Chapter 1: Aai (Mother)

The Mumbai-Pune Expressway is a hundred and fifty kilometres of engineered indifference. Six lanes of concrete that don't care who you are or what you've lost. I have driven it two hundred and twelve times — I counted, because counting is what I do when grief has no other shape to take.

The first time was with Aai. I was twelve. She was driving the Maruti Swift — the red one, the one that still sits in the garage because Baba can't bring himself to sell it and I can't bring myself to sit in it. She had the windows down because she said AC was for people who had forgotten what wind felt like, and the ghats were rolling past like God was slowly unspooling a green carpet, and she was singing — badly, joyfully, completely off-key — some old Asha Bhosle number that she only remembered half the words to.

"Moksh," she had said, one hand on the wheel, the other gesturing at the tunnel entrance ahead, "every tunnel has two mouths. You enter through fear, you exit through faith. Remember that."

I didn't understand it then. I was twelve. I wanted McDonald's at the Lonavala food court and I wanted her to stop singing because it was embarrassing, even though there was no one to be embarrassed in front of. Now I would give everything I own — which is not much, a shelf of books, a second-hand laptop, and a heart that doesn't work properly — to hear her sing one more time.

Six months after her death, I was driving the same expressway in the rain. November monsoon tail — the kind of rain that doesn't fall so much as materialise, turning the windshield into a watercolour painting where every colour is grey. My hands were shaking on the steering wheel of Baba's Hyundai Creta. The wipers were on full speed and still losing the battle.

I was going back to Pune after visiting her grave at the Worli cremation ground. Not a grave, technically — we're Hindu, we don't do graves. But the spot where we had collected her ashes, near the sea, where the waves had taken her remains and mixed them with salt and fish and the entire Arabian Sea's indifference.

The phone call had come on a Tuesday. I remember because I had a Political Science exam the next day and I was sitting in the Fergusson College library, third floor, the corner desk near the window that overlooks the banyan tree, reading about Hobbes and Leviathan and the social contract, and my phone had buzzed with Baba's name and I had almost declined it because Baba never called during study hours, he texted, and the fact that he was calling meant something had shifted in the universe's structure and I didn't want to know what.

"Moksh." His voice sounded like paper being torn. "Aai ka accident hua hai. Expressway pe. Tu — tu aa ja, beta."

The next six hours are a blur of autorickshaws and trains and someone's shoulder on the Deccan Queen and the smell of hospital corridors — that particular Dettol-and-despair smell that Indian government hospitals have patented — and then a doctor with tired eyes and a clipboard saying things that sounded like Hindi but might as well have been Sanskrit because my brain had stopped processing language.

She was gone. Chitra Bharadwaj, age 49, school teacher at Abhinav Vidyalaya, woman who sang Asha Bhosle in the car and made the world's best sabudana khichdi and had hands that smelled of chalk and jasmine — gone.

The police report said she lost control on the Khandala ghat section. Wet road. Sharp curve. The Swift went through the guardrail and down thirty feet into the ravine. They found her phone in the footwell, still playing that Asha Bhosle song. The officer who wrote the report misspelled her name — "Chitra Bhardwaj" — and I fixated on that missing 'a' for weeks because if you can't even spell a dead woman's name correctly, what hope is there for justice or accuracy or anything?

Baba fell apart the way Indian fathers do — silently, structurally. From the outside, nothing changed. He still went to his job at Persistent Systems. He still ate dinner at 8:30. He still watched the 9 o'clock news. But something behind his eyes switched off, like a pilot light extinguished, and the house became a museum of a marriage that no longer existed. Her saris still hung in the cupboard. Her reading glasses still sat on the bedside table. The calendar in the kitchen still showed the month she died because no one turned the page.

I returned to Fergusson College because what else do you do when you're twenty-two and your mother is dead and your father is a ghost wearing a man's skin? You attend lectures. You sit in the canteen and eat misal pav that tastes like cardboard. You pretend that Political Science and Economics matter when the only political reality you understand is that the state couldn't keep one woman safe on a highway it built.

The grief sat in my chest like a stone. Not metaphorical — I mean physically, a weight between my ribs that made breathing an active choice rather than an automatic one. I'd wake up in the morning and lie there, calculating whether the effort of oxygen was worth the continuation of consciousness.

It was during one of these calculations that I met Kavya.

The Fergusson College library has a particular smell — old paper, sandalwood incense from the peon's morning pooja, and the faintest suggestion of Bournvita from the canteen below. I was sitting at my usual desk, not reading but staring at the open page of Hobbes, when someone placed a book on the table across from me.

The sound it made — thwap — the particular sound of a paperback dropped from a height of six inches onto wood — made me look up.

She was reading Premchand. Godan. The spine was cracked in three places and the pages were yellowed, which meant she'd read it before, which meant she was re-reading it, which meant she was the kind of person who goes back to things that hurt because the hurt teaches her something, and I found that either admirable or insane and possibly both.

"You're staring," she said, without looking up.

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Just don't stare. Or if you're going to stare, at least read something worth staring over." She glanced at my book. "Hobbes. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Cheerful stuff."

"My mother died," I said, which was not what I meant to say. I meant to say something clever about political philosophy. Instead, my grief, which had been sitting obediently in my chest for weeks, suddenly stood up and walked out of my mouth without permission.

She looked at me then. Really looked. Not with pity — I'd had enough pity to build a house — but with recognition. Like she'd read the same page in a different edition.

"When?" she asked.

"Six months."

"Sabudana khichdi," she said.

"What?"

"When my dog died — I know, I know, it's not the same thing — my grandmother made sabudana khichdi and told me that grief is like soaking the sabudana. You have to let it sit overnight. You can't rush it. If you try to cook it before it's ready, it'll be hard and tasteless and you'll think you did something wrong, but really you just didn't give it enough time."

I stared at her. She had the most ridiculous metaphor I had ever heard, and it was the first thing in six months that made me want to not stop breathing.

"I'm Kavya," she said.

"Moksh."

"Moksh. Liberation." She half-smiled. "Heavy name."

"My mother chose it."

The smile gentled. Not pity — tenderness. There's a difference, and it matters. "She had good taste."

After that, Kavya became the library. Not in the library — the library itself. The constant. The quiet. The place you go when the world is too loud and you need to sit with someone who doesn't require you to perform okayness.

We drank cutting chai from the tapri outside Gate 1. Every day, 4 PM. The chai-wallah's name was Ramesh and he made the chai too sweet and too strong and it was perfect. Two rupees extra for the bun maska. Kavya would sit on the low wall, legs dangling, reading whatever she was reading — Premchand, Ismat Chughtai, Manto, always the ones who wrote about pain with such precision that it became art — and I would sit next to her and feel the stone in my chest get slightly smaller.

She never asked me to be happy. She never told me it would get better. She never said "time heals all wounds," which is a lie invented by people who have never been wounded. She just sat there, and her sitting there was enough.

Baba noticed, in his distant way. "Ladki kaun hai?" he asked one evening, not looking up from the news.

"Friend," I said.

"Hmm." That syllable contained an entire conversation that Indian fathers have learned to compress into a single sound — approval, curiosity, the faintest glimmer of hope that his son might have a reason to keep breathing.

Meanwhile, I was failing. Not academically — I maintained a 7.8 GPA because my brain functioned on autopilot even when my heart didn't — but existentially. The big questions had moved in like unwanted relatives during Diwali: Why are we here? What's the point? If a woman as good as my mother can be erased by a wet road and a sharp curve, what is the architecture of this universe and who is the negligent contractor?

I started reading differently. Not Hobbes, not economics, not the syllabus. I read Osho and Krishnamurti and the Bhagavad Gita and Jung and Alan Watts and Aleister Crowley and anyone who claimed to have an answer to the question that grief asks, which is not "why" but "how" — how do you keep living when the person who made living worthwhile is gone?

The books led me to darker shelves. Occult philosophy. Tantra — not the Western misunderstanding, but the real stuff, the left-hand path, the engagement with shadow. I read about siddhis — supernatural powers that yogis were supposed to develop. I read about astral projection and past-life regression and the idea that consciousness survives death, which was the only idea I wanted to be true because it meant Aai was somewhere, still singing.

Kavya watched this evolution with the quiet attention of a journalist, which is what she was studying to become. She didn't judge. But she noticed.

"Tu kahan ja raha hai, Moksh?" she asked one afternoon over cutting chai. "Yeh jo tu padh raha hai — Crowley, tantra, siddhis — yeh answers nahi hai. Yeh rabbit holes hain."

"Maybe I need a rabbit hole," I said.

"Rabbit holes mein rabbits nahi hote. Andhere hote hain."

She was right. But I wasn't listening. I was already falling.

The email came three weeks later. No subject line. Plain text. From an address I didn't recognise: jyotimandal@protonmail.com.

Moksh Bharadwaj, Your search has not gone unnoticed. The light you seek exists. It is older than the university you attend and deeper than the books you read. If you are ready, come to the Shaniwar Peth wada, third lane past the Maruti temple, Wednesday, 9 PM. Ask for Professor Kulkarni. The circle waits.

Professor Dhananjay Kulkarni. I knew the name. Everyone at Fergusson knew the name. He taught Philosophy and Comparative Religion, and his lectures were legendary — not because of their content but because of his presence. Silver-haired, deep-voiced, Brahmin in the old-school way that commanded deference. Students said he could quote the Upanishads and Nietzsche in the same breath and make both sound like they were written by the same person.

I should have shown the email to Kavya. I should have shown it to Baba. I should have deleted it and gone back to my failing, small, honest grief.

Instead, I replied: I'll be there.

And that is how it began — not with a bang, not with a thunderclap, but with an email and a boy too broken to know that the light being offered was not the light he needed.