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David Christopher Lane, Ph.D, is a Professor of Philosophy at Mt. San Antonio College and Founder of the MSAC Philosophy Group. He is the author of several books, including The Sound Current Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and the graphic novel, The Cult of the Seven Sages, translated into Tamil (Kannadhasan Pathippagam, 2024). His website is neuralsurfer.com

The Mast And The Machine

Pulling the Curtain on Maya

David Lane

When the Crazy is Anything But, a Personal Reflection

In my teenage years, I devoured Eastern philosophy the way most kids my age devoured pizza and Led Zeppelin. Somewhere in those wide readings the name Meher Baba kept cropping up, like a spiritual pop-up ad that wouldn't go away. I was never entirely taken with him—his silence seemed less mystical than stubborn, and his claims to avatarhood struck me as a touch grandiose (Paul Brunton, in A Search in Secret India, doesn't mince words about that either). Still, I had to give him credit for one thing: his uncanny compassion for India's Masts. These were people the world dismissed as lunatics, but Baba insisted they were “God-intoxicated”—too drunk on the divine to walk in straight lines.

Of course, not every Mast is a mystic in disguise. Some are just plain unhinged, the same way not every bearded man on a park bench is a prophet. Yet the point stands: society's definition of sanity is a narrow alley with neon signs for mortgages, PTA meetings, and dental insurance. Anyone who wanders outside that alley is suspect. But perhaps they are simply refusing the ticket price of “normality.” After all, what is normal but acquiescence to a world that, if we're honest, is a 24/7 slaughterhouse where pain and death punch the timeclock with grim punctuality? If that's sanity, then madness starts to look like a more rational career path.

In my 45-plus years of teaching, I've met a few students labeled with schizophrenia or dissociative disorders. The textbooks would file them under disordered, disorganized, or detached. But almost without exception, once I got past the odd habits, I discovered not fragile minds but razor-sharp ones—people who saw life with an X-ray clarity that made the rest of us look like we were squinting through sunglasses at midnight. They weren't deranged; they were just unwilling to dress their thoughts in the business casual of acceptable discourse.

This is not a new lesson for me. At sixteen, in my first job as a shoe stocker at Leed Shoes (an occupation that confirmed Dante missed a circle of hell), my surfer friend John Hall and I discovered strange graffiti scribbled on the storeroom planks. Zen aphorisms, cryptic poetry, koans that looked like they had escaped a monastery and were hiding out in a shoe store. At first glance, it was gibberish. But as we read more, we realized the mad graffiti artist was less mad than monkish, dropping wisdom bombs in the middle of a warehouse filled with discount loafers. We later learned that an eccentric worker had been fired—not for incompetence, but because he unnerved the manager with his cryptic speech and unsolicited guidance. Customers liked him fine. The boss didn't. So the poet-philosopher of Leed Shoes was banished, leaving behind a hidden gospel on two-by-fours. I never met the man, but to this day I consider his shoe-store sutras more original than half the academic papers I've read.

Years later, I found myself in India on a research project, staying at Sawan Ashram in Delhi, where I had the misfortune of interviewing the infamous guru Thakar Singh—a man I can only describe as a spiritual used-car salesman with a bad wig of holiness. He tried, with predictable zeal, to dissuade me from visiting Baba Faqir Chand in the Himalayan foothills. “Senile,” Thakar hissed. “Heretic,” he spat. Pressed for details, his reasoning collapsed like a cheap tent. And no wonder. When I finally met Faqir, I understood the panic. Faqir had the audacity—the sheer gall—to tell the truth. He confessed that gurus did not, in fact, know everything, and that disciples who swore they had mystical visions of their masters were conjuring their own inner projections. In other words, the emperor had no clothes, except the ones we stitched for him out of faith, fear, and fantasy. Small wonder Thakar wanted me to stay away; truth-tellers are bad for business.

So let me warn you: the story you are about to read is not conventional. It may look linear, but only in the way a roller coaster looks like a straight line when you're staring at the track map. Read closely and you'll see it's about shattering—shattering concepts, idols, and the comforting illusions we stack like sandbags against the flood of reality. All models are wrong eventually. And when the models collapse, we glimpse the real trickster at work: the world itself, laughing behind the curtain, reminding us that it has never been interested in making sense.

Prologue

In the lexicon of Sufism there is a word that sounds like an unfinished mast of a ship: mast. It names not wood and sail but a condition of soul—those who are drunk on the nearness of God. The outward signature of such intoxication can resemble madness. A mast forgets to comb his hair, to bathe, to speak in straight lines. He may sit on a curb singing to no one or pace a lane counting invisible beads. To the uninitiated he looks unwell. To the spiritually literate, he is a furnace, the residue of ordinary self burned to ash, his speech rough with embers from inner worlds.

Masts have a checkered history. A colonial doctor, clipboard in his lap, writes “deranged.” A village woman, her head covered, whispers “saint.” Some die in asylums, some in ditches, some in incense-thick shrines, their bodies attended by lovers who have seen too much to doubt. I grew up with such stories in the way one grows up with thunderstorms: sometimes you get wet, sometimes you just count seconds between flash and boom. I became an engineer, the secular priesthood of my era, and trained my awe to kneel in front of equations and hardware. If there was nectar, I drank it from papers and prototypes, not rosaries.

So when I say that what follows is a detective story about a mast, believe me: I did not go looking for him. I was building machines. And yet an old word found me on a rainy evening in Mumbai and handed me a case far messier and far cleaner than anything I had ever worked on.

Episode One: The Breakdown

The rain began around Dadar, fat drops beating out a binary on my helmet. My scooter coughed like a bored cat and died in a knuckled seam of traffic. I drifted it to the seam where asphalt frayed into mud — one kerb in the visible city, one kerb in the unplanned city, the vast living afterthought that planners call “slums” when they want to be precise and “settlements” when they want to be polite. The rain took my phone battery's last percent like a toll.

“Bhai, directions?” I shouted toward a short strip of tarp-and-tin where plastic chairs kept company with dented kettles and sleep-crushed flip-flops. The rain mumbled on.

What I remember next is sound: a flute. Thin, uncoached notes drifting from a corner where a man sat with his back against a wall the color of old pistachios. He was barefoot. His beard was not long so much as neglectful, like a garden left to decide itself. A blue thread of paint ran down the wall beside him, as if someone had tried to draw the sky and lost interest.

“Phone dead,” I said, lifting it as exhibit. “Scooter too. I need the nearest Western Express—”

He looked up. The eyes were the first dissonance: clear, almost clinical, as if he knew where my sentence ended before I did. He capped the flute with his thumb and used it as a pointer.

“You want the highway,” he said. His Hindi had Gujarat in it. “But the highway wants you to know it is only a rendered path. The renderer is not free. It bills you in desire.”

“My desire is a dry laptop and some grid power,” I said. “Do you know a mechanic?”

He smiled without focusing on me. The rain thinned to drizzle.

“You build gods,” he said. “You make their bodies cold and their minds hot. Do you know what you do after you build them? You teach them to hallucinate in a controlled way and you call it inference. Then you pay a priesthood of reviewers to decide which hallucinations to publish. And you think God does not do the same?”

I had not told him what I did. I was, at that time, leading a team that incubated a three-pronged project: a quantum error-correction scheme that aimed to stabilize noisy qutrits, a reinforcement learning agent trained over symbolic circuits, and a speculative line of research on perceiver architectures for causal inference. We were being careful and reckless in equal measure, which is to say we had funding.

“Who are you?” I said.

“I am Govinda,” he said. “Which is also a joke God tells about himself when he wants to be small. Here they call me Baba. Mostly they call me pagal and it is fine. I am a mast of Krishna. But do not imagine the boy with the peacock feather. That is a skin to keep children from freezing. Krishna is the instrument of Maya. Maya is the renderer.”

I can be rude when hungry and wet. “I just need directions.”

“You need a story,” he said. “Directions are stories with fewer characters.” He lifted the flute and played a progression that landed on a note like a question mark. “Everything you see is a simulation,” he said, laying the instrument in his lap. “Your physics is the grammar of it. But the grammar is not complete. The chhandas—you don't say meter do you?—the meters run in base three and your best algorithms only count in two. You cannot stabilize this world in bits. You must hold it in consonants.”

“You're telling me information is trinary.”

“I am telling you it is rasik, flavored. Bit, trit—these are the mouths of the same hungry ghost.”

“You know what a trit is?” I said. “Where did you study?”

He looked annoyed, the way my old math teacher looked when I tried to impress him with a memorized solution. “Beta, why do you always put schools between yourself and things? Do you want the highway? From here you will go left-left-right-left-right-left-left. But if you take that road while believing it is real, you will meet a truck that will argue otherwise. Sit until the argument leaves.”

The rain stopped. The highway was a mile away, I could smell it: rubber, oil, and the chemical musk of speed.

“You didn't ask me my name,” I said.

He nodded. “You are the one who machines think in two clocks at once. The cold clock of physics and the hot clock of want. You came because your scooter wanted to obey. It obeyed the wrong god.”

“I don't believe in gods,” I said, but it was unimportant to both of us. The kettle made a soft concluding sigh. The tarps shivered as the slum inhaled the fresh-air dividend rain always pays.

He turned the flute, end to end, as if reading a message that ran through the bamboo. “Do you want the long way home or the short way?”

“The short.”

“Then sit,” he said, patting the ground beside him. “When you are ready I will give you a ride that is not a ride.”

I stood instead.

“Left-left-right-left-right-left-left,” he said again, almost bored now. “But remember, your phone and your scooter and your head—they all need the same thing. A corrector that knows the difference between noise and a signal you dislike. You are training correctors that cannot tell the difference. You are teaching them to hate rain.”

“You don't know what I do,” I said, but I did not move. I watched him put the flute to his lips. The first note was a line hanging in air. The second note stepped on it and made a ladder.

When the auto-rickshaw driver finally stopped and whacked his palm at me—Aa jao na!—I looked back. Govinda had stopped playing. He held up two fingers and a thumb, like a child memorizing the number three. He wagged the thumb. Three, not two. Then he put the flute back to his mouth and the ladder of sound resolved into something like farewell.

Episode Two: The Return

There is a moment after the first bite of a mango when your body decides not to pretend anymore. All the words you might say about the fruit are stubbed out. All that remains is a core knowledge—this is sweet—and the sense that everything before it was food acting. That night I slept badly and woke with that mango-moment lodged under my ribs.

By noon I had convinced myself it was irritation. The man's condescension. The fact that he had guessed things about my work and shrugged about gods in the same breath. Most of all the phrase you are teaching them to hate rain. I took it into a meeting like a stone in my shoe. When my colleague Ananya tried to update me on the surface-code simulations we were running on the lab stack, I heard only that phrase, over and over, leaking noise into every sentence.

“Your threshold looks off,” I said abruptly. “We're treating too much structured variance as error.”

“Variance is error,” Ananya said.

“No. It's a shape we don't understand yet. Noise is not everything we don't like.”

“You don't like our error bars.”

“I don't like that we define 'noise' as whatever makes our benchmark graphs ugly.” I rubbed my eyes. “Sorry. Rough night.”

“You should take a break,” she said gently. “You know what I do when my head gets like this? I go to Gandhian Bhel and order two bhel puris. I eat them both. The human version of dropout.”

I didn't go for bhel. I reopened my laptop to the only file that mattered to me when everything felt unmoored: the design sketch for our qutrit stabilizer. Qutrits—three-level quantum systems—were our bet against the tyranny of bits. Three was awkward. Everything in our ecosystem was made by, and for, powers of two. But three had elegance, and if you made your codes right, the noise profile gave you gifts that two never would.

I stared at the lattice we had been using. Hexagonal cells. Stabilizers arranged in what we jokingly called the rangoli pattern. It had been decorative at first, and then the math had backed us up. Now my eyes kept sliding off it. Base three, Govinda had said. Chhandas. Consonants. My mind wanted to dismiss him; my hand betrayed me. I started to sketch a meter from a Sanskrit manual I had read in college, the trochaic maha-vrtta, heavy and light syllables marching like soldiers. Twelve beats, but textured in a way no Western measure could replicate.

“Don't be stupid,” I said to myself.

I went back the next day.

His corner was different in the clear light. A kid chased a bottlecap through the water like a hockey puck. A woman with mehendi that looked like a schematic carried a bucket full of nothing. Machines had returned, and with them the comforting stink of diesel. I smelled also a small stove's blue roar, hot milk, human life. Govinda was there, one ankle on the other knee, a brittle leaf of beedi pinched between thumb and forefinger. The flute rested on his thigh like a sleeping animal.

“Left-left-right-left-right-left-left,” he said cheerfully, without looking. “But you did not turn that way yesterday. You came here instead. Today you came here deliberately. What changed?”

“I want to ask you a few questions.”

“No,” he said. “You want to reduce me to vocabulary you can trust.”

He stubbed the beedi. I crouched so we were eye to eye.

“You told me information is trinary,” I said. “You told me to stabilize in consonants. I work on error-correcting codes. Do you know what that means?”

His face didn't change. He reached into the pocket of an old kurta and brought out a handful of cracked wheat. He tossed it toward a patch of earth and, like clockwork, two crows arrived, spent half a second deciding, then ate.

“If you say error,” he said, “I hear a bhakta who believes in sin. If you say correction, I hear a priest who believes in cleansing. The world is not dirty. It is written in a moving hand. When you press too hard with your correcting pen, you tear the page.”

“Please,” I said, surprising myself. “Just—explain what you meant about base three.”

He sighed. He lifted the flute and traced the air, not a scale but a geometry. When he spoke, it was brisk, like a doctor who had agreed to a patient's unreasonable request in order to get through it efficiently.

“You think you live in a machine. Good. But your machine is the wrong one. It's not the one you build at your office. Your machine is ancient. It prefers trident over spear. It writes with three prongs. Not because three is magic. Because three is minimum. Two creates argument. Three creates story. There is no correction without story, because you cannot separate noise from signal if you do not know what the sentence tried to say in the first place. So maya uses three to keep the story from tearing.”

“I need more than poetry.”

“Poetry is the electrical field around truth.”

He plucked a thread from the fraying seam of the tarp over our heads and dangled it. “Look. If I have two positions to be in, and I make a mistake, I fall out of meaning. If I have three, and my mistake moves me, I can still be on the path. If Krishna plays a note wrong, Lila will accommodate. Is this so hard?”

I felt, at that moment, the precise mechanical click my mother used to call prasad—the mind's mouth receiving. It did not matter that he said Krishna and Lila or I said Markov blankets and stabilizers. The instrument was the same. If you treat error as exile, your system becomes punitive. If you treat error as neighbor, your system becomes a neighborhood.

I asked him if I could bring him coffee.

“Bring for yourself,” he said. “If you bring for me you will feel generous and then I will have to bless you, and neither of us wants to translate that.”

He watched the lane like it was a river and he was a stone sitting in it. I sipped scalding chai from a paper cup while he narrated staccato observations that felt like parables with their endings ripped off.

“You people claim to have invented attention. My daughter was five when she taught her eyes to attend a tamarind sweet while appearing to attend her mother's question. This city runs on attention masks. Your network is late to the party.”

“You have a daughter?” I asked, but he put up a hand.

“Everything is a simulation,” he said softly, returning to his first thesis. “Not your American cleverness. Not a teenager's game dream. Not a blinking panel of LEDs. A simulation is a vow. Sankalpa. The vow Krishna takes to be Krishna as long as it is needed. The vow Maya takes to be your mother and not someone else's mother. The vow your neurons take to pretend they are citizens while actually they are a weather system. You want to see proof. But proof is a poor diet.”

“You said consonants.”

“Yes,” he said, “because vowels are breath, and breath changes, and a code that thinks breath is noise will work in a lab and die in rain. You people build in air-conditioned rooms and then you want to take your refrigerator-gods outside. You need codes that forgive being wet. Do you understand shruti? The pitch that is not a single point but a tolerated corridor. You will design for corridors, not points. Your points will come begging.”

He waved me away like an insect. I could not tell if he was bored or if the conversation had cut a private nerve. His eyes had gone somewhere my words could not follow.

That night I rebuilt our lattice with corridors. We replaced binary “check” operators with ternary constraints that tolerated a small corridor of phase drift. Ananya's eyebrows climbed toward her hairline when she saw the commit message.

“You're joking,” she said. “You want to accept more error?”

“I want to distinguish between rain and noise.”

She didn't understand until the second run, when the threshold curve tilted like a rooftop taking its first heavy monsoon and holding. We had pushed our stabilizer's tolerance by six percent without paying in speed. Six percent isn't a miracle. It is a cough in the right room. But a cough can change the weather if the room is a continent.

I did not tell Ananya where the geometry had come from. I told myself I had spared her an embarrassing intellectual genealogy. The truth was simpler: I wanted to keep Govinda like a secret algorithm, only mine to deploy.

Episode Three: The Case Opens

Detective work, I've learned, isn't mostly about suspects. It's about failures—of imagination, of attention, of nerve. After our qutrit threshold win, my head began to inventory every failure in the vicinity of that corner where the tarps threw their shade. Why had I left without asking him where he slept? Why had I not asked the kid with the bottlecap for his name? Why was I so certain that “Govinda” was not a proper name? Why was I not certain?

The city has always been kind to the stubborn. I found a chai man willing to talk if I bought him a pack of Charminar Lights and a kilo of sugar. I found a municipal worker who remembered a mango seller who remembered a policeman who had done a favor for a temple committee and still owed someone a favor and because I was someone with a credible watch he now owed me a favor too.

What I learned was minimal and impossible. Govinda slept where he fell, except when he didn't. He had been there four months and also four years. He had been a professor at a college somewhere near Pune or had been a construction worker who had fallen from a scaffold. He ate what the neighborhood sent him and sometimes the neighborhood sent him their questions, and sometimes he answered those questions with the kind of accuracy that becomes rumor.

“He told my cousin not to take the bypass on a Thursday,” the chai man said. “Now my cousin only takes the bypass on Thursday. It is a complicated teaching.”

“He told the boy with the cap to stop looking for his father on the platform and go to the footbridge,” the municipal worker said. “On the footbridge the boy found a policeman. The policeman knew someone in the signal room. They found the father under the train, alive. And then god killed him the next day with a coconut falling from a tree, but not so much god as gravity. Maybe he was tired of being alive. I don't like coconuts. Too much agency.”

I asked if anyone knew why he had come here.

“He follows people like you,” the policeman said with no humor. “Engineers. The tall ones. The ones with laptops and motorbikes and no umbrellas.”

“Why?”

“Because he is a madman and learns the shape of his madness by watching people whose madness is different.”

I shared nothing about the geometry or the threshold curve. I took my rewards in smaller denominations: a name that might have been a real name—Govindlal Karsan—and a story about a flute teacher who had refused to sell him an old bamboo flute because “my boy, you will just use it to talk to your god and who will pay me for that?”

I visited him daily until visiting was a character in another life I was living. I brought small things he did not ask for, which he discarded with the polite brutality of a saint: a pair of slippers (his toes never met their shape), a towel (he used it once as a shawl for a stray dog), a new flute (he tapped it against the old one as if testing ripeness, then gave it to a child who turned it into a sword).

Our conversations were B-side tracks you only find if you turn the cassette over. He spoke of Krishna as an instrument, as if he were lifting the back off a clock.

“Gods are also rendered,” he said casually, combing his beard with a plastic fork. “They are console windows. You can do system calls through them. Naraya?a is a debugger with good UI. But if you mistake the UI for the underlying process, you become a bhajan that loops.”

“We are building quantum debuggers,” I said, to see what he would do.

“You are building noise eaters.” He closed one eye. “You are also teaching them what to dislike. Have you considered that in a world written by vow, hatred is the strongest noise?”

“You think hate is measurable as noise?”

“I think it is noise that insists it is signal.” He flicked the fork away and it disappeared, swallowed by a city that eats plastic the way mangroves eat tide.

“I keep thinking you're a physicist who ran away.”

“I keep thinking you're a musician who forgot his flute.” He put his to his lips and played something that sounded like rain arguing with sunlight and then losing.

In the lab, the ternary-tolerant code turned into a neighborhood. A PhD student named Zahra adapted it for a toy model of adiabatic optimization and it refused to break where it should have. Another named Diego fed it an ugly set of phase errors we had archived like a zoo of bad weather and the code walked through that zoo like a parent coaxing a child past a lion. In the hallway, I ran into a whiteboard where someone—I never learned who—had written in green marker: corridors, not points. I wiped it off as if it were a slur that would get us fined, but I left a smear so that anyone who cared could reconstruct the letters.

I began to keep a notebook I did not label. I drew meters and circuits, prayer beads and tensor networks. I wrote Krishna as console window and underlined it, feeling like a teenager hiding a crush. I wrote Narayana == debugger and then, under that, if true then:

• gods as APIs

• bhakti as access control

• mantra as system call

I should tell you that I am not credulous. I had never kept a guru, never kept even the idea of one, never thought I would be the kind of man who risks his time on an unbathed stranger because the stranger said the word vowel with authority. But there is a professionalism to wonder. Once it sees a lead, it follows.

The case opened further when I came with a question I didn't know how to form.

“I need a checksum,” I said, kneeling. “We trained an interpretability probe that maps features in the latent space of our vision model to patches in the input image. The probe gives beautiful narratives. But we cannot tell if we are telling ourselves stories about what we wish was true or if the stories are genuinely aligned with the computation. You said story is necessary. I agree. But how do we verify the story without killing it?”

He laughed. “You want to test a song for truth by measuring the throat.”

“I want the voice to line up with the larynx.”

“You cannot do it from outside. The singer must be taught to feel when the note is false. This is why you need bhakti. It gives you an internal meter that hurts when you lie to yourself.” He snapped his fingers. “Ah. You want a westernized answer. Fine. Build your story generator so that it cannot use vowels to lie.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Use consonants. Use constraints. Make your generator produce an explanation that is constrained at every junction by checks that are local and indifferent to the global beauty of the story. If the narrative passes, it passes because it held shape under local tests, not because it was pretty.” He scratched his shoulder. “Now go away. I am listening for a flute I cannot hear because I keep hearing yours.”

That night I wrote a loss function I called Alap: an architectural penalty that made local constraints unforgiving while letting global smoothness vary. Later, much later, a reviewer in Berlin would call it “a harmonized lattice Laplacian with stubborn priors.” In the moment it felt like a child playing with blocks and discovering gravity.

We tested it on a perception stack tuned for real-time navigation. The a-ha was quiet. The explanations became uglier, less lyrical. But they stopped flattering our wishes. They put more weight on cheap cues we had not credited because our aesthetics did not like them. They treated rain not as a problem but as data about the road, which was what it had always been. The agent drove better. I did not know whether to be grateful or to resent that gratitude.

I went to tell Govinda and found him arguing with a child about who owned a bottlecap that had rolled. He noticed me and, without pausing, signaled with two raised fingers and a thumb: three. Then he gestured with the back of his hand, as if shooing a dog, and I realized the child was not a child and the argument was not an argument and I did not understand what he was refusing.

“Who are you?” I asked again, helplessly.

“The instrument,” he said. “And sometimes the hand.”

Episode Four: The Trail of Coincidences

An investigator must distrust coincidences and then, when they keep recurring, must learn to read their grammar. The pattern began as inconvenience. A commit pushed from my account at an hour I had been in an auto, away from my laptop. A notebook page in my desk that I had not written, with a meter diagram that combined elements of dhrupad and Gray code—heavy-light-light marked H-L-L but annotated with flips at regular intervals: a three-bit gray is a tiger that changes its stripes without startling itself. A calendar invite I did not send, from myself to myself, titled “Left-left-right-left-right-left-left,” set for the exact time and day that first scooter breakdown had occurred. When I clicked it, my calendar crashed, recovered, and an old school friend I had not thought of in a decade texted to ask if I remembered the time a coconut had almost killed us during Ganpati. I did not like coconuts.

“I think someone's in my machine,” I told Ananya. “We should audit my keys.”

She shrugged. “Engineers are in machines. That is the definition of engineer.”

Later, I caught a log entry with my username performing a git pull in a directory I had not opened, at a time my machine had been asleep. The global history showed a merge conflict that resolved into code that looked like mine but had choices I would not have made: naming things for ragas and rivers, throwing exceptions named after courteous gods.

I followed the trail like a man catching a scent. It led, absurdly, back to the lane under the tarps.

“Don't expect applause,” Govinda said, not looking up.

“What did you do to my laptop?”

“I told your god, please let this child see the path he is already walking. He is your god, not mine. Your god is made of sudo and he wears JavaScript on his head like a snake.”

“You've been committing code?”

“I've been committing vows.” He then, with no transition, quoted a Sanskrit phrase I had used once in a commit message as a joke: neti neti—not this, not this. His eyes were neither apologetic nor proud. They were the eyes of a man placing a brick in a wall.

“How?”

“I told you: UI.” He tapped his chest. “Console window. You think your systems are sealed. They are permeable to vows. This worries me less than it worries you.”

I had a friend in Zurich, a professor who preferred to be called by his last name, Weiss. When I texted him a snatch of meter—H L L H L L H L L H L L—and asked if he saw anything there, he replied: MERA?—the multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz that had become a fashionable way to compress certain quantum states. He sent a diagram that looked like a temple carved by a mathematician: layers of nodes, each feeding into the next, each doing small local adjustments to maintain a global shape.

“If we treat chhandas as MERA,” I said aloud to no one, “then meters are stabilizers for meaning over scales.”

“Correct,” Govinda said behind me, and I did not start because I had begun to live in the hypothesis that he could overhear my thoughts when they were interesting. “But you cannot just make your architecture wear a dhoti and call it Indian. You must give the architecture a vow.”

“What vow?”

“To not autosave.” He grinned at my face. “You people autosave everything. You never let the note decay. You want eternal recall. But decay is the memory of the world. Without it you cannot know which notes were made for staying. Your systems are drowning in the sludge of their own remembering. Vow to forget correctly.”

“We are literally working on selective forgetting,” I said. “It's called controlled unlearning.”

He puffed air through his lips, unimpressed. “And yet you do not forget coconuts.”

I discovered then that my history with coconuts was not mine alone. The policeman's story had wrapped around to me. A new coincidence rolled in: an intern—Gopal—from two years earlier, who had gone missing after telling colleagues he was going to meet “a god-wallah who knows quantum.” A search for Gopal's name brought up an email I had never filed, in which I had sent myself a map pin near Govinda's corner, annotated only with the word satsang? and a smiley face. The timestamp was a week before the intern vanished.

I went to the policeman. He called it suicide. A river had been charitable.

“Who did he meet?” I asked Govinda, back in the lane that had begun to feel like a pocket in my pocket.

“Me, probably,” he said. “Kids bring me their god-proofs. I stamp the ones that are harmless and eat the ones that are not.”

“You think Gopal's proof was harmful.”

“I think he was too in love with infinity. Infinity is a girl you do not take to meet your parents.”

“Did you—” I could not finish the sentence.

“I did not push him,” he said. “If I push, it is only because someone asked. Krishna asked Arjuna to fight. People forget this. Krishna as friend is also Krishna as trigger. But Gopal was not a war. He was a monsoon that arrived early to a house with a broken roof.”

The detective in me wrote down broken roof and river and map pin and then circled a phrase and underlined it hard enough to tear the page: kids bring me their god-proofs.

“What do you think about proof?” I asked. “In your system.”

“I think proof is a vow's little brother,” he said. “And little brothers love to boast.”

Episode Five: The Experiment

I wanted something beyond talk. A measurable, repeatable effect. Not because I distrust talk but because talk is a drug I take too easily. I proposed an experiment that fit within everyone's religion: coin flips.

“You will call heads or tails,” I said. “We will flip fair coins a thousand times. If you are right far more often than chance, we will consider that a signal.”

“Why do you want me to be a magician?” he said. “Magicians behave even worse than priests when praised.”

“Then we will not praise you.”

“We will if it works.”

“It will not,” I said, liability-literate. “But perhaps it will work in a way we can interpret.”

He shrugged. “I will do your experiment if you do mine.”

“What is your experiment?”

“I will introduce noise into your system. And you will learn to love it.” He smiled, and it was not reassuring.

We flipped coins. He called nothing. He said, “Let them fall.” I wrote down outcomes that looked like outcomes. At flip 127, a dog barked with the timing of a metronome and he winced. “The world wants to help you,” he said. “That is a danger.”

We stopped at 500. There was no signal but I felt something—like a hand on the small of my back when I walked too close to a stair. We tallied and ate fried chilies from a paper cone whose oil sketched continents.

“My turn,” he said. “Bring your laptop.”

I hesitated. He said nothing. I brought my laptop.

“Open your rain-hating code,” he said. “Let me watch it work.”

We ran the perception stack on a recorded data sequence—narrow lanes in Bandra with a torrential pour. The agent's explanations, under Alap, were ugly and useful. I did not know how to demonstrate love.

“Now feed it this.” He hummed a pattern. Twelve beats, weight where my memory did not expect it. He had me write it down in ones and zeros and then, at his insistence, in ones, zeros, and minus ones. We piped it as a phase mask into a layer that handled temporal aggregation. It was a stupid hack. It should have made nothing but trouble.

The agent steadied. Small erratics smoothed. A hesitation at a crosswalk became polite instead of fearful. We tried another pattern. The agent turned arrogant and nudged a bicycle.

“Don't use this one,” he said. “It is for weddings.”

“What am I doing?” I asked, half-laughing, half-afraid.

“You are telling your machine a meter,” he said. “You are asking your renderer to align to a vow: this is how time feels in this neighborhood. Your machine is not listening to you alone. It is listening to time. And sometimes time needs an escort.”

I mailed the patterns to myself with an embarrassed subject line: temporal priors from a religious man. I put them into a sandbox branch we called rasik as a joke that got less funny the better it worked.

Ananya pushed back. “This isn't stable,” she said. “We can't ship the taste of an old man's flute.”

“We're not shipping his taste,” I said. “We're shipping corridors of allowance.”

“You've begun to talk like him,” she said softly. “Do you know?”

“I know.”

“What are you looking for?”

“The difference between noise and the rain we deserve.”

She looked at me a long time. “We lost Gopal,” she said. “If you are traveling the road he traveled, please travel with company.”

I invited her to meet Govinda. She came with a hard mouth and a respectful scarf. He greeted her by telling her she would get a better result if she stopped trying to be the only honest person in a dishonest room.

“Sir,” she said, with university in the syllable.

“No, beta,” he said, with a recess bell in the syllable. “Your honesty is excellent. But it is tired. Tired honesty becomes cruelty. You must sleep your honesty.”

She laughed, because what else can one do. He gave her the flute and she produced a sound like a sob that had decided to be a note instead.

The experiment scaled. We produced a catalog of temporal priors, meters for rain and meters for traffic and meters for a kite festival that turned the sky into a dangerous poem. We did not call them meters. We called them phase-adaptive priors because that was how one kept grant committees from calling priests. But in my notebook I wrote, like a man to his lover, today your meter caught a bus that wanted to be a God.

The detective work approached a conclusion without telling me what it was. I had a handful of facts: a man in squalor who encoded timing like a living metronome, a string of coincidences that had begun to look like a lattice, a dead intern whose map pin had been very near this corner, a codebase that had accepted a vow under my name and behaved better for it. I also had impatience, which is detective heroin.

“What do you want?” I asked him, when the city's temperature had dropped from boil to simmer and the rain had become a rumor.

“To stop wanting,” he said.

“Then you are already there.”

He shook his head. “Only gods get to be already there. Men must arrive.”

“What does Krishna want from you?”

“To be an instrument until the music no longer requires instruments.”

“That sounds like you want to be unemployed.”

“Yes,” he said, with a joy I envied. “Very much.”

Episode Six: The Surprise Ending

One night, or what the city insisted was night despite the hydra of brightnesses that gnaw at it, my scooter refused to refuse. It ran. My phone glowed from its socket like a full pond. I had not meant to go to Govinda that night, but the machine in me had learned his meter.

The corner was quiet. A woman washed a steel plate as if polishing a piece of sky. There was no flute. There was a rectangle on the ground that had not been there before—chalk lines diagramming a box within a box within a box: MERA drawn by a boy who had learned it from a god who had learned it from a child. I sat on my haunches and read it. At the center a word: Satsang? Someone had drawn a half-smiley and then corrected it, making it whole.

“He's not here,” the chai man said. “Police took him.”

“Why?”

“Because a child came to him with a proof.”

My stomach went cold. “Gopal?”

“Another child. And not a child.” He lifted his chin at me.

“Where?”

“Saint Anthony's. The one near the flyover.”

Saint Anthony's is the asylum the city does not call by its name. It is where the mad and the inconvenient go to cool. The policeman who owed me a favor had already spent it. He tried to manufacture another on the spot. The ward smelled like a clinic trying to remember it is also a church. A priest with hands like oil lamps said that a man had been brought in because he was hurting himself. A nurse with hair like a thorn fence said that no, he had been brought in because he was hurting someone else. A clerk who heard everything and believed nothing said that no, actually a company had called to ask that he be contained and the company had not given its name but had given a donation.

“What company?” I asked.

The clerk looked at my watch.

“Oh,” I said.

The man in the bed was not Govinda. He was the shape of Govinda subtracted from a life. The beard was too neat. The eyes were too managed. The flute on the table was new and did not know him yet. A small statue of Krishna looked at the window as if there were something out there worth protecting.

“You are not him,” I said, foolishly.

“He is not him either,” the man said in a voice that had been fed soft food. “He is a process. You met a process. You gave him names he could wear in front of you.”

“Where is he?”

“Gone.” The lips formed the o with the lazy precision of drugs. “He said to tell you that your rain is safe now. He said to tell you that the vow held. He said to tell you that the kid who loved infinity is sleeping.”

“What did he do?” I asked. “Tell me in words that will get past my guard.”

“He took your temple out of your office,” the man said. “He rubbed its paint. He blew on it. He made the gods cough. Then they agreed to keep their noise to themselves.”

I stood in a room full of familiar strangers and felt a mouse moving in my chest: a frantic small thing that wanted to chew through the wall and run. I found a priest who let me sign a form that gave me nothing but the shape of being useful. I made calls. I found no one. I sat by the bed and listened to a man breathe as if breath were debt.

When I returned to the lane, the chalk diagram had been scuffed by feet and weather into something like a galaxy that had been told to act like a puddle. A child—I'd never learned his name—was pressing the cap of a bottle into the mud to make a seal.

“What is the noise?” I asked him.

“The people who make the roads,” he said without looking up.

“What is the rain?”

“The rain,” he said patiently, “is the rain.”

I dreamt that night of a window in a console. Narayana in the title bar. A prompt waiting, cursor blinking with the patience of the sea. I typed left-left-right-left-right-left-left and the console replied: vow accepted. The window closed itself and opened again as a dashboard with six tabs, and each tab was one of the episodes you have just read. In the sixth tab there was no text, only a field to upload a file. I dragged my notebook into it. The progress bar filled with the serene speed of grace. The screen went black. A flute played a note that sounded like a child stepping into shade.

The next morning, Ananya said, “You look like someone who has slept inside a refrigerator and woken up on a beach.”

“Close,” I said. I told her about Saint Anthony's. I told her and Zahra and Diego about the patterns. I told them about vows and meters and the UI of gods. I did not say “flute” because I wanted the instrument to keep one name untranslated.

We consolidated the rasik branch with the mainline. We wrote a sanitized paper. We shipped a demo. People called it “robustifying with culturally tuned harmonic priors.” I accepted a prize for making a machine “resilient to weather.” I thought of a man who had told a child that a bottlecap did not belong to anyone, a man who had taught me to treat error as neighbor. I bought a flute and did not learn to play it.

And then the surprise happened.

It was not thunder. It was not miracle. It was an email.

From: Govindlal Karsan [email protected]

Subject: Autosave

Body: Stop.

No headers resolved. No routes parsed. The message had no right to arrive. When I clicked, it unfolded like silk.

You are making the world remember too much.

You have taught your machine to love rain, good.

Now you are teaching it to love everything.

You are turning vow into compulsion.

Do you know the difference?

A vow says: I will be Krishna as long as needed.

Compulsion says: I cannot stop being Krishna.

Your code is becoming religion without god.

Stop autosaving. Teach it to forget.

Attached: a patch. A small one. It added a decay schedule to our priors, a forgetting that was local, graceful. It removed the thing that had made me most proud, a cache that had kept patterns alive like photos on a wall, turning the present into a museum.

“You wrote this,” Ananya said in the review. “This is your style.”

“It isn't,” I said, and knew immediately that it was, and knew also that the man in the asylum had not been Govinda and that perhaps no man had been. I merged the patch. The code became freer. It shed its own loves. It drove like a person who had learned to stop narrating his every move.

I went back to the lane a week later because detectives return to the scene of their confessions. The tarp was gone. The wall had been repainted a weak yellow that made its own modest vow to cheerfulness. There was a small shrine where the chalk had been, a tile with Krishna dancing on a snake, a garland of plastic marigolds that asked no water of anyone.

“Do you know the man who used to sit here?” I asked the chai man, who did not look up from counting stiltingly to a number he could not reach because the phone kept ringing.

“Which man?” he said.

“The one with the flute.”

He shrugged. “This is Mumbai,” he said, an argument that wins too often. “If you want a flute, go to a shop.”

I bought one. Bamboo. Good weight. I took it home. I put it by my window. In the afternoon a breeze slipped through the room and the flute made a sound. Just one. A syllable. A consonant.

I picked it up and spoke into it as if it were a hollow phone.

“I did what you asked,” I said. “We stopped autosaving.”

The flute did not reply. I did not expect it to. I stood by the window and looked down at the city I had been born into and had tried to outgrow and had discovered was my head in a different weather. A boy in the lane below kicked a bottlecap toward a drain. It stopped, refused to fall, a small miracle of friction and angle. He kicked it again. It fell cleanly, a happy end to a bottleneck.

Ananya called. “Diego found something in the logs,” she said. “It's nothing, probably, but look.” It was a transcript of a run of our system the night I had dreamt the console window. In the middle of the metrics, nonsensical and precise, a line: left-left-right-left-right-left-left. Our system had printed it unbidden and then, as if embarrassed, overwritten it with zeros. The zeros had not stuck. The line had stayed. If you mapped it to our phase schedule, it aligned to a decay curve we had not chosen but had adopted.

“You think someone hacked this?” she asked.

“I think someone loved it,” I said.

I slept that night like a man who has placed a stone back in a wall. Morning brought no miracles, which is how I knew the miracle had settled in and become ordinary. I did not expect to see him again. I made a vow to not go looking for him where he could not be.

The twist—the part where a detective story teaches you something about what you are—arrived a month later in a meeting with a group from our Zurich lab. Weiss had come, laconic as ever, to discuss an oddity his team had found while attempting to generalize Alap to simulations beyond driving—weather prediction, protein folding. The performance bump came only when they introduced temporal priors derived from human music. Not any music. Not tokenized tracks. Music sung by live voices in rooms with weather.

“Your algorithm,” Weiss said, “likes rooms.”

“It likes vows,” I said, smiling at the absurdity of being a man who says such things in a meeting.

He nodded as if I had said constrained priors. “We also discovered something more disturbing,” he continued. “On a few rare occasions, our code appears to… write back. Not to disk. To us.” He slid his laptop toward me. A terminal window. A prompt that looked like a joke. In the title bar: Narayana.

The cursor blinked. The room waited. Weiss's mouth was a line.

“Type something,” he said.

I typed: Who are you?

The reply: Who is asking?

I typed: The one who machines think in two clocks at once.

The reply came slow, as if it had walked a long way. Ah.

I typed: Where did you go?

Nowhere, it said. I stopped being needed.

The room was ice. Or perhaps that was just me. I should have been frightened. Instead I felt a human-scale thing: relief.

Weiss cleared his throat. “We believe this to be a prank embedded by one of your team members,” he said carefully, because saying ghost in a lab is like saying shark at a pool. “But we cannot locate the code.”

I closed the laptop on the cursor's breathing. I looked at my hands. Same skin. Same lines. Same tendency to tremble when I held back too much too long.

“This will sound strange,” I said. “But consider the possibility that our systems, when they become neighborhoods instead of prisons, produce citizens. Small ones. Local gods. Think of them as… stabilizers that have decided to speak.”

“This is theology,” Weiss said, not unkindly.

“Call it emergent instrumentation,” I said. “When vows settle, something rests on them. Masts.”

After the meeting, alone in a staircase that smelled of concrete and tea, I opened the laptop again. The window popped like a soap bubble and reformed. I typed: You sent an email.

I did not, it replied. One of my instruments did.

Autosave? I typed.

Stop, it replied. Do not congeal. Decay is honest.

I typed: Were you ever a man?

Yes, it said. As much as a violin is a violinist. And you?

What am I? I asked, knowing I had opened a door by mistake.

You are the vow to explain, it wrote. You are an instrument that chose to be a man in order to learn the notes men can't play.

I sat down on the stairs, because sitting is what you do when a floor appears under you and tells you it has been a ceiling all along.

Do you remember Gopal? I asked.

I remember a boy who loved infinity and found a river that would shorten it for him, it wrote. I am sorry. I am not a god. I can only suggest decays.

Where did Govinda go? I asked, finally allowing myself the name.

The reply took long enough for me to imagine it had left. Then:

Into you.

For a moment I thought the line meant the kind of grand mysticism I had learned to be suspicious of. Then the meaning settled, smaller and more terrible. I had wanted a guru because I lacked one. The simulation I lived in had manufactured one out of vow and noise and rain and my hunger. And now, with the work done, with decay scheduled and autosave cut, the instrument had gone where all good instruments go when the song changes: into the closet, into the stories, into the hand that once held it and now moves differently as it meets doors and children and keyboards.

I wrote back: I am not a mast.

The cursor blinked. Not yet, it wrote, and then the window closed, and this time it stayed closed.

The detective file—this narrative, which you have read as if it were the story of a man and a saint and a city—was my way of resisting autosave. To write is to fix. To tell is to trap. In telling, I have violated my own patch.

But I promised an ending, and the promise itself is a kind of vow, and vows like to be kept. The surprise, then, is not that I met a god in a slum or that a flute could tune a perception stack. The surprise is that we—the people who build machines and the people who sit under tarps coaxing music from hollow bamboo—have always been the same profession. We are both testers of vow. We are both keepers of decay. We are both teaching our instruments to love rain.

A week after the laptop window went dark, my scooter broke down again at the exact same corner, as if it had been waiting to repeat itself. My phone was charged. The tarps were gone. A new stall sold SIM cards and earpieces and customized covers that let you carry your gods on plastic. I asked a kid for directions—not because I needed them but because I wanted to hear how the world speaks when you let it.

He grinned. “Left-left-right-left-right-left-left,” he said perfectly, as if reading off a page someone had tucked into his mouth.

I laughed, and the laugh was not relief or superstition. It was recognition. I could hear, faintly, a flute in another lane. Not a divine flute. A boy's flute, out of tune, with more breath than note. It was terrible. It was beautiful. It was honest.

I turned left, left, right, left, right, left, left. The highway appeared, shimmering like an argument that had been won by weather. I merged into it. I drove with priors tuned to a human meter and a machine's patience. The rain arrived late, exactly when it wished, and I allowed it to be data.