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Prologue - THE FOURTH LETTER
Sherabling Monastery, Baijnath.
May 15 2026. 8:30PM.
The evening prayer had just ended.
I was sitting in the quiet that follows it, the particular kind of quiet that monasteries make, different from silence the way a held breath is different from s had gone. The lamps were low. Outside, the Himalayas were doing what they always do, which is exist without any interest in your problems.
I had been on the road for weeks. Mcleodganj first, then Mandi, a few days in Manali. Me and my bike and no fixed destination, the way I used to travel in college, when the point was the moving and not the arriving. I had been trying to fix something. I had been trying to fix it with altitude and distance and engine noise and the particular therapy of mountain roads that demand your complete attention and leave no room for anything else.
It wasn’t working.
I was not going to a therapist either. I am an engineer by profession and, in an irony I have not missed for a single moment these past months, a doctoral student of psychology and neurosciences. I already knew the protocol - the frameworks, the questions, the gentle redirections. I knew which neurotransmitters were involved, which neural pathways were lighting up, why the mind returns compulsively to the same memories the way a tongue returns to a broken tooth. I had helped other people through exactly this. I could not help myself. Knowing the protocol in advance makes it very hard to surrender to it. I was a man trying to fix a car while simultaneously being the car.
I should tell you that the irony has a beginning, and it did not begin the way people would assume. Winter 2021. I made a promise that winter I had no real reason to keep. I kept it anyway. I still do not have what I was promised.
That was 2021. This was 2026, the mountain, five years later, and the same irony sitting in the same chest.
So I sat there, in the quiet that had settled where the prayer had been, and something became clear.
I was not going to outrun this. Not on a motorcycle. Not in the mountains. Not by putting enough kilometres between myself and the fourth letter. Whatever had happened, whatever I had been carrying since that night on the Yamuna bridge, since the fourth letter I wrote on the night of 11 October and the morning that followed it, since the silence that began then and has not broken since, it was not going to dissolve on its own. It had weight. It had shape. It needed somewhere to go.
I decided to write.
I should tell you something about me and writing. I have never kept a diary. Never maintained a journal. I am not someone who processes things through words on a page. I process things by moving through them, physically, on roads and trails and in conversations with people I trust. But the conversations hadn’t happened. That is the other thing I need to tell you.
What happened on those three days in October 2025 -a drive, a letter, and what came after I never told anyone. Not a friend. Not my family. Not a colleague. Not a counsellor. I took everything that happened in those three days and I pressed it down and I kept it there, turning it over in my head, repeating the scenarios, trying to find the angle from which they made sense. I have been doing that for seven months. It has not produced sense. It has produced a very thorough knowledge of every detail of those three days and a complete inability to be at peace with any of them.
The fourth letter in particular. That one I buried deepest. What happened on the morning of 12 October came as the direct aftermath of that letter - a shock of a kind I was not prepared for and did not know how to process and simply did not speak about to anyone at all. I am going to tell you both of those things in this book. But not yet. You need to understand everything that came before it first.
Sherabling Monastery, Baijnath.
May 15 2026. 8:30PM.
The evening prayer had just ended.
I was sitting in the quiet that follows it, the particular kind of quiet that monasteries make, different from silence the way a held breath is different from s had gone. The lamps were low. Outside, the Himalayas were doing what they always do, which is exist without any interest in your problems.
I had been on the road for weeks. Mcleodganj first, then Mandi, a few days in Manali. Me and my bike and no fixed destination, the way I used to travel in college, when the point was the moving and not the arriving. I had been trying to fix something. I had been trying to fix it with altitude and distance and engine noise and the particular therapy of mountain roads that demand your complete attention and leave no room for anything else.
It wasn’t working.
I was not going to a therapist either. I am an engineer by profession and, in an irony I have not missed for a single moment these past months, a doctoral student of psychology and neurosciences. I already knew the protocol - the frameworks, the questions, the gentle redirections. I knew which neurotransmitters were involved, which neural pathways were lighting up, why the mind returns compulsively to the same memories the way a tongue returns to a broken tooth. I had helped other people through exactly this. I could not help myself. Knowing the protocol in advance makes it very hard to surrender to it. I was a man trying to fix a car while simultaneously being the car.
I should tell you that the irony has a beginning, and it did not begin the way people would assume. Winter 2021. I made a promise that winter I had no real reason to keep. I kept it anyway. I still do not have what I was promised.
That was 2021. This was 2026, the mountain, five years later, and the same irony sitting in the same chest.
So I sat there, in the quiet that had settled where the prayer had been, and something became clear.
I was not going to outrun this. Not on a motorcycle. Not in the mountains. Not by putting enough kilometres between myself and the fourth letter. Whatever had happened, whatever I had been carrying since that night on the Yamuna bridge, since the fourth letter I wrote on the night of 11 October and the morning that followed it, since the silence that began then and has not broken since, it was not going to dissolve on its own. It had weight. It had shape. It needed somewhere to go.
I decided to write.
I should tell you something about me and writing. I have never kept a diary. Never maintained a journal. I am not someone who processes things through words on a page. I process things by moving through them, physically, on roads and trails and in conversations with people I trust. But the conversations hadn’t happened. That is the other thing I need to tell you.
What happened on those three days in October 2025 -a drive, a letter, and what came after I never told anyone. Not a friend. Not my family. Not a colleague. Not a counsellor. I took everything that happened in those three days and I pressed it down and I kept it there, turning it over in my head, repeating the scenarios, trying to find the angle from which they made sense. I have been doing that for seven months. It has not produced sense. It has produced a very thorough knowledge of every detail of those three days and a complete inability to be at peace with any of them.
The fourth letter in particular. That one I buried deepest. What happened on the morning of 12 October came as the direct aftermath of that letter - a shock of a kind I was not prepared for and did not know how to process and simply did not speak about to anyone at all. I am going to tell you both of those things in this book. But not yet. You need to understand everything that came before it first.
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