfortable going into their family history with Sasha not around. I didn’t know if she wanted me hearing this stuff.

He blinked.

"No, not at all. This only has to do with me. And a couple of other people whom nobody else knows… What do you remember of high school physics?” he asked.

“Not much. Wasn’t my strong suit,” I said.

“There was this question they used to ask once in a while. You drop a stone from a high place, and it takes a few seconds to hit the ground. You’ve got to calculate the height of the building from that. Do you remember?”

I nodded.

He pointed upwards. "We have a nice terrace, you know. There are flower pots on all the sides. One guy in this apartment maintains most of the pots. It's his hobby. And everyone else gets to enjoy it for free. We've been here for about eight years now. For the first three years, I used to walk on the terrace every day.
This building isn't very tall. But it's the tallest one around for quite some distance. You get a good breeze. You can see the sun set in the distance, and you can see it reflected off the glass panes of the Hiranandani buildings to the west. Sometimes there are clouds, and it's really nice. Eagles fly about. Bats fly overhead... It used to be really nice. I would walk for about thirty minutes every day.

But when you’re alone on the terrace, sometimes thoughts crop up in your head. There were small fragments of concrete and shards of broken flowerpots on the terrace. I would pick them up and drop them from the top when nobody was looking. Then I would time the fall. How long it took to fall from the top of the terrace to the street. Guess how long it took?”

I shrugged. “Five seconds?”

“Nah. Two seconds. That’s not much, but it isn’t instantaneous either. A two second fall corresponds to approximately twenty meters in height. The terrace was twenty meters away from the floor. You know how big a fall humans can survive? About 8 meters. Ten meters if you’re lucky. If you dropped from twenty meters, you’d be mush. Pure pulp.”

He paused for a second to see the strange expression on my face.

“Sorry, but that’s the kind of stuff you think about when you’re alone on the terrace. At that time, there was construction going on, on a lot across the road from us, to the North. This area used to be empty, but now a lot of people are buying up land around here and building flats. That was one of the buildings. Once the building was constructed, a caretaker and his family moved into the apartment.

There were just three of them. The caretaker and his wife, maybe in their twenties, and their baby. Every evening, around 6, the guy would go somewhere on his bike. The mother would lean over the balcony, holding her baby, and the baby would say bye to its dad.

The building's terrace was level with our apartment's and the baby and I could see each other eye-to-eye across the road. The baby would wave to me at times, encouraged by its mother. And I would wave back. It said something to me in its babytalk, and what it said was lost in the wind. Every evening, the mother would hold the baby in her arms and lean over the balcony, and I started to fear for the baby. Of course it was stupid, she knew how to hold a baby, and she was its mother and cared for it more than I could, but I still felt scared. The father would yell something back to the baby in response, and life would go on."

He sipped his beer. I didn't. I wanted to know where this was going.

"So one day, I had this strange dream,” he said. “I was on the terrace as usual. The clouds were salmon, and there were eleven eagles spiraling in the sky, and there was an amazing breeze flowing from North to South, and it touched the baby on the other roof before it reached me, and I was watching it smile at me across the street. It was just a speck. Small enough that I couldn't hear what it was saying, but not so small that I couldn't make out its pearly-toothed smile. The father stepped out on the street and looked up, and the mother leaned over, saying something to the baby. The baby was leaning over the balcony, from the terrace, four floors above the street."

He sipped his beer.

"She slipped. The baby fell from her hand."

He shot me a terrible look, like he was begging me for forgiveness.

"The instant the baby slipped, I heard a sickening scream from the mother and a cry of surprise from the father, and I put my hands on my ears and I walked away. I didn't look back. I didn't see what happened. I didn't want to know. There was nobody on the terrace. Nobody on any terrace, except me and that mother and that baby.

And I came back, and I locked myself in my room. Outside the locked room, I heard voices of people, screams, and people calling out my name. I heard soft knocks on the door. I pretended I couldn’t hear them and lay with my eyes closed. The knocking got harder and harder, and I suddenly had this uneasy feeling that I had forgotten to lock the door. I sat up in my bed and saw the doorknob slowly twist open… And then I woke up."

I expected him to say something, but it looked like he had finished his story. I didn't know what to say. “What happened to the baby in real life?” I asked.

“Probably nothing,” he said. “Since I had that dream though, I haven’t felt like going to the terrace much. So I really don’t know.”

He looked at me holding my bottle without sipping on it. "You don't have to drink your beer if you don't want to. I'm sorry. This isn't a story you tell to somebody you've just met. But I kind of felt like talking to you." He paused. “Sasha likes you, you know.”

"She talks about me?" I asked.
"No. But she hasn’t cried as much since she started going out with you."
"Sasha cries? About what?"
"She hasn't cried around you?"
"Not even once."
"Huh." He shook his head.

"What are you talking about?" Sasha was standing in the hall with us, tying back her hair with a rubber band. It looked like her headache was gone.

"Nothing, just random stuff."

Steve got up and went back into his room and locked himself in. Sasha asked me if I felt like taking a walk. There was a park nearby, with a lake in the middle. I wasn't really thinking. I just went along with what she was saying.

The park stank of Bangalore filth. Bangalore stinks the same no matter where you go. Divided by areas, united by sewage. Mosquitoes were hovering around the marshy areas where water had stagnated. Middle aged women talking in Tamil walked past us. A boy kept yelling "Saamp saamp saamp saamp" leaning over the fence, while looking at the lake. What he thought was a snake turned out to be a swimming bird with its neck above the water. When it climbed onto a dead tree branch, he grinned and said, "Saamp nahi panchi!2" and ran away. A jogger crossed us twice. I felt Sasha's arms on my bare arm. She was holding my left hand with both hands and leaning on it like she was listening for a heartbeat. She was smiling. I felt a little hot, aware that people were watching us, but I didn't want to interrupt her either. She looked at me and said, "I like your silence. I don't get to hear much of it." I laughed and put my arm around her, still thinking of the falling baby. She had no idea why I was silent, but I didn't want to ruin her illusion. At least, not yet.

We walked back to the apartment and took the lift to the fourth floor.

Just as she was about to turn the key in the lock, I asked her, "Say, can we see the terrace?" She frowned and said, "Okay, sure."

We climbed the flight of steps to the terrace that was barred by a metal door. We opened it and went outside. The terrace was bare concrete, except for a few pots here and there. It was about 6 in the evening, and the sun was already setting. The sky was vermillion, the eagles were there just like Steve had said, and I walked to the corner of the building. I walked back and forth. I was trying to locate the building he had talked about, but I didn't know where to look.

"What are you searching for?" Sasha asked me.
"Nothing, I'm just looking."
She kept staring at me until I caved.
"Steve told me something," I said.
"He told you about that dream of his," she said.
"Yes." I hesitated. "I'm looking for that building."

She stood staring at me for a minute or two, and then walked to a corner that faced the setting sun. There was a vacant lot next to the apartment we were standing on. There was a road next to it. She pointed across the road and said "There. That's where he says he saw it happen."

I looked where she was pointing, but couldn't see anything, only trees.

"Where exactly?"
"There." She repeated.
"But that looks like an empty lot... Did they... Demolish the building or something?" "No. There never was any building," she said. She was looking at the spot. Her face was half-turned away from me and I thought I saw her eyes shimmering. But when she looked at me again, they were dry.

“I’ll tell you about Steve some other time,” she said.

I didn't say anything. I just looked across the street at the empty plot of land where the building didn't stand, thinking about how Steve had completely believed every word he’d told me. I wished the sky would stay orange, but pretty soon it was dark, and we had to go in.

Story notes:

Thanks for reading. If you got to the end, I’m curious what you feel about this one. This was a very hard story for me to write, because every time I read through, it bummed me out. The original version of this story was much more dark and bleak. I didn’t have the courage to put that one out, but it exists.

Kanan and Sasha will be back in another story.

If you enjoyed reading this, you might like Family Affair (part of The Elephant Vanishes) and With the Beatles (part of First Person Singular), both short stories by Haruki Murakami.

I’ll be posting one story every day for the next 28 days. To get them via email:

Subscribe now

You can read my other stories here.

Kafka’s father had wanted him to be a doctor. The most he could manage was a compounder. In that part of the country, a compounder was more than a nurse but less than a doctor (as Kafka’s father never tired of reminding him), and he was the one handing out pills, preparing salves, and lending a hand in the Emergency Room when patients were rolled in at high speed. Saving lives was his job. But he wasn’t thinking about his job on the way to work. He was thinking about a question his friend had asked him the previous night when they had been drinking together.

The question was whether Compounder Kafka would jump into a pond on his way to work, if he saw a child drowning in the water. Kafka's answer was, Yes, of course.

His friend tried to make the question more complicated. He asked what if there were other people around? Would Kafka still jump in, or would he wait to see what the other people would do? What if he just couldn't afford to be late to work that day? What if it was the child of someone he hated? What if he didn't know how deep the pond was? Kafka's answers were, no matter what the situation, he would jump in instantly and save the child because a child's life was no joke and there was no point in waiting or keeping a job or wondering if help would arrive, because it's difficult to sleep at night if you let a child die before your eyes, even if it’s the child of someone you hate.

Then his friend said that jumping into a pond would get Kafka all wet and maybe even give him a cold. It would be an inconvenience, a deviation from his carefully structured life. Would he still do it? “Ridiculous.” What was a few minutes of inconvenience compared to saving a child's life? The moment Kafka said this, his friend had given him a wide grin and said he was glad Kafka saw his point, because children in Africa were dying of Malaria right at that moment. By the same logic that Kafka had used a couple of minutes ago, Kafka should donate some money to a campaign that Dostoevsky was raising funds through. A small donation would be an inconvenience, sure, but Kafka surely saw that a child's life was more important?

Kafka hated drinking vodka with his friend Dostoevsky for this reason. It wasn’t about the donation, but he didn’t like these gotcha moments. He should have been more careful when Dostoevsky started the conversation, because he always set him up for traps like this. Kafka denied the equivalence of those claims. If he let a drowning child die before his eyes, he would feel personally responsible. If it was a child in Africa, then he wouldn’t. That was just the way he thought. Dostoevsky took that personally. He said that Kafka was a hypocrite and that if he ever saw a drowning child, Kafka would let the child drown and walk away if there was nobody around to see him. He said that Kafka only talked the talk but didn't walk the walk.

Kafka was still in a bad mood driving to the hospital that morning when he saw a child drowning in a pond by the road. He felt happy that his chance was here, and he felt guilty for feeling happy because seeing a drowning child shouldn't give anyone happiness, but then he thought it was alright to feel happy because he was going to save this child's life anyway. He slowed his motorcycle to a stop.

Kafka jumped into the pond without looking to his right or to his left, grabbed the child around the waist, and waded to the banks of the pond where a skein of geese cackled and ran away angry that he had interrupted their mating. The child was unharmed but wet from head to toe. It was a boy. His hair had stuck flat to the top of his head and he had swallowed some water, and the floor of the pond had been just deep enough to drown him, as if the pond had been designed by an evil god for this very purpose; but good thing that Kafka was around because the boy survived anyway. He expected the boy to thank him and inform his parents, or tell the local newspaper about Kafka’s bravery, but on second thought, he doubted this would happen. He looked around this time and saw that there was not a soul in the vicinity. Only God and this boy and Compounder Kafka himself knew that he had done this good deed. He couldn’t stay long to talk to the child as he was running late.

Kafka went home, wiped himself dry, and changed into different scrubs because obviously he couldn't go to the hospital drenched in water. He wanted to tell his wife the story but she had already left for work, and his children had gone to elementary school. But he could at least tell Dostoevsky when he met him next time at the pub, that he didn’t just talk the talk.

The doctors at the hospital didn't really mind that Kafka was late for work this once, because he was usually on time and he kept to himself. They also liked the strange stories he told them sometimes though they didn’t always understand them. He told a ward boy and a nurse and the receptionist (and the one who replaced her during the evening shift) what had happened that morning. The one at the evening shift thought he was a really brave man and a good person for doing this job. So at least one person saw the value of Kafka jumping into the pond when nobody was around. As a matter of course, Kafka also assisted in saving some lives that day, wheeling in some patients and helping a doctor sterilize some scalpels for a surgery. But another patient who had eaten rat poison two days prior also passed away that afternoon, making the day just like any other day at the hospital. The rescue of the drowning child was the only highlight in his lackluster life. He told his wife the story at dinner that night, and she was sufficiently impressed, and he went to sleep a happy man.

The next day when Kafka saw the child drowning in the same pond one more time, he was surprised. He looked around twice this time to see if Dostoevsky was responsible for this inane prank.

But nobody seemed to be around, and the child seemed to be struggling, and he jumped in one more time, grabbed the child, and pulled him to the bank. The child struggled more this time around, and when they reached the bank, Kafka realized it was a different boy this time who kicked him in the stomach before he ran away without looking back. This left Kafka a little dejected, but he went back home again, changed, and went to the hospital.

He got chewed out a little this time because someone else had had to sub for him when he was needed at the ER, and he didn't want to justify himself by bringing up the excuse of saving a drowning child, because saving a life at the hospital was more important to the doctors than saving a life at a pond they could not see. Besides, who would believe his excuse? He only told the night shift receptionist the story this time, and she said that he had already told her the story yesterday, and he said no this was a different child, and she just looked at him with a frown as if he was mad, and he stopped trying to explain.

The third time it happened, it was a girl in the pond. He was doubly careful when he rescued her, with an explanation ready for whoever passed by, that he wasn't up to any funny business. But there was nobody around to witness his rescuing or to question his motives, and the girl thanked him very properly and said her name was Josefine and walked away down the road while fanning her frock like she was curtsying to an English Lord. Kafka didn't even bother going home this time and he was quite a picture when he showed up at the hospital drenched. He had a spare set of scrubs in the hospital into which he changed himself after drying, and he didn't speak a word to anybody. But he could feel all their looks on his barely dry body.

That night he met Dostoevsky at the pub again and told him about what was happening.

Dostoevsky thought Kafka was joking in retaliation for the original rugpull that he had executed. It wasn’t the first time Kafka was telling him stories like this. Kafka once told him that he woke up as a bug one morning and his family didn’t let him out of his room and thirty minutes into the story, he had admitted it was a dream. Another night, Kafka claimed to have gone riding piggy back round the city on the back of a headless man, but it turned out that he had just been drunk and the headless man was just Kafka’s coat on a rake. So Dostoevsky was waiting for him to clarify what he meant by rescuing a drowning child every day.

But Kafka didn't clarify.

He told the story and he asked Dostoevsky what he thought was happening, and Dostoevsky swore that he had nothing to do with it, and Kafka believed him. But because Dostoevsky didn’t believe him, he wanted Dostoevsky to accompany him to the spot the next day to see for himself. They agreed to meet at the Mondheim crossing and go to the spot together on Kafka's motorcycle. Dostoevsky actually suggested the brilliant idea of showing up a little earlier than usual. Maybe they could see how all these children were falling into the pond.

Kafka couldn't sleep that night. He stayed up typing on his typewriter, writing up this bizarre story and wondering if some magazine would publish it if he mailed it to them. Then he threw the manuscript into the fireplace before going to sleep at 3 because he hated how this story was turning out. It had no logic to it.

A little sleep-deprived and tired, Kafka picked up Dostoevsky at Mondheim and they drove to the pond 45 minutes before his usual time (he was very punctual and you could set a clock by his routine), but he was miffed to find that there was already a drowning child – a boy again – in the pond. "What on Earth!" he exclaimed and ran to the pond and jumped in and dragged the boy out, a little roughly, holding him by his collar with little regard for the bruises he would cause on his delicate body. This boy was at no fault for the crimes (misfortunes?) of his juvenile predecessors, but Kafka was still angry and confused. He wanted an explanation and he wasn't going to let this one run away. "Who is throwing all of you into the pond?" he screamed, and the boy turned white and started crying, and Dostoevsky made him let the boy go and said Kafka should be ashamed of talking to a child this way. When they turned around, the boy was gone, and Kafka told Dostoevsky, there, it was real, and there, he had jumped into the water without a thought just like he had said at the pub. Dostoevsky admitted that he was wrong and Kafka was right and said they would meet at the pub that night where he would make an impassioned speech over vodka about wrongly doubting his friend, but now he had to excuse himself, for he had to meet a girl he deeply loved to unite her with another man she loved (who was not himself). Kafka fully understood the importance of this assignment and let Dostoevsky go.

In his excitement, Kafka hadn't brought a change of clothes, and it was too late to go back home, so he went to the hospital in his wet scrubs and tried to get a change of clothes from a compounder friend, but the friend ignored his requests, and when Kafka entered the operation theater dripping wet, the doctor threw a sponge at him and shooed him away as if he was a mangy dog. The doctor later informed Kafka that he was being suspended for careless behavior in such a highly sensitive environment. When Kafka tried explaining his predicament, the doctor stared at him for a minute or two and told him to go see a psychiatrist first.

The next day, Kafka was resigned to stay at home, and because he didn't want to tell his wife about being suspended, he took his motorcycle and left like he was going to the hospital as usual. The thought struck him that a child could be drowning even if it was his day off, and he hurried to the pond. He was right. A girl was drowning again. He jumped in, saved her, and watched her walk away without even attempting to talk to her. He was tired at this point and just wanted to go home.

Sometime around the afternoon, the thought struck him that if he couldn't find out how these children were falling in, maybe he could do one better and stop them from falling in. A friend of his had a farmhouse with a lot of useless lumber, some of which Kafka borrowed along with his set of tools. With Dostoevsky riding pillion, Kafka drove back to the pond around afternoon intending to set up a fence. There was another child floundering in the pond, and Dostoevsky volunteered to jump in this time saying Kafka had saved enough children for one day, but Kafka said that Dostoevsky could help with the fence if he really wanted to contribute and he should leave the child-rescuing to the expert. He jumped in and saved the child, and not wanting to go back home and waste any more time, he built a fence around the pond soaking wet, while Dostoevsky pretended to help. The completed fence was a crude piece of work. It wasn’t unsabotageable but it would definitely keep a child from jumping into the pond. There were no gates, no holes, and it was impenetrable.

Dostoevsky wanted a drink after all this tiring work, but Kafka was already beginning to feel his throat going sore in the evening breeze and he promised to buy him a round later.

When Kafka woke up in the morning, he was running a terrible fever. But he couldn’t stay in bed, because he wanted to know if his fence had worked. His wife asked him in a tone he hadn’t heard her use before why he hadn't mentioned his suspension from the hospital. Muttering that he would explain everything later, he zoomed to the pond on his motorcycle, and he saw a small crowd gathered there, probably because Dostoevsky had been running his mouth at the pub the last night. But this time he was legitimately scared that he might lose his mind. Because from the high road, Kafka could see past the fence, and despite the fence being solid and undisturbed, a boy was flailing in the water.

Kafka wondered why these people weren't saving that child already, but he had no time to waste, so he ran to the pond and dismantled a few planks and jumped in and did what he always did. When the child got out, he immediately ran to a woman who embraced him and she nodded with a smile at Kafka before walking away briskly. But before he could follow the woman to admonish her about her terrible parenting, another gentleman whom Kafka recognized from the pub told him regretfully, stroking his moustache, that Dostoevsky had been arrested the last night by a bunch of imposing guards who said that he had been talking too much. The gentleman thought that Dostoevsky would be soon going before a firing squad, and he thought Kafka should know about his friend.

Kafka couldn't save Dostoevsky, and he didn't know whether he was actually saving anyone at the hospital. But he could keep saving these children. Were these children falling into the pond or were they sprouting from the pond? He set up camp one night to find out, but every time he showed up at the pond, there was a drowning child already present for him to rescue. As long as he stayed around, none would pop up, but even if he so much as slept and woke up, there would be one flailing in the water.

The hospital fired Kafka because they didn’t want to be involved with an employee who was engaged in the perpetual circus of rescuing drowning victims. Now Kafka was free all the time. But he wasn’t really free. The way Kafka saw it, he had a choice. He could avoid going to the pond ever again and hope that no more drowning children showed up in his absence. Or he could show up every day and pull out a drowning child. His wife thought he had to take the first option while his conscience would only let him take the second. “But what about feeding our children?” asked his wife. Since he didn’t have any answer to give her, he thought it was perfectly reasonable that she took the children and left.

So, they say Kafka wanders around the town, walking through the nearby hamlets, sleeping on the streets, and living as one among the street urchins while coughing a hacking tubercular cough, rescuing the children who show up whenever he visits the pond every day. He could choose not to save them, but what's a minor inconvenience when weighed against a child's life?

Dostoevsky told me this story over a bottle of vodka one winter evening at the same pub Kafka and he used to drink. Kafka wasn’t speaking with him any more. He was upset that Dostoevsky didn't join him in his noble pursuit despite being given a reprieve from death by the firing squad, and while Dostoevsky understood Kafka’s feelings, he didn’t feel compelled to change them. Dostoevsky had occasionally thought about writing down this story and sending it out for publication. He dismissed the idea thinking it would be too outlandish, and that nobody would ever believe it happened. But he swore that the pond was there and the children were there, and he could take me with him the next morning to see Kafka pull out a child from the water.

I really wish I had taken him up on his offer. But I had a train to catch that night, and I've never gone back since.

Story notes:

I was messing with Peter Singer’s “Drowning child experiment” a long time back. It reminded me of Kafka for some reason, and I wrote this story much much later.

Thanks for reading! I’ll be writing one story every day for the next 29 days. If you liked this one, consider subscribing.

Subscribe now

You can read my previous stories here.

Sssssup buddy,

Been a while since I called you from the streets of Bangalore because the streets are flooded and stinking of garbage, so I’ve been sitting at home for the last three days – except for the day before yesterday, when I went to the gym and got my sandals repaired on the road, while waiting on a broken plastic chair and getting my blood sucked by ten thousand mosquitoes. The cobbler said it’ll take five minutes. It ended up taking forty-five minutes. At the end, I asked him what his name was and I smiled when he told me. I judged myself for that little interaction. I don’t know why I had to try so hard to get him to like me. Maybe he reminded me of home because he was speaking in Tamil and I wanted to manufacture some nostalgia.

Today I woke up with my biceps aching like crazy, and I automatically diagnosed myself with dengue. I started to prepare what I would do when I was admitted to the hospital for low platelet count. Anyway, it’s been a few hours since then, and I don’t think I have dengue. It’s just me being a hypochondriac as usual, with Google’s help.

I was walking on the terrace and watching the sky (it’s beautiful! Golden light through gray clouds and the sky is shimmering in so many shades of blue. Wish you were there but you’ll get to see it anyway when you come here next week. Hopefully), and while walking, I was thinking about what you said to me the other day. You know, that you think I’m so cool and you want to be more like me, and when I asked what about me, you said that I quit my job and do the things I want and the things I like without worrying about what other people think.

My first reaction was to type “What bullshit. I don’t do the things I want or like.” But in that split second gap between typing that message and sending it, I realized that you had a point. I do give myself permission to do the things I want. In fact, not being able to swallow discomfort and do things I don’t really believe in is more of a majboori1 than a choice. To someone looking in from the outside, this must seem like a very bold life (or maybe brash, or plain stupid). It must at least look brave and adventurous. And that’s true… and yet I feel very differently on the inside. I feel shaky and nervous and filled with longing for some place that’s always arriving but just not here. I feel like I’m doing the things I want without getting the things I need, and my needs are becoming frustrating goals. Why is that?

You said you want to be more like me,
and I am already me,
so why is it that I’m what you want to be
and still not happy?

Why do I want to be someone else, something else, somewhere else that’s just out of my grasp? I wish sometimes that I could look at myself with the same kindness that you see me with.

I think I have part of the answer. I think I feel like a fraud. You know, when I write my Five Slices newsletter, I sometimes felt like I’m writing things that I don’t really care about, or things that aren’t important while there’s so much misery on the outside. People wrote in saying they really like what I write. But I was still bothered that I was writing about some story about some scam footballer while there was a war going on in Kashmir and people’s houses were burning – but I also couldn’t write about the war because I didn’t know anything about what was going on. It felt insincere to just say “Oh my heart goes out to all those suffering people” because I felt that if I said it, I had to do something about it. But I knew I wouldn’t. I would just sit here in my 2BHK apartment feeling sorry for those people and accepting that we lived in a fucked-up society. I didn’t know how I could empathize with the tourists who got shot and talk critically of the war. (If intelligence is the ability to hold two contradicting emotions at once, I’m Jim Carrey from Dumb and Dumber. But there’s a chance I’ll get better.)

And what was the point of talking about it? It’s not like the 200 people abroad reading my newsletter or all my friends could immediately respond to what I said, pulling off some policy decision that would stop the war. I’d probably just ruin someone’s day with them thinking: “Who does he think he is, making all these proclamations on his newsletter? And does he even know anything about what’s really going on?” And they’d be right. I don’t know shit. There’s just too much to know and too much to fix, and though I know it’s not my job, when I’m writing about things like ideas and scams and the publishing industry, it feels like I could be doing more with my life, but I just don’t know what to do.

I also chuck all my Indian references and inside jokes and things that make my writing personal and niche, because I’m conscious that most people reading the newsletter won’t know what I mean. I’m sitting in Bangalore and aspiring to be a global citizen, and I’m doing it not by owning who I am but by erasing my identity. It feels like I’m selling out, you know. I feel like how Abhishek Upmanyu felt working in that oil refinery in Talwandi Sabu.

I think it goes deeper than that. I read newsletters by people on Substack who write about their thought process and writing struggles and lay out all their emotions on the page. I enjoy what they write, but I feel like I don’t have the permission to do that, because these folks have done something, they’ve built an audience, proven they have what it takes to do something of value, and all of this philosophy is something they do on the side. When I do something like that without “earning” it, I feel like I’m being an imposter. Yet who’s going to give me a certificate saying I’ve arrived and have earned the permission? (Is all of this just a strategy to avoid the real work of writing good stuff and getting it published?)

I think this is one more case of me being hard on myself.

It’s funny. Instead of thinking: “Hey, I lived in a small mountain town, went to college, and worked as a software engineer, and I had this amazing bunch of friends I lived with, and I got to write a movie script, and I got to build a company with a close friend, and I got to make a living through writing…”,

I think: “I’ve done all of these things, so I should do something using all those experiences instead of lingering on them.”

And tomorrow if I pull off something cooler, I’ll turn even that gold medal into a millstone around my neck. I’m somehow reminded of that scene from Tom and Jerry where Tom is playing an impossible tune on the piano over and over again before collapsing of exhaustion. I don’t know if you’d remember it, I watched it when I was a kid. But the strange part is that the moments I felt most alive in my life had nothing to do with what I achieved. They were moments where I felt a real connection with people, and I think I’m chasing that feeling so hard by using attention as a proxy.

Maybe it’s also this feeling that all of this nonsensical overthinking will go “waste” if I don’t turn it into art – that suffering isn’t valid unless it’s turned into beauty, like Kafka or Dostoevsky or Salinger did. But I don’t really believe that, do I, because it’s not a standard I apply to anyone else except myself… I’m perfectly fine listening to anyone else overthink without making something of that overthinking. So is the solution down to the cliched advice of “love yourself more”?

No answers for you today, only questions.

There’s something comforting about writing this as a letter to you, instead of a journal entry scrawled in one of my notebooks. It feels like some day, this might give you just a little more solace to hear your big brother’s voice when you read it again, instead of becoming a page full of ink stowed away in a cupboard.

Love yaaa,
Adhithya Anna

Context: I wrote this letter to my cousin A whom I wrote about here. Making this public because she thought it might be something others could see themselves in.

If you liked hearing me rant and ramble, consider subscribing.