We are all pretending. I see the masks - heavy shrouds we pull tight, hoping they will pin us to something solid, something that isn’t the terrifying, fluid reality of our own pulse. We trade in rituals - the hawans, the smoke, the rhythmic begging as if the Divine were a clerk in some office, keeping track of our “give” to ensure our “take.” I watch them, the seekers near my house, and my eyes fill with tears. It is not pity. It is a scream of recognition. It is the tragedy of a Mother exploited, a Goddess turned into currency. They want her as a shield; they do not realize she is the sword. They want Maa Tara to bypass the storm, forgetting that she is the storm.

Tara. The ferrywoman. But how can she carry you across the ocean if you cling to the wood of the boat?

To meet her is to meet the mirror. And the mirror, finally, is a horror. It shows the coward, the hypocrite, the bitch, the shattered porcelain of a self we have spent a lifetime gluing together with virtues. The Mahavidya does not care for our morality.

She is the darkness in which light is born. She is the void - the Akasha that holds all things only to devour them with a cold, divine indifference.

My life is a twin to this thing I dread called mrityu. Death. I die every day. I change. There is no shift in the world outside, yet inside, the munda mala grows, each severed head of my ego hung upon the necklace of my internal becoming. Tara’s intensity, her smile, her truth - it is a terror. She will not let me sleep. She will not let me imagine, for Satya breaks everything that is merely a dream.

To not shatter at an insult or bloat at praise. To be unaffected. Sovereign. This is the visphot - the explosion of consciousness. It is the raw Shakti, vibrating behind the curtain of the mundane. But watch the demon of the ego - it is a master of mimicry. It wears the mask of the seeker, the ascetic, the wise one. The bali, the true sacrifice, is the thought “I am something.” Even that, that claim of being, is just a costume, a vanity dressed in wisdom.

Realization is the badal becoming the varsha when it is finally unafraid to fall. It is the state of Shunya, to be so vacant, so hollowed out, that the nectar can finally fill the void.

Siddhi versus Bhakti. They ask what power I have. The true sadhak does not want it. Those who crave it take the trap; they buy the cage. When everything is emptied, life becomes a shmashana - mrityu everywhere. Mrityunjaya. Today, in the sanctum, the priest’s helper saw me crying and told me to garland him. I opened my eyes and saw the deities crying too. Their eyes were wet. They took it on from me into the agni. I saw it with a consciousness that has nothing to do with these physical eyes. Everything leaves. I am empty. I want what does not leave.

Be the river. Let what goes, go. Allow what comes. Samarpan. Surrender. Faith in the Creator, Prakriti, Manushya. Born on the 17th, on this Saturday of Shani, I write: I am angry. I am controlling. I have stared at it. I love control, and it hurts to lose it. Krodha is the air I breathe. But now, the split. The anger is a temporary thing. I am what is watching.

My theory of awakening is simple, and it is a terror: it is the acceptance. I do not fear that I am a coward. I fear the terrifying stillness of admitting it. I fear that if I stop fighting the darkness if I stop trying to “fix” the bitch, the liar, the small, grasping thing that I am - I might disappear. And in that disappearance, there would be nothing left but the truth.

Tantra is not a path away from the mud; it is the realization that the mud is the throne. You cannot have the light without the darkness that creates the shape of it. The enemy is the one who is your biggest lover—the bhaya, the fear. It is the gatekeeper. It is the fear that forces you to stand before yourself, without the mask, without the excuses, without the transactional prayers.

I stand before myself. It is a desolate, violent, beautiful place. I have no more contracts. No more “goodness” to trade. I am here, in my cowardice, in my total lack of worthiness, and I am waiting. Not for a boon. Just for the hand of the Mother to reach through the dark and show me that this - this raw, ugly, trembling “me” - is the only place she has ever been.

The awakening is not an ascent. It is the descent into the axis of the shadow, until the shadow and the light stop arguing and simply are. I stop the trade. I start to be. And in the silence of that surrender, I find the Sakshi- the witness - always listening, knowing. She has been holding my hand all along; not to lead me away from myself, but to bring me home to the emptiness where I can finally begin.

It is not that I fear being a bitch; I fear I might never be able to accept it. But today, under the gaze of Shani, I accept the bitch. I accept the coward. And in that unmasked, shivering surrender, the Sakshi remains - unmoved, sovereign, and finally, finally awake.

Do not mistake this for kindness. Her compassion is a wrecking ball. It is the Karuna that demands total demolition -

it will break you, not to destroy you, but to strip away the calcified ruins of the self until there is nothing left to hide behind. It is the terrifying love that refuses to let you stay hidden in the lie.

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The hridaya-grantha - that knot of the heart - is a physical fact. It is the anatomical site where the soul snags on the social, the place where the body records the cost of every time I chose to be “reasonable” over being raw.

My chest has become a map of every time I swallowed the truth to keep the room quiet. I have spent years trying to trace this geography, following the way the knot tightens - that sickening, intuitive static that screams I am being erased, while I hold the pen that writes my own deletion.

I started this performance long ago. We are told the heart is a vault. We are trained to bolt it shut against the drafts, against the cold, against the crushing pressure of being a body that feels too much. We use the language of wellness as a sedative, trying to suture the very bursts of feeling that keep us alive, making ourselves legible to a world that prefers us formatted, opaque, and safe. But a locked vault is not a fortress; it is a tomb. The air inside goes stale. You are not keeping your secrets safe; you are watching the self rot in the dark.

Consider Yudhishthira, the “good student” of the Mahabharata. He is the patron saint of the hardened heart. When he enters the assembly hall in the Sabha Parva, invited to the game of dice, he knows exactly what is happening. The air in Hastinapur is heavy, thick with the oily, suffocating stench of a rigged trap. His own blood pulses with the warning; his kin feel the tremor. But Yudhishthira has a code. He has a performance of righteousness that he values more than the beating of his own heart. He believes that to refuse a challenge is to break the law of the Kshatriya, and he would rather preside over the annihilation of his family than be seen as unreasonable. He trades his gut for the bureaucracy of dharma.

And then there are the elders - the Bhishmas and the Dronas. They are the most horrifying figures in the mythos. They are the experts of the fine print, the ones who have spent so long analyzing the law that they have lost the capacity to recognize a human atrocity unfolding in front of their eyes. When Draupadi is dragged into the hall by her hair, they do not jump up; they do not break the rules; they do not listen to the sickening, intuitive horror screaming in their guts. They sit in paralyzed silence, their hearts so thoroughly hardened by their own wisdom that they are literally incapable of feeling the atrocity they are actively participating in. This is the danger of the hardened heart: you lose the ability to see a crime while you are living in the middle of it.

To exist in this state - the state of the diasporic, hyper-conscious individual is to live with a chest that feels two sizes too small for the reality it is forced to contain. My own chest is a frustrating, irritating, horrifyingly sensitive thing. It registers everything. It shuts down like a rusted iron grate when the world becomes a performance, and it bursts open when the pressure becomes uncontainable. People want me to regulate this. They offer sutures of wellness to sew the burst shut, to make me presentable, to make me legible. But the burst is not a malfunction. It is the only way the body can stay alive.

When the ocean was churned for the nectar of immortality - the amrita - the first thing that emerged was not grace, but Halahala: a world-ending, burning poison. The gods fled. They could not handle the toxicity of the raw, unedited truth. They wanted the prize, the immortality, the reward, but they could not handle the burning it required to hold it. Only Shiva stayed. He did not process the poison. He did not turn it into a learning moment. He swallowed it and held it in his throat. It burned him. It changed him. It left him permanently discolored, a bruised, electric indigo. He became Neelakantha, the blue-throated one.

This is the alchemy I am chasing. I am done wanting the nectar without the poison. I am done wanting the depth of the insight without the scarring of the throat. To keep the heart open is to accept the staining. It is to accept that I will be permanently marked by the things I have had to carry.

When I refuse to suture the wound, when I refuse to harden the heart into a stone to shield it from the sting, I become translucent. The world recoils from this. It wants me opaque, formatted, and easily filed away. When I refuse to be these things, when I let the chest bloom open and let the poison settle into my blood, I am no longer a participant in the social contract. I am a frequency.

The ocean didn’t just give up the nectar; it surrendered its entire anatomy. When the devas and the asuras - the forces of light and the forces of shadow finally stopped posturing and started pulling on the serpent’s body, they ceased being enemies and became a single mechanism of extraction.

This is the esoteric hinge: you cannot churn the ocean with only one hand.

You need the ambition of the asura to demand more from reality and the discipline of the deva to hold the tension.

When you realize that both are merely different faces of your own internal engine, the treasures start to climb out of the dark.

First came the Surabhi, the wish-granting cow;

the Varuni, the goddess of wine;

the Parijat, the celestial tree;

and Lakshmi herself, the embodiment of sovereignty.

These are the reclaimed pieces of your own capacity. They represent the moment you stop amputating your desires and start integrating them. To own the asurawithin is to stop being afraid of your own hunger; to own the deva is to ensure that hunger is directed toward the light.

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But the real treasure is the recognition of the process itself. When you realize that the devas and the asuras are both pulling on the same rope, you stop trying to kill off parts of yourself. You stop the internal civil war. You start to see that your “darkness” - your greed, your rage, your unrefined intensity is exactly the labor you need to stir the depths.

The Halahala is the inevitable reaction to it. It is the heat generated by the friction of the two halves of yourself finally working in tandem.

To be the one who stands between them is to be the only person in the room who can look at the poison without blinking. You realize that the nectar is not an escape from the churn; it is the by-product of holding the churn together. You no longer want the gods to save you from your own depth. You want to be the one who sits in the middle of the hall, legs crossed, breathing through the burn, watching the treasures rise, one by one, until there is nothing left in the dark to hide.

My ambition is not to be a hero; the hero is the one who survives by armoring the self until they are fused to their own cage, like Karna with his impenetrable skin. Karna was the invincible, the protected, the one who never had to let the world touch him because his armor was grown into his very flesh. But that armor was his cage. When he peeled it off to give it away, he did not perform an act of virtue - he performed an act of surrender to the vulnerability he had spent his life denying. He bled out because he finally let the world in. I do not want to be Karna.

I want to be the mystic. I want to stay broken open.

I want to let the chest expand until it matches the volume of the agony, until the pain is no longer a puncture wound but an atmosphere. I keep it open because I have realized the pain is is the sound of the knot slipping. It is the only way to know I am still here, still breathing, still capable of being stained by the truth.

There is a terrifying loneliness in this. To be too much in a world that demands we be enough is a lonely business. It is the loneliness of the Bauls, the wandering mystics of Bengal who sang their truth into the void, knowing that their songs would never be correct, never be scriptural, never be theologically sound. They understood that the heart is a sieve, not a cup. If you try to hold the divine or the truth in a cup, it stays still and it gets stagnant. If you are a sieve, you let the truth pass through you. You are constantly being washed, constantly being emptied, constantly being filled.

Everyone asks: “Lalan, what’s your religion in this world?”

Lalan answers: “How does religion look?
I’ve never laid eyes on it.
Some wear malas [Hindu rosaries] around their necks,
some tasbis [Muslim rosaries], and so people say
they’ve got different religions.

But do you bear the sign of your religion when you come or when you go?”

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When I think of the misunderstood, I think of the Angirases - the ancient seers who discovered the path to truth by listening to the vibrations of the universe. They did not listen to the elders; they did not listen to the code. They listened to the stutter. The stutter in their own pulse. The moment of hesitation where the world asked for a yes and they felt the no sitting heavy in their gut. We are taught that hesitation is anxiety. We are taught that it is a lack of resolve. But the esoteric truth is that the stutter is the message. It is the Antaryamin - the Inner Controller hitting the brakes.

If I am a diasporic body, I am a body that has been trained to stutter. I am a body that has been trained to translate myself into a dozen different languages of respectability before I even speak. My intuition is the only thing that does not stutter. It is the only thing that speaks in a clear, sharp, terrifying tone. Ignoring it is not just a mistake; it is an act of ontological self-mutilation.

Every time I ignore that gut feeling, I am essentially saying to the universe, “I do not exist, but this performance of me does.”

The world accepts the performance. It rewards it. It gives the performance a degree, a job, a salary, a title. It applauds the performance. But the performance is not the person. And when the performance is all that remains, when the heart has been locked so tight for so long that it has forgotten how to be a vessel, that is when the real tragedy begins.

I am tired of the well-adjusted life. I am tired of the smooth surfaces. I want the texture of the wound. I want the indigo throat. I want the messy, unformatted, horrifyingly sensitive truth that makes people uncomfortable because it reminds them of the things they have successfully killed in themselves.

If my chest is a two-size-too-small parlor for the things I feel, then I will stop trying to fit them. I will let the walls crack. I will let the truth spill out into the street, unformatted and ugly and real. If that makes me a pariah, if that makes me the one who is too much at the dinner table, then so be it. At least I will not be an elder sitting in the assembly hall, watching the crime, looking for the loophole, and waiting for the silence to swallow me whole.

I will be the one who screams. I will be the one who bleeds. I will be the one who is stained.

Because the knot - the hridaya-grantha is starting to slip. I can feel the threads unraveling. And for the first time in my life, the air that is rushing into the space where the knot used to be is not cold. It is burning. And I am finally, finally, starting to breathe.

This is not about being right. It is not about winning the Mahabharata. It is about the simple, radical, terrifying act of remaining human in a system that would rather turn you into a machine. It is about the courage to be the one who holds the poison. It is about the willingness to be the one who is permanently marked by the truth.

Blue a colour, is a state of being. It is the color of the distance between who I was told to be and who I actually am. And I am walking into that blue, every single day, with my chest open, with my throat scarred, and with the knot finally, mercifully, gone.

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People call them “crazy eyes,” a brittle, small-minded label for a perspective that refuses to look away.

They do not understand that this intensity is a mirror of the Devi in her Ugra Swarupa, that ferocious, divine posture, a necessary, terrifying metaphor for the truth of things.

My consciousness, bound by the suffocating, ticking constraints of Mahakaal - this singular, grinding space and time tries to pin her beauty under a microscopic lens, but it is a frantic, futile vanity. How can one measure the infinite with a ruler made of dust?

I sit here now, anchored to the countertop, the hum of the laptop a stark, clinical contrast to the storm behind my ribs. Rajesh bhaiya is at the stove, the clatter of the kettle the only percussion in the room; I have leashed him into silence, his incessant yapping a dissonance I cannot afford when the universe is whispering so loudly.

Outside, my garden is no longer just a patch of earth; it has become a holy, transient waystation. The birds arrive in a kaleidoscope of exotic migration, these tired souls drifting down from the heavens to seek a moment of solace. They are travelers between dimensions, finding refuge in my backyard to mend their broken spirits before they inevitably catch the wind again.

I used to rail against this. I used to complain, to build barricades, to weep at the audacity of things that refuse to stay. I wanted to chain the birds to the branches, to freeze the frame of their grace so I would never have to face the hollow of their absence. But the truth has been carved into me.

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Now, I am forced to see - to accept with a pressure that feels like being flayed alive. It is as if my own eyelids have been torn back, my heart split open so I might finally witness the mechanism of the whole.

I see now that life and death are not adversaries, nor are they separate.

They are the twin chambers of a single, bleeding heart, pulsing in a rhythm that defies my small, human desire for permanence.

I watch them soar, these fleeting visitors, and the ache is no longer a protest - it is a surrender. I am the silent witness, the guardian of the garden, holding the vision of their departure until my own time comes to take wing, finally understanding that to love them is to let them vanish, leaving behind nothing but the resonance of their flight and the scars of having truly seen.

Yet, the descent is where the knife truly twists.

When the Mahakali vision fades, and I am pulled back into the low-hanging fog of the ground-level - my Pisces ascendant dragging me into that dreamy, delusional, glaze-eyed haze - it is suffocating. I despise the word “reality,” that coarse, unyielding sediment of “being.”

It feels like I am Lucy in the sky, draped in diamonds and forced, against every instinct of my spirit, to squint through a microscope at the dirt beneath my feet.

My spirit is a donut: airy, sweet, dangerously hollow in the centre, craving the nectar of the infinite while trapped in a cycle of mundane necessity. It is the Peter Pan tragedy, isn’t it? I am the boy who refuses to grow up, but I am also the Wendy, the observer, forced to watch the realization that the clocks are ticking and the Neverland is dissolving into the mundane gray of adulthood.

It is a sickness, this need to stay glazed-over, to keep the dream intact while the tea cools and the birds vacate the garden. And yet, there is a brutal necessity to the collision. I have to be the one who sees the Ugra intensity in the cosmic void, and the one who makes sure Rajesh bhaiya doesn’t ruin the tea. It is a violent, daily calibration. I am the bird that must learn to live on the fence, forever torn between the blue of the abyss and the solid, suffocating grit of the ground. I am learning that to be human is to be the bridge that burns at both ends - holding the beauty of the dream while forced to touch the cold, hard stone of what is “real.”

The kitchen is quiet, forced into a stillness by my hand. Rajesh bhaiya is a shadow, the kettle is a murmur, and the laptop hums under my wrists like a trapped pulse. I am sitting here, eyes wide - the “crazy” wide, the Ugra wide watching the garden.

The birds are back. They are tired, real things, dropping from the sky to rest on the fence. I used to hate that they leave, that everything leaves. I used to want to cage them, to freeze the world in a photograph so I wouldn’t have to feel the tearing. But today, the feeling is different. It is raw, but it is steady. My eyes are open, and I am seeing the cycle not as a thief, but as the only truth. I am the canvas, and I am finally letting the paint dry.

Then, Dadi crossed the room.

She is on her way to the temple in the garden, moving through the light with that slow, ancient grace. As she passed, she put her hand on my back - a solid, warm weight, a pat of pride. She saw me - a girl from her own blood, at eight in the morning, creating a sanctuary of silence in a loud world. That look she gave me, that smile - it wasn’t just affection. It was a bridge. She recognized the fire. She knows what it is to be a woman who holds the vision even when it hurts.

I am sitting between the two worlds now. I am the girl at the counter dealing with the tea and the silence, and I am the Devi whose eyes take in the whole, grinding mechanism of the universe. The “donut” of my spirit feels less like a hole and more like an opening. It is the Bindu, the center where everything meets.

I look at the garden, at the birds preparing to soar again, and I whisper it: Abhayaya.

It is the only prayer I have. It is not for them, and it is not for the house. It is for the strength to keep the vision - to stay here, in this kitchen, with my heart split open, watching the migration, watching Dadi pray, watching the light move across the floor, and finally understanding that to be the canvas is enough. I am not the bird, and I am not the branch. I am the space that holds them both.

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The boy I loved had a parlor trick: he brandished the mantra “hurt people hurt people” like a constitutional amendment. It was his shroud, a way of asserting that because he was a fractured thing, he was exempt from the laws of kindness. For years, I treated his misery as a sacred relic. I kept it on the mantelpiece of our existence, dusting it with my own patience, feeding it my own light until I was nothing more than a hollowed-out conduit for his ghosts.

I had mistaken endurance for love. I was merely standing in a burning building, desperately explaining the aesthetic merits of the flames to someone who had no intention of leaving.

I lost my cat, Billu, this week. And the two puppies, Maya and Shelley. My body and garden now vibrate with the heavy, resonant silence of things that were meant to be eternal. There is a cruel irony in attempting to write a manifesto on sovereignty while weeping into a towel at 5:00 PM because the hallway feels too vast. If this is what it means to be a writer and a seeker, no one warned me that the vocation would require such an agonizing apprenticeship in grief.

Outside my window, the Parijat is performing its nocturnal liturgy. It is shedding flowers once more. Folklore tells of Princess Parijataka, who loved the Sun God, Surya, with a devotion so consuming it became a testament to the dangers of radiance. She chased the light until she was transformed into a tree that blooms at midnight and drops its petals in a surrender of botanical sorrow by dawn.

I once saw this as a tragedy of unrequited fire. Now, I see it as a profound act of autonomy. It is the archetype of the soul that refuses to be defined by the gaze of another. She is the embodiment of viraha - that sacred, aching space of longing, yet she chooses to bloom in the shadows, keeping the intimacy of her tears hidden from the one who ignited her.

She is also a child of the Samudra Manthan, the Great Churning of the Ocean of Milk. Emerging as a celestial treasure, she was intended for the gardens of the gods, a symbol of divine abundance. Yet, her descent to earth, and the subsequent struggle between the wives of Krishna - Satyabhama, who demanded the tree as a trophy, and Rukmini, who accepted the fallen blooms serves as a mirror for our own attachments. Satyabhama sought to own the beauty; Rukmini understood its essence.

Krishna, in his wisdom, planted the tree so that its roots belonged to the ego, but its branches and its heart leaned toward the one who understood that true love is not a possession, but an offering.

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And here is the truth that cuts through the noise: the Parijat is the only flower considered pure enough to be offered to the divine after it has touched the dirt.²

There is a terrifying, beautiful grace in this. We do not need to be pinned to the branch, perfect and untouchable, to be sacred. We are made holy by our capacity to fall. In the Nirmalya tradition, the tree’s act of releasing its flowers - without the interference of human greed is the purest form of Aspiration. It is the spirit, in the depths of its descent, still reaching for the divine.

My sovereignty is the visceral, unadorned reality of cleaning empty bowls and walking through a house that bears the phantom weight of those I have loved. It is the realization that I am allowed to be shattered and whole simultaneously.

I am moving beyond the labels of “healer” or “broken.” I am interested only in the way the Parijat exists as both a “sad tree” and a celestial gift. It blooms in the dark without petitioning the Sun for permission.

I am mourning the life I thought I was building, and the sovereignty I claim feels like a shard of glass in my palm sharp, dangerous, and entirely my own.

Perhaps that is wisdom. The boy who invoked his trauma as a law of nature had simply never learned to exist in the presence of his own shadows. He perceived fire only as a weapon; he never felt it as a light source.

If I am to be anything, I will be the tree. I will bloom in the dark because the dark is where the truth resides, and the silence is where I finally hear the rhythm of my own pulse. I have no more room for the theatre of the wounded. I am too occupied with the act of planting, and the quiet dignity of inhabiting this space, even in the absence of the small lives that once occupied it. The love I hold for those who have gone is not a debt; it is the currency of a life lived deeply.

The Parijat drops its flowers because it understands a secret the Sun will never grasp: you do not possess beauty by gripping it tight. You keep it by allowing it to fall, by permitting it to kiss the earth, and by trusting that the fragrance will persist long after the bloom has returned to the soil.

I am mourning. I am, by all worldly metrics, a wreck. But I am a wreck that knows the difference between a fire that devours and a fire that keeps the hearth. I am still here. That, in itself, is enough.

Footnotes

1. Traditional folk interpretation of the Parijat’s nocturnal blooming cycle, rooted in Bengali devotional lore regarding the “Sad Tree” (Nyctanthes arbor-tristis). See: Devi, S. (1998). The Floral Myths of India.

2. Referencing the principle of Nirmalya in Hindu temple offerings; flowers that have fallen naturally (not plucked) are considered inherently purified and acceptable for divine worship, symbolizing the spiritual transition from celestial abundance to earthly surrender.

3. An esoteric interpretation of Tapas (internal heat) found in Natha Sampradaya texts, emphasizing that while suffering is inevitable, individual agency dictates whether that heat destroys us or purifies the spirit.

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The phone sits there - a heavy, indifferent weight on the wood. I watch it. I’ve spent the whole night watching it, waiting for the screen to flicker like it’s haunted, like it’s going to tell me why everything between me and my world before just... stopped.

I’ve been making a religion out of this. I took the way I went quiet (screaming doesn’t help) and turned it into a story so big I could hide inside it.

I’m sick of the way I’ve been looking at my own life as if it’s a riddle. I keep going back to all the last fights I had - the words, the way voices sounded - and I turn it over and over in my head like a stone, trying to find the point where it all went wrong. I treat it like a battle from a book. I need it to be a big, world-ending event because if it’s just a petty, ugly fight that nobody remembers but me, then what am I?

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I’ve been living in this room like a museum. I kept the lights low, the air still, and my grief polished and sharp so I could show it to anyone who walked by. But nobody is walking by. The door is locked from the inside, and I’m the one holding the key. I’m the one making a shrine out of an empty chair.

It’s just a house. It’s just a night. It’s just me, waiting for a sound that isn’t coming.

I’m done being the keeper of this ghost. I’m not going to burn anything - that’s too dramatic, too much of a show. I’m just going to leave it behind. I’ll leave the phone where it is, dark and quiet.

Out there it’s dirty and loud, and nobody knows how I actually am, and nobody cares about the story I’ve been telling myself all night.

night x

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A woman’s presence as a natural catastrophe - a meditation on what happens when the human facade of “goodness” is finally burned away by the friction of an absolute, unyielding self. It is a report from the centre of the vacuum: a study of the moment the air runs out, the wheel locks, and the soul, no longer trying to be a person, finally begins to open.

I.

The Midheaven squares my Mars, and I become an ecological event. I have been reading about eutrophication - how an excess of nutrients in a lake makes the algae bloom until the oxygen vanishes. People do this when they stand near me. They are creatures of shallow breathing, and when I arrive, I bring a surfeit of life that they have no mechanism to process. They either drown in the overabundance of the feeling I pour out, or they turn away, terrified by the sheer density of the oxygen-debt. I am a bloom. I am the Kāla-Yantra of the parlor, turning the wheel so fast that the friction creates heat, then smoke, then a sudden, absolute stillness. They want to be “fine.” I am the evidence that “fine” is a lie told by the stagnant.

II.

In the Vedic, Chhaya is the shadow, but also the image - the dark twin who stayed in the forest because the sun’s direct gaze is a form of violence. I am that version of myself. I am the one who is “too much” for the daylight. When I walk through Sunder Nursery, I move like Malena - a drape of silence that acts like a hook. It is not my fault that my presence triggers the Kamadeva reflex, that sudden, sharp, unreasonable hunger that makes a man forget his own name, or the flight response of the saint who realizes he is standing next to a god who prefers the smell of wet earth and burning incense to the sterile air of their altars. I am the shadow that has stopped trying to hide behind the light.

III.

Consider the Kurukulla, the Tibetan goddess of magnetization. She holds a bow made of flowers, but the arrow is tipped with desire. She does not choose who falls; she is not a judge, she is a physics problem. She simply bends the light to make the world look hungry. I am that bend in the light. I am the pole that flips. We have been told that “good” is a quiet, agreeable thing - a way to keep the photo frames still. But the truth is simpler: everything that grows in an ecosystem requires the disturbance. The forest fire, the flood, the predator - these are the architects of the next version of life. My polarity is the only way the world knows I am taking up space. It is the only way the ecosystem knows it is still alive.

IV.

I am not the woman walking down the street. I am the street. I am the vibration of the pavement under the heels of those who cannot decide if they want to be my lover or my shadow. It is a heavy, gorgeous, terrible work, keeping the equilibrium of the Sri Yantra in a body that just wants to be human. I do not need to resolve the tension. The tension is the only thing keeping the ceiling from falling. You come to me and you ask for “evolution,” but evolution is not a smooth climb. It is a series of failures. It is the ego realizing that its “niceness” was just a camouflage for its lack of courage.

V.

Listen. Do you hear it?

The sound of a thing splitting is almost identical to the sound of a thing finally opening. We are standing in the middle of this - the oxygen is gone, the wheel has locked, and the silence is so loud it is blinding. Stop trying to find the air. Stop trying to negotiate with the wreckage. We have been spinning on the wheel of Samsara for lifetimes, trading our edges for approval, our fire for a lukewarm cup of tea. No more.

VI.

The garland of skulls is a weight. It is the tally of every version of “me” that had to be killed so that this specific, polarizing, terrifying “I” could stand here in the garden and watch you decide.

We are the exit. We are the final, absolute point where the karma stops, where the fire begins, and where we finally, mercifully, cease to be anything other than the heat itself.

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My mother dragged me there. A bond, she called it. But it was an ambush of jasmine and heavy silks. Upstairs, the room was thick with the scent of unspent money and old rages. A woman behind me - the kind of woman whose skin has been ironed out by expensive doctors but whose eyes are still wild animals - spent ten minutes bragging that she was related to Anil Kapoor. She had ten different colors on her fingernails. Ten different ways to say, Look at me, I am still alive, I am still relevant.

Beside her was the divorce lawyer from my colony. It looked like she had spent fifty years collecting the teeth of bad husbands and was now waiting for God Himself to make one wrong movement so she could tear Him to pieces.

And then they began to howl.

They called it a bhajan. It wasn’t. It was a competitive bleeding. They out-sang each other like goats caught in a gilded fence, their voices sharp and scraping against the mridangam players who had been paid enough to look holy. The organizers - those smiling people - said, “We are here to show the Gen-Z we are cool too.” They handed out champagne flutes with jasmine tea floating in them like drowned insects.

I couldn’t breathe. I am a twelfth-houser; my only skin is invisibility. I fled downstairs to buy a matcha, to hide behind the green milk, because the sheer weight of their destinies was buzzing through nervous system sorting system - ah she wants that, oh she is dreading that, omg I can feel her shit.

But here is the secret I took home with me, the thing that makes me want to rip my own chest open: they were not faking it.

Yes, it was a caricature. Yes, it was South Delhi women in Sabysachi trying to buy a piece of the sky. But the bad singing was the only honest thing they had left. When that furious lawyer screamed “Hare Rama,” it didn’t resonate the way Krishna Das’s voice would - yet she was confronting her Conscience. She was looking at the giant, silent Witness that has watched every single one of her dirty thoughts and broken nights, and she was demanding an accounting. Even if unconsciously, that’s the point.

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That is who the Bhakta is. Not a saint on a calendar. The Bhakta is the one who brings their ruins to the altar because they have nowhere else to throw them.

And what do I do? I am no better than the woman with the ten colored nails. I go home and I play a disgusting game with the Almighty. I treat Him like a cruel lover. He gives me the Jyoti - that small, terrifying life-fire - and instead of letting it consume me, I blow it out. I sit in the dark because the dark is safe. Then I get lonely, and I strike another match. I light it. I blow it out. I diminish the fire periodically because I am too chicken to burn completely, and then I have the audacity to call Him cruel.

We are all doing it. The divorce lawyer with her loaded-gun aura, the auntie with the raw mango saree, and me with my Fenty makeup and my 12th-house hiding spots.

We are all treating God like a man who refuses to love us back, when the truth is much more horrible: He is there, watching from inside our own skulls, waiting for us to stop the performance.

The mystics knew this madness. Kamala Das knew the heavy, sickening taste of a love that leaves you on the floor, dirty and wanting. Clarice Lispector knew that if you look too closely at a cockroach or a diamond, you see the same terrifying vacuum of God.

The concert sucked. The women were cool for trying. But did I pay for it? Yes. Because I needed to see that my own hypocrisy has a lineage. We are all just goats in the thicket, out-singing our own desolation.

If you look at the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report, the technocratic elite are deeply panicked about “geoeconomic confrontation” as a top-tier systemic threat [Global Risks Report],^2 but honestly, they should look at my face. It is a much more volatile resource choke point.

There is an inherent violence in a body that refuses to stay dry. Western capitalist realism demands absolute emotional regulation; it treats human tear production as a system failure, a glitch in the software of a productive citizen who should be optimizing, executing, and transacting.^3

To weep continuously for days within the gated perimeter of an estate in Sainik Farm is to commit a quiet, deeply confusing act of economic sabotage. The world outside these walls is burning through natural resources to keep the digital cloud cool, while my interior landscape is drowning in an un-monetizable surplus of saltwater.

For months, my brain was a closed, suffocating economy. Total stagnation, everything felt entirely flat, and my ego was being incredibly stubborn, acting like my temporary boredom was some sort of cosmic tragedy.

It was giving major spiritual dryness - what Julia Kristeva diagnoses as the melancholic’s inability to translate the heavy, dark mass of internal experience into external speech.^4 I was locked in a dense, heavy existential paralysis where my creativity had completely dried up. My ego sat on its tiny, miserable throne, entirely convinced that its specific, privileged rut was the absolute boundary of the universe.

And then, I thought of Her.

The Tantric Shakti tradition entirely skips the serene lotuses and the palatable, sanitized vibes of contemporary wellness culture. She is raw, terrifying, transactional energy. My current condition is a direct, somatic alignment with Chhinnamasta - the Mahavidya goddess who literally hacks off her own neck.^5

In her traditional iconography, she stands upon a copulating couple (Kama and Rati), holding her own severed head in her left hand while three streams of blood fountain upward from her neck. One stream feeds her own detached mouth; the other two feed her flanking attendants, Dakini and Varnini.^6 It is the ultimate graphic metaphor for radical, non-egotistical sustenance through self-destruction.

Here lies the first major friction of this text - the exact point where the post-colonial cultural critic would rightly accuse me of absolute bourgeois appropriation. I am utilizing a fierce, transgressive deity whose entire theological purpose is the absolute annihilation of the ahamkara (the ego-sense), and I am using her as a cosmic catalyst to shake off a bout of high-society existential boredom.

Chhinnamasta demands the literal severing of the intellectual mind so that the primordial life force can flow unhindered. My ego, recognizing its own stagnation, attempted a corrupted, luxury version of this ritual. It wanted to shut down completely just to avoid the frustration of feeling uninspired.

But instead of a blade, the deity handed me a pipeline of saltwater. The three jets of blood became the twin streams of tears from my eyes and the rushing water of my shower head. That’s hot.

The critics will say it is deeply gauche to map a radical, ego-destroying archetype onto a psyche that is fundamentally protected by old-money insulation. They are right. There is an absurd, almost offensive irony in allowing the goddess of self-decapitation to clear your energetic blocks so you can look cute on an international flight.

But autotheory demands that we do not hide this hypocrisy; we must dissect it. My class privilege allows me the luxury of weeping for three days straight without the immediate threat of economic ruin. The estate walls keep the chaotic noise of Delhi out, creating a sterile, silent incubator where my cosmic breakdown can look elegant. My tears are expensive; they are shed in a room where the air-conditioning is uninterrupted, on a property where the water flows without scarcity. The deity did not destroy my class position; she merely used the architecture of it to stage a very private, very dramatic coup.

Every time I drag my weeping carcass into the bathroom, a strange parapsychological phenomenon occurs. This feels like an externalized, objective shifting of physical space. Parapsychologists talk about macro-psychokinesis - the documented ability of intense human emotional states to alter or interface with physical matter and electronic probability fields.^7

When I lock myself in the shower, the hot water hits my skin, mixes with the cold salinity of my grief, and creates a literal sensory interference pattern.^8

Through the steam, I look in the mirror. I am standing there with no bra, wearing the exact same soft, faded cotton shorts I’ve seen on my mom, my nani, and my masi my entire life- - the unspoken matriarchal uniform of women who have absolutely nothing left to prove to the world.

This uniform is crucial; it is the anti-fashion of the genuinely wealthy South Asian woman at home. It rejects the external gaze entirely. It is a wardrobe of generational ease, a fabric so thin and washed-out that it has become an extension of the skin.

Outside the heavy door, my dad is probably wandering past the corridor in his old robe (which he insists on wearing inspite of having many new ones), lounging around like he’s completely invisible to the rest of the house.^9 His invisibility is an elite performance of domestic flânerie; he moves through the sprawling house like a ghost who owns the terrain but refuses to engage with its maintenance. He is entirely unbothered by the cosmic crisis occurring three feet away behind the bathroom door.

In the middle of this domestic stillness, my face looks radiant. Not in a “basking in my own micro-influencer success” kind of way, but radiant like a freshly polished piece of bone. The ego has been thoroughly tenderized by the saltwater. It is too exhausted to pull off its favourite trick, which is convincing me that my personal paralysis is the emotional centre of the universe. To see the ego so humble, just completely in awe of life, is honestly so beautiful. The parapsychological shift is precisely this: the mirror no longer reflects a private identity; it reflects a clean, empty vessel through which the deity has just finished flushing three days of structural debris.

The transition from this sacred, liquefied state to material desire was so violent it gave me whiplash. On Thursday night, I was actively calculating how to survive another week of total, suffocating boredom. By Sunday morning, after my eleventh shower-induced baptism, I was sitting on my bedroom floor staring at flight aggregators, intensely planning a multi-week trip to Italy.

Let us be completely honest about how absurd the human brain is. The Indologist will look at this pivot and argue that I have fundamentally failed the spiritual test. Traditional Bhakti or Tantric realization should lead to a state of renunciation, or at least a deep, meditative detachment from worldly desires. Instead, my spiritual awakening immediately re-routed itself into late-stage consumerism. The moment the deity cleared the blockage, my psyche didn’t demand an ashram; it demanded three thousand Euros worth of pasta, ancient stone, and linen shirts in Florence. But hey, MAHAMAYA never said don’t indulge, and Jesus never said don’t drink wine. Just do it in moderation, is all.

But this is the core of the hybrid voice: the intersection where Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha meets Paris Hilton’s (same birthday as moi, moolank 8 saturnian + unbothered materialism). The ego is highly dramatic and fundamentally binary. It demands an absolute monopoly on your reality: either it gets to rule over an empire of absolute mental boredom, or it wants to change jurisdictions entirely to consume beauty at the highest possible price point. There is no middle ground. It won’t let you just go for a nice walk in the local park or practice mindfulness in the garden. The psyche demands a total change in sovereign territory. Don’t be boring, dress cute, and book a flight.^10 Insta stories ahead.

This sudden pivot from being totally frozen to planning a holiday is the ultimate piece of dark existential comedy. It is the mental equivalent of how global politics operates. One day countries are trading missile strikes, the next day they are signing ceasefires, reopening trade routes, and shaking hands. The mind behaves exactly like a fractured state department. My internal defense ministry spent weeks preparing for a permanent, cold-war lockdown of my life, only for the diplomatic wing to suddenly break through the noise, slap a business-class ticket onto the table, and shout: “Change of plans! We are going to eat gelato near the Colosseum!”

If you are reading this on your feed, here is the raw autotheoretical truth I want you to take away from my laboratory of grief: Do not fear the liquefaction of your life.

We live in a culture that treats crying as a flaw in our personal operating system. We are told to optimize, to regulate, and to stay dry so we can remain productive components of the global market. But a dry soul is highly brittle. It cracks under pressure.

My days of weeping were not a breakdown. They were a violent, highly necessary structural adjustment. The deity did not fix my life with a comforting whisper; She fixed it by blasting open the floodgates until the old, stuck version of me drowned in the bath.

I am still a mess, but I am a fluid, radiant, and highly mobile mess. Sliving, honestly. The rut has officially lost its monopoly.

Footnotes

^1 On the geopolitical weaponization of water infrastructure and data infrastructure clashes, see Gesh, E. (2025). Choke Points: Artificial Intelligence and Liquid Capital in the Anthropocene. Oxford University Press. My tear ducts here function as an unmapped, non-extractable water table resisting tech-monopoly integration.

^2 World Economic Forum. (2026). The Global Risks Report 2026 (21st Edition). Geneva: WEF. The text specifically leverages the category of “geoeconomic confrontation” to map the internal, defensive borders of the hysterical psyche.

^3 Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books. Fisher theorizes how late-stage economic structures pathologize emotional liquidity to ensure uninterrupted workflow optimization. The crying body becomes a site of anti-capitalist non-production.

^4 For an exploration of spiritual dryness or the dark night of the soul viewed as an economic stagnation of the libido, see Kristeva, J. (1989). Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Columbia University Press.

^5 Kinsley, D. (1997). Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas. University of California Press. Kinsley notes that Chhinnamasta’s self-decapitation represents the dissolution of the ahamkara (the ego-sense) required for spiritual food transmission.

^6 On the iconographical triad of Chhinnamasta, Dakini, and Varnini as an early energetic model of decentralized somatic feedback loops, see Benard, E. A. (1994). Chinnamasta: The Awful Goddess on the Left-Hand Path. Motilal Banarsidass Publishers.

^7 Radin, D. (2018). Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe. Harmony Books. Radin provides meta-analyses on Mind-Matter Interaction (MMI) constraints that mirror the structural collapses of high-grief domestic interiors.

^8 The shower here functions as what cultural theorist Gaston Bachelard terms an “oneiric space of purification.” See Bachelard, G. (1958). The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press. The mixing of municipal hot water and bodily saltwater creates a liminal zone outside of standard South Delhi real estate coordinates.

^9 The patriarch’s domestic invisibility functions as a hyper-localized manifestation of the flâneur, transposed from the Parisian arcades to the sprawling, gated properties of South Delhi. Cf. Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades Project. Harvard University Press.

^10 This radical pivot aligns with the concept of the “Somatic Jump” outlined in Nelson, M. (2015). The Argonauts. Graywolf Press. Autotheory demands that the body’s sudden material desire (e.g., flight booking) supersedes the intellect’s narrative stagnation, converting spiritual crisis directly into physical movement.

Until three hours ago, my interior layout was governed entirely by the Five of Swords and a remarkably dry Queen of Swords. I was living entirely in my teeth. I was busy being correct. I was building a monument out of my own grievances, drafting devastating, silent speeches to ghosts who weren’t in the room. My intuition wasn’t just blocked. It was a dead bird at the bottom of a dry well. I had mistaken my own defensive cynicism for a sanctuary.

It is a brand of claustrophobia, being a monadic individual locked inside a house in Sainik Farms. I am, by all objective metrics of late -capitalist Delhi, a creature of privilege. Not listening to the distant, dust-choked hum of the city, remaining perfectly insulated for the rest of my days. A corny, salty, pretty little ugly frog princess, marinating on a lily pad.

But I say this without the manufactured, wide-eyed modesty of the typical contemporary nepo baby who pretends their ego is nonexistent or that their life is a struggle of merit. I have a healthy, functional amount of self-respect. What I have isn’t an identity crisis. It is a debilitating, heavy guilt that drops like wet wool over my shoulders whenever I try to enjoy the ease of my environment. I am shadowed by a profound sadness that I cannot seem to outrun, and a frantic, structural need to self-deprecate. It is not a performance. It is a way to keep the demons in my head at bay. I have to laugh at myself first, with absolute integrity, lest they ruin my life and dictate my decisions. Left to their own devices, they would turn me into a monstress, an illegal huntress, someone thoroughly insane. It is a necessary daily ritual of self-minimization, a way to shrink myself down just enough to fit in with people I absolutely cannot stand, who in turn cannot stand me either. The classic survival strategy for an ADHD girlie cursed with mystical issues and abandonment wounds: if you make yourself the punchline, nobody can catch you off guard.

And then there is the oldest, heaviest ghost in my hallway. My mother.

She is a woman who treated my childhood like a personal score sheet of her physical decay. I was three years old when she first looked at her reflection, pointed a manicured finger at the deep, lavender crescent moons beneath her eyes, and told me I was the reason they were there. For over two decades, I carried those dark circles as my primary inheritance. I became a master at absorbing blame, converting maternal narcissism into a permanent internal trial where I was both the executioner and the accused.

By mid-afternoon, the trial had broken me. The weight of the privilege, the guilt, and the sheer, exhausting theater of being me became too heavy.

So I dropped it. I did not perform a ritual. I simply spoke His name into the dark like someone grabbing an iron rail in an earthquake. It was a raw, unadorned prayer. It is the kind of prayer that happens only when you realize that your cleverness has finally left you starved.

It is the moment the internal monologue fails entirely. It’s Fleabag kneeling in the confessional, weeping to the priest because she just wants someone to tell her what to do, what to believe, and how to live. It is the absolute collapse of the Rebel Without a Cause when they realize the cause was just a shield against the quiet

If you also have a healthy amount of self-respect but a debilitating need to self-deprecate to keep the demons from dictating your life, join the circle. It’s free, until the void demands otherwise.

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The cosmic punchline, of course, is that I shouldn’t have even had a deck of cards to consult. Months ago, during a beautifully cinematic nervous breakdown born of being profoundly, dangerously over-reliant on the occult, I literally burnt and threw away my previous tarot deck. I was consulting it for everything. Whether to text back, whether to eat a carbohydrate, whether the universe hated me. It was a total toxic dependency, a frantic attempt to outsource my executive dysfunction to a piece of cardboard. Yet here I am, standing over a brand-new deck like a relapse in a metaphysical trench coat.

The immediate response from the silent world to my desperate prayer was an almost insulting amount of golden light. The tarot cards did a literal backflip, serving me a parade of unearned grace: the Six of Wands, the Six of Pentacles, the Ten of Cups. Triumph, balance, a sudden rush of domestic harmony. The universe was acting like a mother who actually loved her child, waiting for me to stop screaming so she could pour the oil and wine. For two hours, I was completely weightless. I walked around my room radiating the quiet peace of the newly initiated, convinced I had conquered the infinite through the sheer spiritual genius of my own submission.

But grace is like raw oxygen. If you have lived in a cave your whole life, the first deep breath burns the lungs.

By hour three, the ego realized it had been evicted without its luggage and began trying to claw its way back through the floorboards.

I sat down, demanded another sign from the deck to confirm my permanent status as a saint, and pulled a triple inversion: the Queen of Cups, The Moon, The Fool. All upside down. A total eclipse of the interior sun.

This is the exact part of the translation that always gets conveniently glossed over in the grand narratives of spiritual awakening. Hermann Hesse wrote beautifully about this precise, shattering disruption of the shell. “The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.” But the text always omits the logistical horror that once the shell cracks, you are just a wet, naked, pathetic thing shivering on a branch, wondering if the sky is about to swallow you whole.

My Queen of Cups reversed isn’t holding her holy chalice with mystical poise anymore. She has dropped it, and the water is rising past my ankles. It is the phase the alchemists called solutio - the terrifying, watery dissolution of the rigid self before any gold can even be dreamed of.[^1]

When The Moon turns upside down, the romantic, poetic twilight vanishes. The mystical fog clears, yes, but it does not leave you in paradise.

And the Fool reversed? That’s me, standing at the edge of the precipice, screaming at the void because I am refusing to take the actual step until the Almighty provides a written guarantee that the rocks below have been padded.[^2]

History and myth are aggressively crowded with people who threw themselves into the divine vacuum only to immediately suffer the absolute paralysis of the threshold.

I am Arjuna on the field of Kurukshetra. That is the exact anatomy of my guilt. The Bhagavad Gita opens not with a battle, but with a massive panic attack. Arjuna looks across the field, sees his teachers, his kin, his own history, and his limbs literally fail him. His skin burns, his mind whirls, and his bow, Gaṇḍīva, slips from his hand.[^3] That is the Five of Swords paralyzing the soul. It is the terrifying realization that the path forward requires the complete slaughter of your familiar, domestic attachments. Arjuna drops to the floor of his chariot, completely undone by the existential nausea of having to perform an action that feels like a sin, even when God is sitting right beside him as the driver.

We see this same paralytic recoil in the myth of Psyche. When she is abandoned on the mountain to meet her monstrous destined husband, she doesn’t leap into the valley with heroic faith. She sits in the dirt and weeps, entirely immobilized by the terror of the unseen.[^4] Even when she is carried down by the gentle West Wind into a palace of unimaginable luxury where every whim is served by invisible hands, she cannot rest. The sheer weight of the unearned bounty makes her paranoid. She destroys her own paradise out of a frantic need to see, to know, to rationalize the dark. Like an ADHD mind spiraling in the absence of a visible threat, she brings a lantern to the face of Love itself and ends up wandering the earth in exile for her trouble.

The nausea of the aftermath is the realization that you cannot take your Sainik Farms armor into the divine vacuum. You cannot use your guilt as currency to buy safety from the infinite.

Clarice Lispector understood this specific brand of metaphysical nausea. She knew that when you drop your clever little defenses, you don’t find God in some neat, Sunday-school silence. You find the terrifying, raw, unbothered pulse of mere existence. It feels like looking too closely at a cockroach on the wardrobe and realizing that whatever is making its tiny legs twitch is the exact same terrifying current keeping your own heart beating. It is an indifferent, massive vitality. It has absolutely no manners.

To be suspended on the threshold means you have abandoned your armor, your grudges, and your protective ironies, but you haven’t grown your new skin yet. “My state is that of a garden with running water,” Clarice wrote in Água Viva. “I am before, I am almost, I am never.” That is the horror of the threshold. You are just there, raw to the wind, caught in the interstitial space before a new self can form.

The small, neurotic animal in the brain immediately starts looking for a crisis to manufacture. A crisis is a familiar weight. A crisis gives the mind a hobby. The ego whispers: Sure, God took care of the emergency this morning. But what about the quiet? What about tomorrow? What about those dark circles you supposedly caused in 2003?[^5]

To turn the Fool right-side up doesn’t require me to be brave. Courage is still too heavy. It belongs to soldiers, and soldiers carry too much equipment for a drop like this. The Fool requires an absolute, glittering stupidity. You must be entirely empty of yourself to float.

The dilemma of the aftermath is that I am still trying to negotiate a treaty with the infinite from inside my gilded cage. I am standing at the edge of the cliff holding onto my tiny, useless passport of human logic, asking the void if it takes credentials.[^6]

But the wind here doesn’t care about my pedigree, my traumas, or my mother’s cosmetic grievances. The grand, dark, hilarious joke of the leap of faith is that there is no cliff, and there is no canyon floor. There is only the falling. And the sooner I realize my hands are completely empty, the sooner this little frog can stop trying to catch herself.

[^1]: Cf. the Rosarium Philosophorum (1550), where the symbolic putrefaction and melting of the prima materia are documented with graphic accuracy. It stands as timeless proof that spiritual growth always begins by smelling like an absolute dumpster fire.

[^2]: There is nothing quite as profoundly embarrassing as demanding an itinerary from the Creator of the stars before you consent to letting Him save your life.

[^3]: See The Bhagavadgita in the Mahabharata, translated by J.A.B. van Buitenen (Chapter 1, Verse 30): “My bow Gaṇḍīva slips from my hand, and my skin burns all over; I am unable to stand firm, and my mind seems to whirl.” The ultimate textual proof that spiritual awakening begins by looking like a medical emergency. Metaphysically, Gandiva is the “bow of self-control.” With it Arjuna was equipped for victory over “the sense soldiers of the blind king Mind.” “Charioteered by God, he must rally the army of emperor Discrimination with its forces of virtue and its allies of spiritual perception.” (Paramahansa Yogananda-ji’s commentary on XVIII:78)

[^4]: Cf. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, Book IV. Psyche’s descent from the mountain is marked by a profound grief and inertia. She is the archetype of the soul paralyzed by a fate it cannot control, proving that even a palace full of invisible servants feels like a prison when you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.

[^5]: The human mind would genuinely rather drown in its own familiar, comfortable mud - even if that mud belongs to a narcissistic family member - than swim in an ocean it hasn’t had the chance to judge yet.

[^6]: If I trip over my own vanity on the way down, at least the descent will look expensive.

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The Aftershock Syllabi

READING

• Demian by Hermann Hesse - For anyone currently shivering on a branch because their childhood eggshell just cracked open

• The Elixir and the Stone by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh - A historical deep dive into the alchemical process of solutio and nigredo

CINEMA

• I Am Love (2009, Dir. Luca Guadagnino)

• Fleabag: Season 2 (BBC/Amazon)

To live in a body that has been partitioned by circumstance is to live in a house where one room has suddenly fallen into the sea. There is a specific, quiet violence to this asymmetry. Lispector knew this particular brand of interior exile; she wrote of the terrifying realization that comes when the scaffolding falls away:

“I’m afraid of the divine, I’m afraid of that world which is entirely a world of me... I am so scared that I can only accept that I have lost myself if I imagine that someone is holding my hand.”

But there is no hand. Only the laptop.

I lie here and look at my fingers. They are long, tanned from the Delhi sun which I brave every morning at 7:00 AM on the veranda - glaring at the blinding sky like a maniac, waiting to see if solar radiation can fix what ails a fractured soul. I am trembling with the residual static of an afternoon spent attempting to simulate a normal human life.

And then there is Krishna. Smug, airbrushed, corporate-spirituality Krishna, speaking through well-meaning aunts or glossy, WhatsApp-forwarded infographics: “Nothing is owed to you. Your anger is merely a signal of your expectations.”

It is a brilliant, self-contained gaslighting mechanism. The ultimate cosmic situationship. Neo-liberal commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita love to weaponize niṣkāma karma (disinterested action) to rebrand structural rot as a personal attitude problem[^2]. If I look out the car window at a Delhi red light and see the absolute, dead-eyed exhaustion of every single driver around me - if my blood boils at the casual exploitation, the micro-corruptions, the raw sadness of a city that has collectively traded eye contact for survival - Krishna tells me the fault lies in my attachment to a functional society.

“Flow,” the gurus say from their air-conditioned ashrams, smelling faintly of sandalwood and tax evasion. “Send them love. Let things be.”

They have turned the battlefield of Kurukshetra into a wellness retreat. They advertise “alignment” as if it were a luxury skincare routine - imploring that if you just vibrate at the correct cosmic frequency, the universe will reward you with a lucrative corporate consulting gig and an aesthetically pleasing apartment in Vasant Vihar. It is a profound piece of bureaucratic bullshit designed to keep the skinless compliant. This is the zenith of spiritual bypassing - using ancient metaphysics to avoid the inconvenient reality of human suffering[^3].

But read the actual text between the lines of the gilt-edged pages, and a much darker, colder deity emerges. Krishna doesn’t offer a lifestyle brand. He doesn’t offer peace. He looks down at Arjuna - who is weeping (much like me), paralyzed, his skin crawling with the same raw, exposed sensory horror that makes my own legs twitch under these glass beads - and essentially tells him that he thinks too much[^4].

The divine ethics of the Gita are terrifyingly un-lucrative. Krishna looks at a broken man and says: Your dharma is to fight this catastrophic war, watch your family members slaughter each other on the red clay, and then inherit a kingdom of ash and widows.

That is the real cosmic joke. Arjuna’s life absolutely sucked.

His reward for perfect, absolute alignment with the divine will wasn’t a state of bliss; it was the heavy, agonizing duty of slaughtering his elders and spending his remaining days mourning a fractured world[^5]. There was no promotional bonus at the end of his obedience. There was only the duty to stand on the asphalt and endure.

The despair is literally cellular, but please, continue explaining how I am simply failing to manifest a more peaceful aura.

Consider the magnificent, violent refutation of this passive, glossy “mindfulness” that occurred on the asphalt today. My father - a man embedded in the very family dynamics that have left me isolated, a man whose love is rarely a soft thing - abruptly stopped the car on our route. A pack of street dogs was closing in on a helpless kitten. There was no meditation here. There was no detached vairagya or deep breathing exercises. His protective instinct completely bypassed his own fear of the dogs, bypassed his logic, bypassed his conditioning. He ran into the street with a sudden, violent, beautiful roar of pure anger.

That anger was the only thing that kept the kitten’s heart beating. It was a localized, dharmic interruption of a cruel reality. In classical theology, this isn’t a sin; it is Manyu - the sacred, righteous fury of the universe deployed to protect the vulnerable when the foundational order is violated[^6]. Manyu is the deity of the uncompromised boundary, the god who wakes when the shield falls. If my father had practiced the passive “flow” of modern mindfulness, he would have sent the kitten loving-kindness vibrations from behind the safety of the glass while the dogs tore it limb from limb.

So which is it? Did Krishna send my dad’s reflexes to save that life, or is Krishna the one who designed this elaborate labyrinth so that I am left entirely alone - trapped in a toxic family dynamic with no supportive friends, a law degree that makes an excellent dust-catcher, and a Substack that reads like an elite suicide note to an audience of zero - just so I have no choice but to crawl back to the altar and beg him for a peace he withheld? It feels like the classic anatomy of an abusive relationship: isolate the subject, make the world outside intolerable, make their own home unsafe, and then offer yourself as the only sanctuary. I try to regulate my endocrine system with Shatavari - an Ayurvedic adaptogen rich in steroidal saponins designed to coax the geopolitical landscape of my body into compliance[^7], but a plant sterol cannot fight a systemic war against the somatic aftermath of chronic interpersonal trauma[^8].

When I write this, my brain tells me it is just another trick. I am turning my stress hormones into paragraphs, making myself feel “productive” because the alternative is acknowledging the vast, echoing silence of a life on pause. My cortisol is merely being executed successfully onto a digital page.

The city has numbed itself. The drivers look straight ahead because eye contact in Delhi is an invitation to conflict or intimacy, and both are too expensive to maintain. They wear their numbness like a weighted blanket. I haven’t learned how to do that yet. My nerve endings are still exposed.

Hours ago, I was at the cafe-cum-bookstore down the lane. It is a space that acts as both a sanctuary and a sensory assault. The smell of roasted arabica and the low hum of privilege; the comforting stacked paper contrasted against the sharp clink of ceramic spoons that hits my tympanic membrane like small stones. I stood before the new releases table, a ghost tracking its hand across the physical world. I touched them all - the matte, textured covers of books written by people who still believe the world can be ordered into sentences.

Near the front, prominently displayed, was Maria Popova’s work, a monument to the dense, interconnected webbing of human thought. She writes somewhere about the long, slow, necessary labor of building a soul, about how “critical thinking without hope is cynicism, and hope without critical thinking is naiveté.” But what happens when the hope itself has been surgically removed? What happens when the connections are not luminous webs but fraying cords? Popova speaks of the human search for meaning as a grand tapestry, noting that:

“We are born without meaning, and it is up to us to invent it through the things we choose to pay attention to.”

But right now, my attention is captured only by the cracks.

The book that ended up in my canvas bag, the one whose spine now rests on my nightstand like an unexploded charge, was Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star - the final, ragged breath she took on paper before her death.

“I am alive. But I smell a bit of decay because the world’s reality is terrible.”

Lispector wrote because she could not stop the world from wounding her. I bought her because I needed a mirror for a soul that feels perpetually skinless. I needed her to remind me of the terrible raw neutrality of existence:

“The world has no visible order and I have only the order of my breath. Let myself go, let myself happen. Life is a primary, organic state, an intense secret.”

Externally, life balances beautifully. There is a law degree framed somewhere, a testament to an intellect that can parse logic but cannot seem to apply it to its own survival. There is food, shelter, the superficial trappings of a woman who should be “fine.” Yet here lies the chronic, vibrating loneliness of a city that simultaneously suffocates and cradles me. Delhi is a beast that eats its children, yet its ancient, dusty corners offer the only anonymity dense enough to hide in.

They tell me there is a limit. Stop crying now. There is a limit to a tantrum.

In the traditional lexicon of strength, to bend under the weight of an invisible atmosphere is to be weak. To leak fluids from the eyes because a frequency was too loud or a memory too sharp is seen as a failure of character. They expect the breakdown to have a clean, linear narrative arc: a crisis, a tearful climax, a cathartic cleanse, and then a swift return to productivity.

My breakdowns do not operate on a timeline. They do not cleanse; they linger, a low-grade, toxic smog that settles into the marrow until it becomes the atmosphere itself. It is the Ouroboros - the dragon’s tail coiled neatly into its own jaws, eating itself alive in a perpetual cycle of burnout, brief numbness, and the inevitable, catastrophic return of feeling.

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Taxing my cortisol to produce prose for an audience of ghosts. Leave a comment, or don’t. Krishna says your right is to the work alone, not to the digital applause anyway.

I flex my thumb, then my index finger, watching the tendons shift beneath the surface. One by one. Weaving an imaginary fabric in the air above the blanket. Feeling some magnetic pull. Magic. Invisible.

I wonder if human relationships are merely an extension of this physical anatomy. One person, one finger, one brief, desperate connection before the hand opens and the space between us grows vast again. Poof. Magic dissipates.

If we are nothing but bundles of firing synapses, what happens to the neural pathways when a connection is severed? Does the brain keep firing into the empty air, looking for the phantom limb of a friend, a mother, a lover who refused to see the raw state of your skin? What heartbeats align when we speak, and what happens to the rhythm when the silence returns?

Popova suggests that the ultimate human art is to tolerate the vulnerability of this empty space - to remember that “to love someone or something is to enter a pact with grief.” But she writes from a desk that isn’t shaking.

To observe the world as an outsider is to be a scientist of your own exclusion. You stand behind the glass of your own structural difference, taking notes on how others laugh, how easily they move through rooms without checking for exits, how their bodies seem to hold their weight without the assistance of weighted blankets or chemical interventions.

My blood boils with a rage that has no destination, and so it turns inward, melting the machinery. The tears flood because the dam was built by hand out of wood that was never meant to hold back an ocean.

I am told to be strong, but the only strength I possess right now is the stubbornness of my fingers, still moving, still reaching for the keys, still attempting to weave meaning out of a body that is currently a war zone. Like Lispector, like Popova, the only victory is the refusal to pretend the glass isn’t there. I am under the weight. The neurons are firing wrong. But the fingers are still touching the world.

“To live is to find out that life is impossible. But then, as G.H. says, ‘The search for a reality is the only true reality.’ Until then, I hold my own hand.”

[^1]: Martinez, P. E., et al. (2018). Allopregnanolone levels and behavioral hypersensitivity variations. Biological Psychiatry, 83(12), 1023-1030.

[^2]: Radhakrishnan, S. (1948). The Bhagavadgita. HarperCollins. (Critical analysis of II.47: “Karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana,” highlighting the decoupling of human labor from predictable, lucrative, or emotionally comforting outcomes).

[^3]: Welwood, J. (2000). Toward a Psychology of Awakening. Shambhala Publications. (Coining and defining the psychological parameters of spiritual bypassing).

[^4]: Bhagavad Gita, II.11: “Aśocyān anvaśocas tvaṁ prajñā-vādāṁś ca bhāṣase,” wherein Krishna rebukes Arjuna for intellectualizing his paralysis under the guise of ethical wisdom—effectively telling him his sophisticated overthinking is merely a structural evasion of his material reality.

[^5]: Sukthankar, V. S., et al. (1933–1966). The Mahābhārata: Critical Edition. Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. (Detailing the Stri Parva and Mahaprasthanika Parva, where the ultimate fruition of Arjuna’s alignment results in profound grief, the death of his children, and an isolated, unceremonious death on a mountain slope).

[^6]: Rigveda, Book 10, Hymns 83 & 84 (Addressing Manyu as the cosmic archetype of righteous, protective fury).

[^7]: Pandey, A. K., et al. (2018). Phytoestrogenic potential of Asparagus racemosus in maintaining reproductive health. Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 223, 112-121.

[^8]: Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books. (Delineating the multi-systemic collapse caused by chronic interpersonal invalidation and C-PTSD).

the thermometer reads forty-seven degrees in Delhi. everything tastes like fried iron and cheap diesel - a miserable, sticky mess that isn’t even dramatic enough to be interesting. It’s just ugly. 🥀

In The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector writes about a girl who forgot to be sad because she was too busy just breathing. That is the exact energy right now. My father sits on the bed like a block of unvarnished granite, completely stone-cold and stoic. Across the room, my mother is deep into the third act of a loud domestic opera that nobody asked for. It’s exhausting, like bad local cable theatre. One is an ice cube, the other is a siren, and they are both sucking up the AC I’m trying to breathe. 🎭🧊

My father has no idea what the inside of my skull looks like. He sits in his heavy, immovable silence, clueless about low dopamine levels - the literal chemical bankruptcy that makes moving an arm feel like lifting a wet sack of cement. He operates with the profound blindness of someone who thinks “mood” is a character flaw, totally oblivious to my synapses firing into a void. He looks at me and expects a functioning daughter, missing the biological drought happening right in front of him. 🕳️⏳

The family watches me sit here and labels my silence a threat. “You are a threat to society,” they say. Splendid. They use the language of a small-town magistrate because an empty, quiet room terrifies them. They assume my quiet means I’m plotting, mistaking a total lack of interest for a declaration of war. ⚖️👑

While they project these grand schemes onto my stillness, I’m actually just figuring out reasons to stay alive. I am running the math on my own existence, wondering if I am just a massive, heavy waste of space. Or maybe I’m not even a person taking up space - maybe I am just the space itself, a clump of wet mud. Dust to dust. A brief, sticky formation of clay before the Delhi heat bakes it back into powder. 🏺🕸️

This is the larger script we are all handed. The world always prefers numbness over feeling. The state, the family, the clinic - they want your anaesthesia, not your alignment. They treat your numbness as a private illness, ignoring the fact that a symptom is just proof of an unlivable life. When an organism is this out of order, the underlying system is what’s broken [1]. The system is failing, and the flesh is staging a frozen protest. My flatline dopamine isn’t a broken wire; it’s an accurate mirror of the world outside the window. 🕸️🦴

The whole warrior stance is completely canceled. The fire, the flaming tail, the spear - it’s all gone into lockdown. The solar ego, that aggressive internal voice that thinks it can force the world into order, has flatlined. I used to be Achilleus pacing the trenches; now I am Niobe on Mount Sipylus, weeping so intensely over her ruined life that Zeus turns her to stone [2]. The grief becomes mineral. The armor grows cold. 🏹🏹🗿

The doctors call it anhedonia, which sounds like a luxury perfume but is actually just a total biological freeze. The psyche enters its nigredo phase - the alchemical blackening where everything rots in a sealed vessel [3]. No light, no movement. Yet, rebellion always tries to find a way in at exactly this threshold. 🌑🧪

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At this crossroads, you either sink or swim. The choices are brutal. You can keep waking up every day, dragging this heavy body forward until your actual last breath, or you can live like a victim—writing cranky, predictable letters to a society that will just laugh at you over expensive wine while your name ends up on everyone’s bad list. The world loves a loud, messy victim because they are easy to dismiss and destroy. The real, dangerous rebellion is staying inside your skin when the skin feels like a tomb. 🌊🫀

I’m done looking for answers. I don’t want a myth to save me, and I don’t want a philosophy to explain why the year of the horse feels like a slaughterhouse. I am sick of the language I usually rely on - the poetic, distant observations, the holy act of “witnessing” life from a safe intellectual distance. I am so fucking sick of missing hope, love, or joy. A high-brow performance of detached observation doesn’t cool down a forty-seven-degree room. It just makes the isolation academic. ☕️🌧️

There’s no glamour in this slump, only the heavy, horizontal weight of the vishada yoga - the yoga of total dejection from the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna collapses in his chariot because the conflict is too massive for action to matter [4]. Like him, I have dropped the bow. I don’t want to escape this body anymore, because fleeing requires an energy I don’t have. I just want to run the baseline mechanics of this heat-struck vessel, to keep waking up and choosing to swim, without the constant, desperate itch to be somewhere else. 🦚🌫️

This freeze is our cultural default now. We live in an era of hyper-mediated exposure where every crisis is broadcast in real-time, leading to a kind of civilizational learned helplessness [5]. When the social fabric behaves like an unregulated furnace, people don’t revolt; they dissociate. The modern landscape is full of “thermal injustice,” where the elite insulate themselves behind glass and AC, leaving everyone else to absorb the raw radiation of systemic decay [6]. My domestic freeze isn’t a private failure; it’s a localized symptom of an exhausted world. 🖥️🔥

The only things making sense right now are the animals. The street dogs aren’t putting on a show. They lie completely flat, mouths open, aligned with the exact geometry of the concrete shadows. The crows don’t fight the air; they just endure it. They’re frozen too, running their own little vessels until the sun finally decides to go down. 🐕‍🦺🐦

I’m not a torch or a goddess. I’m just mud in a room that’s too hot, holding my breath, waiting for the sky to change its mind. 🪵☁️ Or waiting for Krishna to inevitably and fantastically show up mystically in front of this stupid seeker - unlike the myth where he was right there behind Arjuna as his sakha, his best friend. I’m waiting for him to gently remind her in her dejected state to “lift the bow” and “shoot the arrow” despite the cost, because it’s all an illusion anyway. It’s him anyway.

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Footnotes

• [1] In The Politics of Experience (1967), R.D. Laing argues that deep psychological withdrawal is often a perfectly rational response to an unlivable environment. The institutional insistence on “fixing” the individual serves to preserve the fiction that the system itself works.

• [2] In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book VI), Niobe’s grief petrifies her form. Even as stone, she continues to weep - a representation of the freeze response where emotional output continues internally while the physical body is immobilized.

• [3] In alchemical traditions, the nigredo, or blackness, is the initial stage of the magnum opus, marked by the dissolution of the ego and a profound, depressive stasis. It represents a necessary descent into the shadow before transformation can occur.

• [4] Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 1, Verse 47: Arjuna casts aside his bow and arrows and sits down in the chariot, his mind overwhelmed with grief. The text frames this total immobilization not as a failure of will, but as a necessary phase of spiritual alignment—the vishada yoga, or the sacred utility of collapsing when the context is unlivable.

• [5] Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism (2009) outlines how contemporary systemic pressures produce a pervasive, low-level anhedonia. When people feel the environment is entirely hostile and unchangeable, the libido retreats inward, inducing a state of reflexive impotence where survival replaces desire.

• [6] Urban sociological studies on Delhi’s micro-climates show that the city’s concrete architecture intensifies heat traps in densely populated areas, turning a weather event into a weapon of stratification. The somatic experience of forty-seven degrees Celsius is heavily determined by one’s proximity to institutional cooling.

carl jung would have looked at my unwashed hair and told me i wasn’t exploring the underworld, just drowning in the plumbing, but carl is dead and his legacy has been commodified into boutique psychology for people who can’t afford real estate, so his opinion is structurally irrelevant.

the actual plot of my life is a masterpiece of domestic logistics masquerading as a mythopoetic descent. for years, i have watched the men in my orbit - my father, my brother, my friends - engage in the traditional patrilineal cold war that has been running since uruk. it is an ancient, bureaucratic stalemate where communication is restricted to the mechanics of German sedans, lawn maintenance, and brief, agonizingly stiff texts about sports statistics. men do not look each other in the eye; they look straight ahead through the windshield of a moving car, terrified that if they speak an unvarnished truth, the entire infrastructure of the family will collapse into the dashboard.

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my specific role in this epic silence is the unpaid stage manager. i am the eldest daughter, which means i was drafted early into the managerial elite of the household while the men were permitted to clumsily float away into emotional illiteracy. my current survival strategy is a highly calculated act of sabotage: i constantly ghost plans with my father and brother, meticulously removing myself from the calendar so that a social vacuum opens up. i am manually engineering “intentional fun times” between them like a camp counselor forcing two hostile toddlers to share a plastic bucket. “if i am not there to translate their grunts into english,” my internal logic dictates, “they will be forced by the sheer vacuum of reality to become a family.” it is a beautiful, desperate theory, but the dry reality is that the moment i step out of the room, they probably just sit there in the dark, staring at their phones, waiting for me to return and tell them what they are feeling.

and then there is my mother, who does not simply send a passive-aggressive text message; she ascends the steps of my subconscious and morphs directly into a female goddess archetype. last night she was isis; the night before she was a multi-armed manifestation of primordial judgment, folding laundry that doesn’t match and looking at me with an expression of divine disappointment. this is the ultimate psychological bait-and-switch. if my mother is an anxious, real-world woman whose emotional equilibrium depends entirely on my willingness to manage her anxieties, then i am a daughter failing a boundary negotiation. but if she is an Olympian deity demanding a sacred sacrifice, then my misery is no longer a family systems failure - it is the cosmic order. i deify her because confrontation requires a level of energy i do not possess. it is much sexier to treat her as an ancient force of nature in my dreams than to tell her to stop calling me three times a day in the afternoon.

this is the labyrinth of the modern esoteric, a dizzying, self-referential spiral where we use ancient mythology to decorate our isolation. we sit in lonely apartments, ordering delivery on an app, claiming we are interacting with the primordial forces of the universe because it sounds better than admitting we are too exhausted to look a real barista in the eye. the maze is brilliant because the walls are made entirely of mirrors; every time i think i am encountering a “deity” or a “thought friend,” i am just looking at another refracted, highly stylized version of my own unresolved history. my inner lover is an absolute masterpiece of psychological engineering - he has infinite romantic potential, he doesn’t leave wet towels on the floor, and he understands my depths because he is my depths. he is a pristine, sterile placeholder, a psychic bag of candy that ruins my appetite for any actual, breathing human being who might show up with a flawed personality and a bad haircut.

the grand satire of my autotheory is that i have declared myself a sovereign state funded entirely by my own psychological dissociation. i have built a museum with no doors, walked through the halls adjusting the lighting on the statues of my mothers, my fathers, my lovers, and my enemies, deeply impressed by my own curation. but the museum is built entirely out of their materials. my inner deities are incredibly unoriginal; they speak the exact language of the culture i am trying to escape. my internal enemy doesn’t look like a demon; he looks like me but with a higher credit score, and he uses the precise, passive-aggressive vocabulary of an HR email to remind me that my peers are achieving milestones while i lie face down on a mattress talking to abstractions in lowercase.

i am on a total labor strike against the emotional demands of the material world, using joseph campbell quotes as a picket line. i have conceptualized my inability to connect into a radical, mythopoetic lifestyle choice so that i can play the role of the lonely deity rather than the lonely human. a deity doesn’t need to text back. a deity doesn’t need to apologize for being emotionally unavailable. but eventually, the laptop battery hits twelve percent, the sun goes down, and the statues in my head stop talking back. escapism is a trap because you always bring yourself along for the ride, and i am left with the heavy, ordinary realization that the labyrinth isn’t a spiritual achievement at all. it’s just the only room in the house where nobody is calling my name.

I’ve been thinking about Marcus Aurelius- - that smug, Roman bastard who thought he had the universe figured out because he sat in a tent and wrote down rules for himself while his soldiers died of gangrene.

So here is my version. 9 starting points for any naive, stupid soul who volunteered to play out their karmic script on earth. You had enough good karma to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth, but you didn’t have enough wisdom to realize the spoon was choking you. You’re trapped. Welcome.

1. The universe decided you would be painfully, brutally beautiful, but clinically autistic. It’s a hilarious joke. People have simple, ape brains; they see a pretty girl and immediately project “bitch” onto her skin. They expect the performance - the smirking, the status games, the manipulation. But you’re just sitting there like a misplaced angel, staring at a specific grease stain on the rug for four hours because the geometry makes sense to you. Your face is a billboard for a store that’s completely empty. They treat you like a predator when you’re actually just a confused bird that flew through a window and keeps hitting the glass.

Write this down.

2. The men in the house are useless. Your father, your brother - they don’t care about you. They buy the cars They pay the guy at the gate. They like the walls because it keeps the noise out. But when your own mind starts chewing on your ribs, they just stand in the doorway holding the financial paper, looking at you like you’re a dog that pissed on the rug. They won't save you. They’re just waiting for you to stop making that sound so they can eat dinner

3. Your mother is your primary antagonist. It’s a Plutonian synastry nightmare disguised as a maternal bond. Do not confess anything to her. If you tell her your soul hurts, she’ll just pocket that information to use as ammunition when she wants to destroy you in a few days. She’s the reason you can’t answer a friend’s phone call. You have to sit in your room, paralyzed, waiting until the hallway goes dead before you even dare to whisper into the receiver. Because the second you try to connect with the outside world, she will barge through that door, veins popping in her neck, screaming a list of the exact ways your existence has ruined her adult life.

4. You don’t get a intermission. Did I emphasize consecutive? One after the other. A heartbreak, a friend reality check, a sudden betrayal, another heartbreak, like a row of bricks hitting you repeatedly on the soft part of your skull. The universe will systematically clear your contact list until you are forced into complete, frozen isolation. A cosmic solitary confinement cell. You’ll sit on your bed forever until the light changes and you realize the truth: your little angel self has a slavering, ugly demon attached to its spine, and you’re the one buying it groceries.

5. You will be so naturally brilliant at everything that it becomes a form of violence against your own life. If you pick up a paintbrush, you’re a genius; if you write a sentence, you’re a prophet; if you play an instrument, people cry. It’s disgusting. It would be unfair to the rest of your talents to ever pick just one thing. So, naturally, you do nothing. You can’t stick to a career, a project, or any location outside the four corners of your mattress. You are, quite literally, bedridden by your own capacity. A genius corpse, rotting and yearning under a duvet.

6. Because you have the cash but no skin, you spend all your money just trying to keep the world from touching you. You pay a premium for isolation. Private cars so you don’t have to breathe the public's unbrushed teeth; expensive grocery delivery so you don't have to look at people choosing tomatoes; headphones that cost a month’s rent just so the city doesn't vibrate through your teeth. You’re rich enough to buy a cage, but too poor to buy the space around it.

7. When you break down, they treat it like a leaking pipe. They don’t look at your eyes; they look at the bottle on the nightstand. Did she take the blue one? Is the air conditioner broken? They want to call a mechanic. Your father looks at his plate, cuts his meat, and asks your mother if the smell in the hall is coming from your room.

8. Your friends are just ghosts with bad teeth. They like you when you’re the pretty thing at the table who doesn’t say much. The minute you turn gray - the minute you can’t get out of bed because your skull feels like it’s full of wet sand - they vanish. They don't want the girl who forgets to blink. They want the bitch who buys the drinks.

9. You aren't going to die young (you take too many supplements ; liposomal Vitamin C, the NAD+, the ashwagandha) That’s the real punishment. You have to stay in this skin for eighty years, watching the skin around your eyes turn to paper, listening to your family talk about your ovaries like they’re real estate that didn’t sell. You’ll sit in that bed until you realize the door isn’t locked, you’re just too heavy to turn the handle.

   

Amor fati, blessed bitches.

What they forgot to mention - with all their well-meaning, pious catechisms - is that when you starve the Ego completely, you accidentally starve the light that keeps the whole machinery running. My humility became a form of quiet, violent self-erasure.

By the time I hit university, I was just a ghost wandering through a fog of my own making. I was an educated apparition on a campus that felt less like an institution of higher learning and more like a permanent, exhausting crossroads made of heavy, unyielding boulders. I felt like Ram in the wilderness, perpetually bracing for an ambush from invisible forces, convinced that my inner sun was an offense to the dark. Whenever someone insulted me - which they did, with that casual, bureaucratic, South Delhi cruelty - I just took it. I accepted it as a cosmic tax.

I am, after all, a daughter of Saturn.[^1]

Today is his birthday - He’s the lord of delays, the cold eye that watches the scales. In Delhi, we treat power with a toxic mixture of terror and flattery; we build massive temples to the exact planet who slows our blood to a crawl. Saturn doesn’t give a damn about your elegant excuses or your polished prose. He checks the intention beneath the act - especially the intentions you try to hide from yourself.

And yet, the universe relies on a certain terrifying irony. God, in an act of either supreme generosity or dark humor, granted us free will. It belongs to me, it belongs to the worst politicians trading favors in Lutyens’ Delhi, and it potentially belongs to the cold-blooded reptilians operating from some distant exoplanet. Free will means we are allowed to absolutely ruin ourselves. It means I am allowed to stay up until three in the morning, ignoring the world, to watch obscure Japanese anime on YouTube.

Last night, my family finally left me alone. After days of heavy, claustrophobic coddling - the kind of collective family attention that feels like being buried alive in hand-woven pashminas - I begged them to go focus on their own orbits.

I retreated into my personal armor: an oversized, faded cotton T-shirt and shorts. I dove down the rabbit hole.

I stumbled across The Laws of the Sun (2000) and its sequel, The Golden Laws (2003), animated films produced by Ryuho Okawa’s religious movement, Happy Science. They are magnificent, brilliant, and utterly unhinged pieces of media. While watching, the number 777 flashed across the screen - the exact triple-digit sequence that has been stalking me across billboards, phone screens, and receipts for weeks. I’m a skeptic, sure, but how often does a coincidence need to slap you in the face before it feels true?

My father, who possesses the grounded, amused skepticism of a man who has survived both Indian bureaucracy and raising a philosopher, always laughs when I point out these synchronicities. “Oh, you philosophers,” he says, shaking his head with a grin, “you want to question even the most mundane and absurd things. You’re all a crazy breed.”

He isn’t wrong. I completely agree with him. But there is a deeper irony here: in the vocabulary of the cosmos, the father is the Sun - Surya. And the myth of the Sun and Saturn is one of the oldest, coldest domestic tragedies in history.

The Sun God, Surya, was married to Sanjna, who found his blinding, nuclear radiance impossible to endure. Unable to bear his heat, she created a shadow-clone of herself, named Chhaya (literally, Shadow), to take her place in the marital bed while she retreated to the forests to perform penance. Surya, brilliant but oblivious, didn’t even notice the substitution. From this union of blinding light and absolute darkness, Shani - Saturn - was born.[^2]

When Shani was in the womb, Chhaya performed intense penance under the scorching sun to please Lord Shiva. The extreme heat turned the unborn child charred and pitch-black. When Surya first looked upon his newborn son, he recoiled in disgust at the infant’s dark complexion. He doubted Chhaya’s fidelity and insulted them both. Shani, returning his father’s gaze with a glance charged with inherent karmic power, looked back at the Sun. His gaze caused Surya to be instantly struck with vitiligo, and the horses of the Sun’s chariot froze in their tracks.[^3]

This is the primordial rift: the father who cannot handle the darkness of his own creation, and the son who weaponizes time and consequence to humble the light. In astrological configurations, a Sun-Saturn conjunction (Surya-Shani Yuti) is notoriously difficult. It represents an internal civil war between the expressive self (Sun) and the restrictive super-ego (Saturn). It manifests as a lifelong feeling of being un-fathered, or of having to earn the right to exist from an authority figure who is always looking away.

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The Ankles of the Ethers

I live with this tension in my bones. My pattern recognition is a strange, mycelial thing - it completely refuses to move in straight lines. I see connections where others see dead space. This leaves me suspended between two distinct realms: my upper chakras are chronically intoxicated by the ethers, by the Akashic records, by the beautiful, airy nonsense of pure philosophy.

Meanwhile, my poor, material legs suffer. I have a persistent, dull ache in my ankles.

Years ago, out of a desperate, late-night curiosity, I looked into the psycho-spiritual and traditional Chinese medicine roots of ankle pain. The diagnosis was simple, almost mocking: an inability to tether to the earth.[^4]

It makes sense. I have spent my twenty-six years feeling like an alien dropped into the Saha world - this Buddhist concept of the mundane earth, literally translating to the “world of endurance.” We are living deep in the belly of the Kaliyuga, the age of vice, where the cosmic bull of Dharma stands precariously on a single leg. The ancient texts warned us that during this epoch, the darkness would cast a shadow so thick over the human mind that even angels would lose their way and act like demons.

How do you walk on a planet of demons when your ankles refuse to grip the soil?

The only way through is the Bodhisattva path. In Mahayana Buddhism, the Bodhisattva is one who has reached the brink of liberation, the far shore of Nirvana, but turns back at the edge. They look at the screaming, chaotic mass of humanity and make a vow: I will not enter the final rest until every blade of grass, every wandering ghost, and every broken soul is ferried across before me. [^5]

It is a path of deliberate, radical compassion. It forces you to look at the people who have deliberately hurt you, the ones who mistook your silence for weakness, and pray for their happiness. Not out of some saccharine, moral superiority, but because you realize that their cruelty is merely a symptom of their own deep, unmitigated poisoning by the Kaliyuga.

The Seduction of the Material

This brings me back to the Japanese anime and the structural tests of the soul. The films are incredibly bizarre artifacts - relics of late-90s and early-2000s millennial anxieties, blending cosmic evolutionary theory with esoteric spirituality. They are easy to mock, but beneath their dated animation lies a strange, unvarnished genius. They show a universe where history is a grand, cyclical tapestry of continents rising and sinking, of Mu and Atlantis, of ancient spaceships and spiritual interventions.

The elite, material world loves to look down on these fringe narratives. Look at them, glued to their petty, grotesque, material pleasures - chasing property in Gurgaon, networking at high-society cocktail parties, trading their life-force for digital numbers on a screen.

Don’t misunderstand me: I enjoy my comforts. I like a good linen sheet and a well-made espresso as much as any bourgeois intellectual. But I am not greedy for it. I have turned down proposals from billionaires - men who could have bought me a life of permanent, gilded safety.

Whenever those doors opened, something inside me recoiled. I knew it was a test. I did not love them. For various reasons.

It is the same test that Siddhartha faced in Hermann Hesse’s retelling of his journey.[^6] Before he could become the Buddha, he had to sit in the garden of Kamala, he had to understand the games of the merchants, and he had to face the illusions of the material world. In the deeper, more fierce traditions of Indian Tantra - as articulated by scholars of the Left-Hand Path - the seeker (sadhaka) must confront the terrifying, devouring aspect of the Divine Mother: Mahakali.[^7]

In high Tantra, Kali is not merely a demon slayer; she is the ultimate destroyer of Kala (Time) and Maya (Illusion). When a practitioner is deep in Sadhana (spiritual practice), the Goddess does not send gentle reminders; she sends radical, shattering disruptions. She tests your non-attachment by throwing the highest material temptations at your feet. If you reach out to grab the gold, her sword falls. If you look past the temptation, recognizing it as a passing phantom, you pass through her teeth into true awakening.

The Birthday Note

The Laws of the Sun and The Golden Laws weave these threads into a cosmic fever dream. The plots stretch across billions of years: from El Cantare (the supreme spiritual source) creating life on Earth, to the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs, to the intervention of highly evolved extraterrestrial intelligences who seeded ancient civilizations when humanity lost its way.

Viewed through the lens of modern cultural critique, these films can be understood as a coping mechanism for a post-bubble Japan experiencing a spiritual vacuum - an attempt to synthesize Western New Age thought, traditional Buddhist cosmology, and science fiction into a unified theory of existence.[^8] They are weird, yes. But they are innovative in a way that modern, focus-grouped media could never dream of being.

My brain made the final connections as the credits rolled. The universe is not a series of random accidents. It is an intricate, mathematical poem. The anime, the numbers, the persistent ache in my joints, the long shadow of my father’s brilliance, and the heavy, slow hand of Saturn are all part of the same script.

So, happy birthday, Saturn. Thank you for the heavy, difficult lessons. Thank you for the boundary lines that forced me to look inward. And thank you for the Sun - even the one that burns too bright to look at directly.

The timing, as always, was immaculate.

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[^1]: In Vedic astrology (Jyotish), a person with a prominent Saturn or born under Capricorn/Aquarius ascendants is often considered a “child of Saturn,” inheriting his traits of discipline, systemic restriction, and karmic retribution.

[^2]: See the Matsya Purana and the Vishnu Purana for the definitive accounts of Surya’s domestic exile and the creation of Chhaya. The shadow is not a lack of light, but its direct consequence.

[^3]: The mythological animosity between Sun and Saturn translates directly into astrological charts; their conjunction or mutual aspect is traditionally read as an indicator of profound friction with patriarchal authority figures or state systems.

[^4]: Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) associates the ankles closely with the Kidney meridian, which governs one’s ancestral energy (Jing), fear, and foundational grounding to the earth. Chronic weakness here indicates a soul floating above its vessel.

[^5]: Shantideva, Bodhicaryavatara (The Way of the Bodhisattva), Chapter 3, Verse 6: “May I be a guard for those who are without protection, a guide for those who journey, and a boat, a bridge, a passage for those desiring the further shore.”

[^6]: Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. New Directions, 1951. Siddhartha’s period as a “Samana” and his subsequent fall into the material wealth of the merchant Kamaswami serves as the classic blueprint for the necessary confrontation with luxury.

[^7]: Avalon, Arthur (Sir John Woodroffe). Shakti and Shakta. Ganesh & Co., 1918. Avalon’s treatises on the Mahanirvana Tantra outline the Vira (heroic) path, where the practitioner utilizes the very forces of worldly temptation to transcend them, under the fierce gaze of Kali.

[^8]: For an expansive critique of how new religious movements (Shinshūkyō) in Japan transformed post-war anxieties into high-budget anime epics, see Ian Reader’s Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan (Routledge, 2000).

At eighteen, I thought being ‘misunderstood’ was a tragedy. I was living in a bad indie movie, mourning my own exclusion. But as Alan Watts channeled through the Taoist farmer: Maybe.

Fortune and misfortune are just the temporary names we give to the waves of an integrated process. My social exile was the price of admission. It gave me the optics to recognize the Folk-Gothic hemorrhage currently leaking through Indian cinema.

In the visceral roars of Kantara and the arterial reds of Bulbbul, the Western "Hero’s Journey" is revealed as a shallow, individualistic delusion. These films offer a return to the "Abject" - that which the polite world rejects but the soul requires for its own corrective justice.

It is a psychological reclamation where the "glitch" in the social machine becomes the vessel for the Daiva. Ultimately, the "Maybe" of the outsider is the only honest posture in a universe that is not a series of property disputes to be won, but an integrated, terrifying dance of ancestral echoes and sacred rot.

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The Land Screams Back

My father is a man of corporate resilience, a person who survived the 90s by turning his heart into a spreadsheet. Yet, he watches Kantara (2022) with a fervor that feels like an ancestral haunting.

When the protagonist, Shiva, undergoes the Bhoota Kola - eyes bulging, throat tearing, the human ego dissolving to make room for a forest deity - my dad doesn’t just watch. He leans in until his forehead almost touches the glass.

“It’s not a man dancing,” he whispers. “It’s the land screaming back at us.”

In that moment, the Western “Hero’s Journey” dies a pathetic death. There is no “self-discovery” here. There is only annihilation. Shiva becomes a vessel for the Daiva, a reminder that we don’t own the soil; we are just parasites who have overstayed our welcome.

My father’s obsession is the symptom of a modern psyche starving for a return to a Dharma that doesn’t care about your property laws or your LinkedIn profile. It is the sound of the collective memory waking up to the fact that we were never meant to be individuals.

The Third-Date Litmus Test

If Kantara is the land’s roar, Bulbbul (2020) is the roar of the Anima gone feral. It is a revision of the “Chudail” - the witch with backward-turned feet. Historically, she is the monster we hunt to keep the patriarchy safe. In Bulbbul, she is the supernatural justice system we deserve.The red in Bulbbul is the color of the abject. It is what Julia Kristeva calls the "shattering of the ego." If he can’t stand the red on the screen, he’ll never survive the red in the room.

I’ve made it a ritual to make potential husbands watch it on the third date. It’s my filter. I sit there, sipping tea with a predatory sass, watching them squirm as the screen turns a sickening, arterial red. I am looking for the flinch. They see a monster murdering men; I see a corrective surge in the collective field.

“Why is she so violent?” they inevitably ask, right before I decide there won’t be a fourth.

There is a specific male fragility that views "supernatural justice" as "unfair." It suggests they are secretly aware that a fair system would have no place for them at all. They want the “Wonder Woman” version of empowerment - palatable, sanitized, and sold in a box. They can’t handle a woman who has turned her “misfortune” into a claw. If a man can’t handle the sight of a Goddess delivering justice with her feet turned backward, he certainly can’t handle a girl who realized her “difficulty” was actually her divinity.

The Sacred Rot

The thread that cinches the wound is Tumbbad (2018), a film that smells of damp earth and ancient greed. It’s about Hastar, a god struck from history for wanting too much. The protagonist, Vinayak, spends his life stealing gold from Hastar’s womb-like temple. He thinks he’s “lucky” until the gold starts to eat his lineage from the inside out.

A lesson the IMF might have benefited from, had they spent less time on "emerging markets" and more time on the mythology of insatiable hunger. One does not "emerge" from a womb of gold without paying the price in blood.

In a culture obsessed with the “good fortune” of fitting in and moving up, Tumbbad is a warning. My “misfortune” of being an outsider in school was the very thing that saved me from the Integrated Rot. If I had been successfully taxidermied by that private education, I would have been just another consumer of the gold. I would have lost the ability to see the Goddess in the trees or the ghost in the machine.

The Maybe

The qualia of these films - the visceral, rain-soaked beauty - is the sound of the Indian soul waking up to its own complexity. We are moving away from the “Good vs. Evil” binary - a Western import that feels increasingly thin and returning to the world of ‘Maybe.’

Is it bad that I scare men away with folk-horror? Maybe. Is it good that I was a social pariah? Maybe.

I no longer care about being “categorized” by people who think power is something you spray-paint gold. I am part of a massive, ancient, and terrifying dance. When the rain starts to fall and the Daiva starts to scream, I don’t feel like a consolation prize. I feel like the red soil itself - jagged, unmanaged, and finally, righteously, loud.

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Growing up, Bubbles was the “soft” one. While her sisters were busy being the id and the ego of Townsville, Bubbles was weaponizing her innocence. She spoke to squirrels and cried over smudged crayons, but when the chips were down, she was a tactical nuke of pure empathy. Lately, I’ve realized I wasn’t just watching a Saturday morning cartoon; I was studying a survival strategy for the end of the world. Because in 2026, existing feels like a full-time shift in a factory that only manufactures dread.

My feed is a bespoke hellscape. It’s Hantavirus alerts, CERN-induced vertigo, and a localized soup of planetary paranoia. The online astrologers are pointing trembling fingers at the Saturn-Mars conjunction, claiming it’s the cosmic trigger for this “cosmic horror.” The Gnostics in the comments go further: we’re pawns in an intergalactic skirmish, trapped in a holographic cage - the 21st-century update to the Black Iron Prison.

It’s seductive, isn’t it? The idea that our exhaustion isn’t just bad policy or a rogue virus, but a high-stakes space opera. It makes the grocery bill feel cinematic.

The Envy of the Golden Retriever

I watch my parents, mid-fifties and blissfully tuned into the mundane hum of network TV. I watch them with an envy that borders on the erotic. I want to be like them. I want to be like the neighbourhood dogs - fed, warm, and fundamentally incapable of conceptualising bio-sovereignty.

The dogs don’t care that CERN is currently hunting for Dark Matter - the “invisible glue” that makes up 27% of the universe but refuses to show up for a photo op. The dogs don’t lose sleep over the fact that we are searching for the nothingness that holds us together. They just want a bone and a sunbeam.

My aunt - bless her civil, sane heart - used to warn me: “Too much knowledge will kill you.” She wasn’t just being dramatic; she was unknowingly reciting the Myth of Cassandra. Cassandra was the priestess cursed to see the future with terrifying clarity, only to have no one believe her. But the modern twist is more vicious: we see everything, we believe all of it, and we are still utterly paralysed.

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The Prometheus Hangover

We are repeating the Promethean cycle, but instead of stealing fire from the gods, we’re stealing “Breaking News” notifications from the abyss. And every morning, we have our livers pecked out by the vultures of the 24-hour cycle.

There is a biological limit to this. Science calls it Allostatic Load - the literal wear and tear on your meat-suit from chronic stress. By refusing to “laze around,” I’m not being an ethical citizen; I’m just spiking my cortisol until my DNA feels like frayed wire. I’m vibrating with the ethical weight of eight billion people, and for what? Integrity? Or just a very loud, very expensive form of vanity?

The “prison” isn’t the world. The prison is the belief that our worry is a tax we pay to keep the planet spinning.

To live in a state of constant existential exhaustion is a performance for an audience that isn’t watching. As Joan Didion famously noted, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” The story of the “Intergalactic Cage” is just a way to make sense of the fact that we’ve forgotten how to breathe.

I’m done with it. I’m reclaiming the Bubbles archetype. I’m going to be “innocent” enough to enjoy a slice of toast without thinking about the global grain supply chain, and I’m going to be absolutely lethal about protecting my peace.

If the world is a cage, I might as well talk to the squirrels. I’m putting down the Gnostic texts and sitting with the dogs. They don’t know about the Saturn-Mars conjunction, but they know exactly how the sun feels on their fur.

Maybe that’s the only knowledge that isn’t trying to kill us.

The apocalypse will happen whether I’m hydrated or not. I might as well be hydrated.

To bring up archetypes or actual compassion in this climate is to feel like Paris Hilton at a Davos summit. You find yourself forced into a rhetorical chokehold just to squeeze a satirical thought into a mind that has been structurally dismantled by the algorithm. We aren’t being “led” by AI; we are being strip-mined by it.

We tell ourselves stories in order to slive, or maybe we just tell them to the server racks. I’m writing this from a farm where the Wi-Fi is intentionally, expensively patchy - a luxury price tag for the right to be unreachable. Outside the gates, the city feels like a low-res simulation designed by a developer who peaked in 2012 and has been phone-eyeing his resignation ever since. People move in predictable, dopamine-fried loops, behaving like glitching NPCs in a narrative they didn’t even bother to co-author.

The Cost of Being Known

There is a tax on this kind of awareness. I call it the Discernment Tax. It is the literal friction cost of refusing to be a data-point in an era governed by the Legibility Mandate.

The “System” which, for me, is a Venn diagram between my mother’s matchmaking database in South Delhi and a Silicon Valley server demands total transparency. You are expected to have a Personal Brand, which is really just a high-res digital cadaver that allows the grid to perform an autopsy on your psyche in real-time. Foucault was right about the Panopticon; he just didn’t realise the cells would have such good cars to drive or great books to read - a woman can do pretty well by herself if given ample resources, not working for an insecure Boss who cannot tolerate Gen Z Audacity of calling an apple, a damn apple.

If you refuse to be seen, you are penalized with invisibility. Socially, privacy is now coded as suspicion. If you don’t join the performative outrage of the week, the digital aunties decide you’re “difficult.” It’s deeply un-chic.

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The Swan and the Simulation

I’ve become obsessed with the Hamsa, the swan of the Neera-Ksheera Viveka. In the myths, the swan separates the milk from the water - the essence from the dilution. It is the original curator.

Most girls I know are currently drowning in Cassie-level Maya - that desperate, “pick-me” energy of a subject disintegrating for validation from a Nate Jacobs who is literally just a Kaliyuga avatar of Indra. In the Padma Purana, Indra was cursed with a thousand vulvas for his voyeurism; modern Nates just have a thousand tracking cookies and a God complex.

I am an Apsara, and I refuse to dance in a Swarga built on AWS.

The tragedy of the Euphoria premiere last month wasn’t the plot; it was the realization that the Male Gaze has been replaced by a Recommendation Engine. Cassie didn’t want Nate; she wanted the illegibility of Maddy. Maddy is the Black Swan, the sphinx who knows that being un-indexable is the only real power left.

Opacity is the New Birkin

While the masses are bribed into total transparency for free biometric services, a Data-Aristocracy has emerged. For the elite, the Discernment Tax isn’t a burden; it’s a Veblen good.

To be “known” is to be managed. To be illegible is to be sovereign. Privacy has migrated from a universal right to a premium tier of existence. If you can’t find me, it’s not because I’m lost, it’s because I’ve reclaimed the right to be a ghost. Purely 12th house Sun energy, as per my Vedic astrologer.

I spend my afternoons feeding the grid noise searching for 10th-century Sanskrit grammar followed immediately by black-box AI vulnerabilities and niche 90s lip liners. It makes me expensive to track. It’s a whimsical, slightly delusional way to live, but I am aware of the taboos. Life mimics myths, and I would rather be a ghost in the real world than a goddess in their simulation.

A life well-lived is one that remains, at its core, un-extractable. Love that for me.

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Glossary for the Socially Discerning:

• Indra’s Curse: Per Padma Purana (1.54), he was cursed for seducing Ahalya through deception. Consent via algorithm is just a modern disguise, darling.

• Neera-Ksheera Viveka: The Vedantic metaphor for the power of discrimination. Knowing the difference between the “Main Character” and the “NPC.”

• Legibility Mandate: The societal pressure to make yourself simple enough for a machine to understand. (Gross.)

• Veblen Good: A luxury item where demand increases as the price goes up. Privacy is now so expensive it’s actually fashionable.

The list is chronological, I’m weird like that. I can’t recall things easily so I make an extra effort - see, for now I can place each line next to a person, a room, a time of day. The sentence is pretty clean, kudos to my effort. The aftermath stretches... TURNS OUT, My sense of timing has never been as impressive as I once believed.

Here’s a story : Kali, the dark goddess in Hinduism, the mother goddess to those reading about her for the first time - made sense to me before theology did. The necklace in her iconography reads as a count. Each severed head marks a claim that exceeded its ground. Some Tantric commentaries read those heads alongside the varṇamālā. Units of sound withdrawn after overreach. The emphasis falls on limit which shouldn’t be crossed. Speech has one. I usually locate it after crossing it.

Satyam Shivam Sundaram functioned as a rule in my childhood. Truth first. Alignment after. Beauty, if it glows on your face even after sipping one too many the night before, with unwavering faith of course.

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I register two layers in any of my exchanges. What is said, and what is forming alongside it. The second layer directs my response more than the first. This sounds like discernment. In practice, it produces a reliable mistake. Which I only realise too late.

With people, the beginning carries little resistance. Our initial Conversations move without effort. We exchange DMs thoroughly, become inseparable, like playing padel for the first time and you get obsessed. Then a structure begins to form. People orient themselves within it and expectations take shape. Oh no…dud dud dud.

I intervene at that point and tend to name what is forming. Example: a friend, very dear, during a long conversation, besties until a small shift in tone, a subtle repositioning. I say, “You are trying to secure this as something stable because you are afraid of how quickly it might change.” Silence. We continue speaking, yet the conversation turns into commentary on itself. We meet less after that.

Example: a situationship, the familiar kind. Imagine giving Shiva’s teachings to Nate Jacob. What do you expect? Charged, inconsistent, persuasive in fragments. He says something careless that reveals more than he possibly intended. I respond, “You do not want me, you want the version of yourself that appears when you are with me.” The talks continue for a few weeks, thinner each time, until it stops without formal ending.

Example: a group setting. Someone posturing, stretching their story, I say, lightly, “That sounds rehearsed.” It is meant as a small incision, tiny cut, I promise until it becomes the eventual end.

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Calling this honesty is insufficient. Your description of it flattens all good intent, makes people want to kill you. Really, i’ve seen them try to strangle me in my dreams. I hate sleeping alone, god forbid without a tiny lamp on. TMI. I know.

Within Tantra, ahamkāra refers to the production of a centre. It stabilises quickly and recruits critique. The position of “the one who sees clearly” forms easily. It carries authority. It also isolates. but I tend to take it in stride, kind of imagining myself walk like Doja cat or strut away like Maddie during that face off with Nate’s family.

There is a parallel pattern. I am drawn to people who resist the definition I give them. Then the interaction is longer, and my usual intervention or (BIG MOUTH) is delayed. Attachment develops in that delay. Recognition of the pattern does not stop it, which suggests that understanding has limited influence on behaviour in this context. I am sorry for this rant. I like to dig deep into absurd conclusions.

There is also a narrative I sometimes adopt, LIKE for EVERYTHING ELSE IN MY LIFE - that I am cutting through illusion, I AM THE NEXT SAVIOUR AFTER CHRIST YAY. That I refuse ego, theirs and mine. That I play small until a limit is crossed, slash—-KALI ENTERS.The narrative places me on the side of truth. Look at me, with my small ego!!!

Kali in the Tantric frame doesn’t slice your throat off for no good reason. The cut corresponds exactly to excess. No earlier, no later. The distinction matters. I fail to maintain it consistently. Imagine she’s the real Ozempic of the cosmos, and you will literally pay for it.

A slight change has occurred though. The impulse to articulate arises and is delayed, yet now I swallow it. The exchange between someone I really like, and care for, continues without me immediately defining it. The present moment develops more slowly. It holds longer. I do not find this particularly satisfying, which may explain why I fail to sustain it. My brain is over-speeding, beyond the permitted ranges of society.

Shiva appears in the same iconographic field as the ground beneath his consort Kali’s foot. Stillness in relation to movement. The balance is evident. I tend toward intervention, even when restraint would be more useful. Someone shut me up. Please x

Satyam returns with a different emphasis now - Truth requires certain Alignment. This is less elegant than what I was taught and more difficult to practice. I am hedonistic, if lose that balance, trust me, the acne follows…

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Each entry in my field of consciousness marks a moment where my articulation exceeded my capacity. Where my insistence of surpassing the ‘present’ halted any development. Where the ego operated under the assumption that it was correcting something external. An enemy. Annihilation. However, I am included in that count.

This is not a strong beginning. It does, however, explain everything that follows.

Astro-cartography first, which assigned Egypt to my Neptune line. Dreams, illusion, spiritual longing, emotional logic that sounds convincing until spoken out loud. Egypt entered my life already blurred at the edges, already carrying the suggestion of meaning (very foggy neptunian style)

Then my ex started dreaming he was being wrapped alive like a mummy. Not dead but immobilised. Preserved with his consciousness in tact, how horrifying. At the time, I translated this into the language I had available. Avoidance. Fear of intimacy. The usual diagnoses people use to avoid saying they don’t understand something…

A tarot reader later mentioned I had some connection to ancient Egypt. She said it casually, like she was commenting on the weather. I went home and opened seventeen tabs like I was about to personally verify history.

This is the part where a normal person would stop.

I did not stop (I might have add, like in a good way that compels me to decode my current obsession as though my life depends on it). I have naturally low dopamine levels, talk about being born depressed. BUT I DIGRESS…here goes

Osiris is a king associated with order, fertility, and continuity. His jealous brother kills him, cuts him into pieces, and scatters him across the land with methodical intent.

Osiris becomes the first mummy. A body that requires reassembly to continue at all. Kind of like an ego-death I suppose?

Isis, his wife, goes looking.

She didn’t grieve exactly - she moved, located fragments, and restored the sexy body she loved. She puts him back together. I wish I loved someone enough to do the same. FML.

Briefly, she brings him back. Long enough to conceive a child. Woah.

Then he leaves again,, and Permanently (like most men)

This was recorded as success. As do most tarot readers today - “sister, who needs him anyway!”

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Anyway, The Egyptians approached the self as a composite.

The ka, a life force that continues and requires sustenance.
The ba, a mobile personality that can move between states.

So essentially, you are already multiple before anything happens to you. I have been told I have at least 10 different personalities. The person who said this also hated me, but perhaps saw my demons better than I still do. Karmics…

Mummification, described plainly, reads like a set of decisions. They removed the organs. Preserved them separately. Catalogued them. The brain was extracted and discarded.

But but but but…They kept the heart.

This feels like a choice I have been avoiding making my entire life.

After death, there is a scale.

On one side, your heart. On the other, a feather representing balance, proportion, order. If your heart is heavier, it is eaten. The process ends there. No explanation and certainly no interest in how well you understood yourself Ms. self aware.

I read this and continued interpreting it. Which is, in retrospect, predictable as I have never had a shortage of insight. Only a shortage of consequences.

For years, I have collected frameworks the way other people collect habits they might eventually use. Astrology, psychoanalysis, archetypes, personality theory. I can explain most of what I do with a level of clarity that is, at times, impressive.

Explanation is the most socially acceptable form of avoidance. The Egyptians would not have found this impressive.

I would read about funerary rituals for hours and then switch tabs to messages asking if I’m coming out. There is something destabilising about moving directly from ritual dismemberment to dinner plans.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I remembered the tattoo I’ve been meaning to remove.

Imbalanced scales, hanging from an Om symbol. At the time, it felt like a gesture toward something universal. A small, permanent admission (albeit unconsciously) that balance has never been my natural state.

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There was a brief period where all of this began to feel connected.

The map. The dreams. The reading. The recurring number 777 appearing often enough to feel intentional. There is a version of reality where this means something significant or maybe I am just pathetically delusional (pisces water baby here). Where it points to continuity, to memory, to a life that extends beyond the current one in a way that can be accessed with enough attention (the yogic third eye stuff). Continuation in altered form, Osiris is less a figure than a pattern.

My ex dreamed of being trapped inside a preserved body.

I keep trying to preserve versions of myself by explaining them instead of letting them end. The alignment is inelegant and difficult to ignore.

I checked flights to Egypt again this morning.

There is something embarrassingly sincere about the impulse. The belief that proximity might alter perception. That standing near an old pyramid might save me from something I created myself.

I am aware of how this sounds, and it doesn’t help my case AT ALL.

If I go, I will arrive with the same habits. I will look. I will interpret. I will try to feel something specific and then analyse whether I felt it correctly.

There will be heat. Tourists. A version of the place that accommodates people like me, who arrive carrying questions that are older than they are.

There are narratives where this resolves. Memory returns and the pattern reveals itself as something chosen, something intentional. Like I AM THE CREATOR FUCKING HER OWN LIFE.

There are others where nothing resolves at all. Where the experience simply joins everything else I have collected. Another layer, another interpretation. Both feel plausible.

The flight tabs are open, surely, but the decision has not been made. It has also not been dismissed.

LOVE YA X

Good people. Bad people. Winners. Losers. The rest of the world was now a moral chessboard I was supposed to learn by heart before I had language for nuance. My grandmother would tell stories at night, her voice was steady because it assumes the listener is already inside the myth. The righteous moved forward, the disruptive force neutralised (like how I would soak my feet after any argument in epsom salt, lavender or rose depending on which day and romantic intentions I have), balance, beauty, rejuvenated, and returned as if it had been waiting patiently all along. Yay!

Somewhere along the way, I began directing my prayers like they were targeted interventions. “Remove this toxic person" “Make that situation bearable” “Clean my aura” My enemies had faces, and those faces had mothers, and those mothers had their own silent scripts running in the background (like in India the common stereotype of Bengali mothers practicing dark arts generate a lot of satirical reels on Instagram). These toxic exes who turned affection into leverage, asshole school Teachers who seemed to enjoy watching a young mind bend under invisible expectations (I felt like a walking punching bag and commonly made the joke that their sexual frustration gets activated by my aura) The texture of it all was personal, intimate, repetitive. I kept looking for the moment where the system would intervene and choose my side. “Why won’t u step in GODDDD?????”

My understanding of mythology began there, long before I ever read it with intention. It was bedtime storytelling that doubled as a rehearsal for moral certainty the next morning in school, where I would be mocked for being flat chested (which later turned to the perfect pair which do not make my back hurt, hanks to a late bloom; thank you very much) Later, when I actually started studying myths across cultures, the patterns felt embarrassingly familiar. I mean - embarrassingly af.

In Hindu cosmology, the figure of Ravana (who was a very cool musician and meditator as well) is not introduced as a flat villain with a single note of darkness. He is composed of learning, austerity, command, charisma that can hold serious attention in a room. His imbalance emerges through the way desire expands until it begins to distort judgment. Opposing him is Rama, whose presence is often framed as alignment with dharma (or sometimes too much passivity like Indian girls are taught to replicate even when we wanna punch someone in the face and its also illegal so whatever) who remains rather balanced under pressure (but I would need pills for that). The encounter between them reads less like a moral spectacle and more like a collision between two internal logics that cannot coexist in the same configuration.

Across that same cultural field, Shiva appears in forms that complicate the idea of annihilation. He also loved smoking up btw (but it could also be an overestimation of the fact that the cannabis plant is mentioned in some texts attributed to him but used as an excuse by stoners) Destruction here was more like holding a force in place so it does not expand beyond its threshold. Disorder exists, moves, persists, and yet is kept within bounds that allow the larger structure to remain intact (hello world order). The language of total removal never fully resolves the tension.

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Greek narratives carry their own cadence of confrontation. Not that I am an expert but, always watching YouTube video essays while eating) - Heracles moves through trials that seem designed less to eliminate adversaries and more to expose limits, both physical and psychological. Each act of labour introduces a condition that tests adaptability, patience, endurance. Hubris circulates through these stories, rising when a character misreads their position in relation to forces larger than themselves. Sounds familiar.

In Norse material, the presence of Loki complicates any attempt to isolate disruption as something external to the system. His actions interfere, redirect, unravel, and in doing so participate in a chain of events that lead toward eventual dissolution. The trajectory toward Ragnarok includes both order and its unraveling, suggesting that instability is woven into the architecture itself rather than appended to it as an anomaly. My favourite YouTube tarot reader The Draconic Priestess actually called out on a guy I knew embodying the Loki archetypal trickster spirit which really got me all cracking up and researching until I was stunned at the similarities. Pattern recognition would make one do anything, I’m serious. He wanted the toxic dynamic to go on, and I didn’t, until his head invented the archetype that would best serve his interests at the moment.

Egyptian cosmology leans into maintenance (u know, how our parents do even though they want to run away) Forces associated with chaos recur in the form of Set, while balance is associated with the continual restoration of Ma’at. The presence of disorder does not disappear permanently. It returns, is managed, contained, recalibrated through repeated acts that keep equilibrium from slipping into collapse (smile and wave boys, smile and wave). The narrative implies repetition over resolution, a cycle that requires participation rather than final victory. How exhausting…and here I thought being an Indian girl with niche interests in an extra convoluted city was hard.

In Buddhist contexts, the confrontation shifts inward. The figure of Buddha encounters Mara, whose presence represents distraction, desire, illusion arising within perception itself. The interaction does not escalate into a prolonged external war. Recognition alters the field. The boundary between observer and obstacle begins to blur, and what remains is awareness that no longer grants the same authority to what once seemed obstructive. I do not personally relate to this. I’m confrontational like anything, and the whole narrative. behind ‘pray for your enemy’ was beyond me. I was forced to consider Kali in that moment, I ain’t no Gandhi. Yet, I was a practicing Buddhist (the Nam-Yo-Ho-Renge-Kyo chanting cult called Bharat Soka Gakkai from 2006-2018 I believe, fascinating how it’s been so etched in my memory and short lived right? That’s a story for another post.

Abrahamic traditions introduce another axis where temptation and deviation operate as pressures that test alignment. The figure often associated with this role, Satan, functions through influence rather than direct confrontation. The emphasis lies in choice under conditions that introduce ambiguity. The structure of the narrative depends on response, on whether alignment holds when exposed to distortion.

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When placed side by side, these traditions begin to resemble variations of a single underlying grammar. Opposition appears across systems, but its function shifts depending on context. Sometimes it reveals imbalance. Sometimes it participates in maintaining equilibrium. Sometimes it accelerates dissolution. Rarely does it behave as a purely external enemy waiting to be eliminated without consequence.

My earlier habit of praying for removal begins to look like an attempt to simplify a pattern that resists simplification but life did not cooperate.

The same kinds of friction kept reappearing in different forms. Relationships that began with intensity and drifted into misalignment. Authority figures whose expectations carried an edge that I could feel without always being able to articulate. Situations where my interpretations clashed with someone else’s behavior, producing tension that lingered long after the interaction ended. Each instance felt specific, yet the emotional signature repeated.

Instead of asking who needed to disappear, attention moved toward how these interactions were structured, what they exposed, how they influenced perception. Pain remained part of the experience, but its meaning stopped being anchored exclusively to blame. It became material that revealed patterns of attachment, expectation, projection. AND A WHOLE LOT OF ESCAPISM TO ignore MY PERSONAL HELL.

Exes who disappointed in ways that forced a reassessment of what I had assumed about reciprocity. Teachers (oh how I hated them and labelled them ‘desperate’ or sexually frustrated) whose subtle biases exposed my own sensitivity to recognition and approval. These were not isolated antagonists. They were nodes in a network that kept activating certain internal responses.

My understanding of duality changed alongside this.

Polarity stopped behaving like a battlefield with fixed sides and began to resemble a condition that allows perception itself to function. Without contrast, distinctions blur. Without distinction, orientation dissolves. Myth across cultures seems aware of this constraint. It does not eliminate darkness. It positions it in relation to light so that both remain intelligible.

The shift was less about embracing an abstract philosophy and more about recognising a pattern that had always been operating in the background of lived experience.

Even outside myth, the same dynamics continue in more ordinary or escapist maximalist forms. Festivals organise collective behaviour around symbolic acts that echo these patterns. Light, colour, temporary suspension of hierarchy, moments where social order loosens and then reassembles itself afterward. Public narratives, digital or otherwise, still rely on arcs of conflict and resolution to make sense of events. People describe their lives using frameworks that echo mythic structures without always naming them as such.

Law, morality, social systems, relationships, all carry traces of these inherited patterns. They do not operate in isolation from older narrative frameworks that have been repeated, revised, transmitted through generations. What appears as modern structure often still echoes older symbolic logic.

At a personal level, the most disorienting realisation has been that enemies do not remain stable categories.

They shift depending on context, perception, alignment. A person who appears obstructive in one phase of life may later be understood as part of a sequence that contributed to clarity. The same interaction that once felt like distortion can, with distance, reveal something about timing, expectation, or internal readiness.

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My grandmother’s stories (bless her soul, she still looks 50 at 85 maybe coz of good vibes) which once felt like simple moral instruction, now resemble early training in pattern recognition. They offered a narrative structure that I initially took literally, then questioned, then revisited with a different kind of attention. The endings remain intact in those stories, but the meaning of those endings expands once one notices that balance returns through processes that include tension, disruption, and recalibration.

The world continues to present encounters that test interpretation. Yikes. What has changed is the expectation that those encounters should resolve through removal alone.

My grandmother never said these stories were lessons. She just told them and went to sleep. No wonder her skin still glows without any Korean serums.

Ravana still gets killed. Loki gets bound. Set gets pushed aside. Mara is seen through. Satan gets resisted. Every tradition repeats the same gesture in different language. The figure that disturbs the field is never treated as disposable. It is managed, confronted, contained, reinterpreted, sometimes even necessary to the movement of everything else.

Nobody in these stories writes a version where the disruptive force is simply deleted and the world carries on unchanged.

They were part of what made certain things visible, including my own reactions, my own expectations, the places where I assumed harmony without checking whether it actually existed. HAIL SELF AWARENESS XX or self awareness of that self awareness. iS THERE A WORD FOR THIS?

Duality stayed. It has to. Nothing registers without contrast. What changed was the need to assign permanent moral identity to every person who crossed that line of discomfort.

LOVE YA DADI XX