Chapter 5: Parda (Veil)

The siddhis came like monsoon — not all at once, but in gathering waves, each one larger than the last, until you couldn't remember what dry ground felt like.

The first was small. March, three weeks after initiation. I was sitting in the Fergusson canteen, eating poha from the steel plate that every Indian college canteen serves poha on — the same plate, I'm convinced, recycled across every institution from Kanyakumari to Kashmir — when I looked at the boy sitting across from me. Sunil Something. Second-year economics. We'd never spoken.

I knew, with a certainty that bypassed logic entirely, that his mother had called him that morning to tell him his dog had been hit by a car. Not because his eyes were red — they weren't. Not because he was sad — he was eating poha with the mechanical efficiency of a boy who hadn't yet processed what he'd been told. I knew because I felt it. A cold spot in my chest, specific and localised, like someone had pressed an ice cube against the inside of my sternum.

"I'm sorry about your dog," I said.

He looked up. His face went through four expressions in two seconds — confusion, surprise, suspicion, and then the sudden crumbling that happens when someone acknowledges the thing you've been trying to hold together.

"How did you know?" he asked, his voice cracking.

"You look like someone who lost something." A careful answer. Not a lie, but not the truth either. I was getting good at the space between.

After that, the siddhi — if that's what it was — strengthened. I could feel emotions in others the way you feel weather. Standing in a crowd on FC Road felt like being in a storm of feelings — waves of stress from the office workers, pockets of joy from the college kids, the dense fog of exhaustion from the chai-wallah who'd been standing since 5 AM. It was overwhelming at first. I'd walk into a room and stagger slightly, as if hit by a gust of collective feeling.

Vaidehi taught me to control it. "You're not a sponge," she said during a Tuesday session. "You're a radio. Learn to tune. Right now you're picking up every frequency. That's useless. You need to select."

"How?"

"Intention. Before you enter a space, decide what you want to sense. One person. One emotion. Narrow the beam."

I practised. In lectures, I'd focus on a single classmate and read their emotional state like checking a thermometer. In the tapri queue, I'd pick one person and know — know, not guess — whether they'd had a good day or a terrible one. At home, I focused on Baba, and what I found there made me wish I hadn't looked.

My father's interior was a landscape of grey. Not sadness, exactly — sadness has movement, has peaks and valleys. This was flat. A plain of emotional nothing, stretching in every direction, with occasional dark shapes on the horizon that I understood were memories of Aai — not cherished memories but land mines, things he walked around carefully to avoid detonation.

"Baba," I said one evening. He was watching the news. The anchor was shouting about something — they always shout, Indian news anchors, as if volume is a substitute for truth.

"Hmm?"

"Do you want to talk about Aai?"

The grey plain shuddered. I felt it — a seismic tremor in his emotional landscape, quickly suppressed. His face showed nothing. Classic Indian father: the exterior a load-bearing wall, the interior crumbling.

"Kya hua?" he asked, not turning from the screen.

"Nothing. Just — if you ever want to."

"Accha." The universal Indian father response that means: I heard you, I appreciate it, and I will never in my life take you up on this offer.

The second siddhi arrived in April. Telekinesis — though that word makes it sound like a Marvel movie, and what it actually felt like was closer to a suggestion. I could nudge things. Small things. A pen rolling on a table, redirected with a thought. A page turning without wind. A cup of chai sliding half an inch toward my hand when I reached for it.

"You're developing faster than expected," Dhananjay told me, watching me practice in his study. The brass diya on his desk was my training target — I was trying to make the flame lean left without touching it. "Most seekers take a year to reach this point. You've done it in four months."

"Is that good?"

"It's notable. Rahu chose well."

"Rahu chose me?"

A flicker of something in his eyes — a miscalculation, a word he hadn't meant to say. He recovered smoothly. "I mean your natural capacity attracted Rahu's attention. The connection is mutual."

But the word "chose" lingered, and I filed it in the part of my brain that Kavya's journalist training had indirectly developed — the part that notices when a source corrects themselves, because the correction is always more revealing than the original statement.

The Mandal sessions grew more intense. We were no longer just meditating — we were practising. Dhananjay introduced exercises that felt like the spiritual equivalent of weight training: holding a flame steady with concentration for ten minutes, sensing another member's thoughts across the room, projecting an emotion into a space and having others identify it.

I was good at it. Better than most. And the competitive part of me — the part that had maintained a 7.8 GPA not because I cared about grades but because I couldn't bear to be second — that part fed on the excellence. I looked forward to sessions the way I used to look forward to exam results: for the confirmation that I was enough.

Arjun Sane noticed my progress. He'd been in the Mandal for eight years — one of the senior members, though not in the inner circle the way Vaidehi was. He approached me after a Saturday session, while others were dispersing.

"Impressive," he said. "The flame exercise. You held it for eleven minutes. That's longer than anyone except Vaidehi."

"Thank you."

"How do you do it? The focus?"

"Grief," I said honestly. "Grief teaches you to hold one thing in your mind without letting go. It's the only training I had before this."

Something shifted in his expression. Not sympathy — calculation. The look of someone inputting data into an equation.

"Grief is a resource," he said. "Don't let them tell you it's something to be healed. Pain that sharp is fuel. Use it while it burns."

He walked away before I could respond. His words sat in my head like a splinter — not exactly painful, but present, an irritation that I kept touching.

That night, during a private session with Rahu, I asked: "Who is Arjun Sane?"

Arjun is a man who has been in the circle long enough to know its shape but not its purpose. He sees power as the destination. The Mandal sees power as the tool. This difference will matter.

"Matter how?"

The way all differences matter. Eventually.

Rahu's cryptic responses were becoming a pattern — answers that opened more questions, directions that led to more directions. It was like navigating by a compass that showed north but refused to tell you what was north of north.

But the siddhis were real. And they were growing. And I was addicted to them the way I'd been addicted to grief — not because they felt good, but because they felt like something, and after six months of feeling nothing, something was everything.

Kavya saw the change. She couldn't not see it — I was different. More confident. More distant. More present in some ways and less present in others. I'd look at her during our chai sessions and know exactly what she was feeling — the warmth of affection, the cool thread of concern, the growing frost of suspicion — and the knowing made me simultaneously closer to her and further away, because intimacy built on telepathy is not intimacy at all. It's surveillance.

"You're doing something," she said one afternoon. Not accusatory. Journalistic. She was gathering facts.

"I'm studying."

"Not at the library. I've been there every day this week and you haven't been once."

"Studying elsewhere."

"Where?"

"Does it matter?"

"Haan, Moksh. It matters. Because you've changed. You walk differently. You talk differently. You look at people like you're reading their weather reports. And you have this—" she gestured at my face, "this look. Like you know something you're not telling me."

"Maybe I do."

"Then tell me."

I almost did. The words were right there, queued up like commuters at Pune Junction — the wada, the Mandal, the initiation, Rahu, the siddhis, the vision of the SUV behind Aai's car. But Rahu's voice, quiet but insistent, interrupted: Not yet. The channels are stabilising. One wrong frequency and the work of months collapses.

"I'm working through some things," I said. "Give me time."

"I've given you time. Five months of time. And in those five months, you've gone from the boy who told me his mother died over Hobbes to someone I barely recognise." She put down her chai cup. It made a small sound on the metal table — the sound of finality, of a bookmark being placed. "Main wait karungi, Moksh. But main pagal nahi hoon. Don't mistake my patience for blindness."

She left. I watched her walk through the Fergusson gate — she had a specific walk, Kavya, purposeful but not rushed, the walk of someone who knows where she's going and doesn't need to prove it by hurrying. Her dupatta caught the wind and for a moment she looked like a painting — the kind you see in museums where the artist has captured a woman at the exact intersection of beauty and sadness.

I should have run after her. I should have told her everything.

Instead, I went to the wada for the evening session and practised making flames bend with my mind and told myself that the distance was temporary, that once I understood what happened to Aai, once I'd mastered the siddhis, I would come back to Kavya with answers that justified the silence.

The lies we tell ourselves are the most dangerous kind, because the liar and the audience are the same person, and neither one is willing to call the other out.