He used to say that the first gate opened in Guwahati during a power cut.

  Thunderheads had knuckled the sky into bruises. The electricity failed, as it often did, and his father lit two kerosene wicks that trembled in the kitchen like minor deities unsure of their jurisdiction. He was four. Outside, the crickets stitched the dark together.

  That was when the girl appeared.

  She was older than he was, but not by much—sturdy, round-faced, with the grave composure of a chowkidar’s daughter who already knew the arithmetic of rice and wages. Her skin held a dark blue undertone, as if she had been washed in indigo and dusk. She did not knock. She simply occupied the straw mat opposite him, knees almost touching his, and regarded him with an appraisal far beyond childhood.

  He would later name her Mahamudra.

  At the time, he only felt a sweetness in the skull, as though syrup had been poured between his ears. She gestured for him to sit straight. She drew an invisible circle around them with her finger. The air thickened.

  Every story that followed in his life would be, in some way, a rehearsal of that circle.

  He grew up believing that the body was not a house but a crossroads.

  Seven crossings, to be exact. Seven currents spiraling like colored smoke through the spine. His father had brought him a garland from Kamakhya on his first birthday; he was told it carried judgment and blessing in equal measure. By adolescence he had woven together an interior cosmology from fragments—Hashem and Ganesha, Kali of Karnat and Melchizedek, Exu Morcego and Lucifer as the shining star in Chidakash.

  Names were doors. Doors were vessels.

  He called his gift Parkaypraveshan—the entering of another body. Not possession, not theft. More like passing through callous in the skin of time, slipping laterally between moments as if the hours were beads on a misstrung rosary. He imagined dark matter as perforated ether, miniature black wells beneath ordinary sight. If one could become small enough—anima-siddhi, he named it—one might fall through and surface elsewhere.

  He insisted he had done so.

  Once, in 2000, when he was taken to the tenth floor of a concrete building in Salt Lake—CRP, AF, acronyms clanging like metal trays—he believed there would be no descent except through a bullet. He spoke later of resurrection, of slipping beneath the floor through a pore of darkness and reassembling himself on the road below. He spoke of manifesting weapons from ether, of being both soldier and angel, of culling and being culled. Of returning home by Manojava, swifter than mind.

  Those who loved him learned to listen without confirming.

  His wife, especially.

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  There were other apparitions.

  At twelve, after the family had shifted houses and cities and loyalties, he saw Mahamudra again—outside a locked gate at dusk, one meter from the window where he stood alone. She did not speak. Her eyes held something like expectation, or perhaps accusation. Then she dissolved into the ordinary geometry of evening.

  At twenty-five he began a new discipline, invoking Ekajati, the Star of Zion, mapping yogini dashas from almanacs onto public parks. A woman appeared repeatedly on a bench one kilometer from his house—twenty-eight years old, he would say, with long, delicate hands and a face like rose petals folded upon themselves. She sat always in the direction the chart prescribed.

  He never touched her. He claimed they spoke without sound.

  When she expressed a desire to visit his home, he diverted the current of prayer toward other ends: his cousin Sunanda’s academic rise, the improbable ascent of a local politician to chief minister. When, by coincidence or competence, these came to pass, his faith in the circuitry of will hardened into architecture.

  “Eshitwa,” he would murmur. The molding of what has already occurred.

  But architecture can become a labyrinth.

  He began to theorize the mechanism of gods.

  The crown chakra, he said, was a resonator—logical, luminous, a precursor to scientific consciousness. If excited in conjunction with the Shivasati gland (he tapped his forehead when he said this), it could animate quantum residue into form. Angels and demons were not ancient species but fresh emissions, Yin and Yang braided into a loop where energy dissipated to zero.

  Thus, Kabristan Pari.

  On 05.05.2024, at 2 a.m., returning from the bathroom, he sensed a silhouette half a meter behind him. A humming in the nerves, as if a high-voltage wire had been threaded through the brainstem. The back door shuddered. His wife woke and cried out. The figure fled toward the veranda, into a sky that did not acknowledge it.

  He described greenish-yellow auras, batlike wings, a violet-faced Sitara holding a wand of light. He described longing as voltage.

  His wife described insomnia.

  In his most lucid hours he admitted a cost.

  Every entry into another vessel, every revision of a memory, required erasure. “A quiet genocide,” he once said, startling himself with the phrase. Competing selves extinguished so one narrative could proceed. Mentor’s spouse recast from classmate to confidante to chaos-bringer. Friends resurrected in altered temperaments. Enemies simplified into demons he could conquer.

  Even Mahamudra changed forms—child, woman, shadow, queen of a throne he called Chintamani Suravi of Fantasies. Each version both continuous and incompatible.

  Who, then, remained constant?

  Sometimes he claimed to be an aeon, formerly Exu Belo, King of Seven Crossroads. Sometimes a Nephilim expert named Bilu. Once, after experimenting with a spirit board that spelled out the name of a long-dead school crush before declaring itself Virginia Woolf, then Shamael, he wept—not from revelation, but from exhaustion.

  “I open gates only when compelled,” he told his wife. “Never for leisure.”

  She did not ask what compelled him.

  In the end, the science of it—if it was science—resembled an abattoir of causality. A shed between waking and dreaming where every action was already a memory and every memory could be rethreaded into a different tapestry.

  As a boy he had raised a garden lizard toward the light and watched its skin change color. For a moment he believed his own skin shifted in sympathy.

  Perhaps it had.

  Or perhaps the true siddhi was simpler and more terrible: the mind’s capacity to survive by mythologizing its fractures. To turn trauma into teleportation. Fear into angels. Desire into goddesses who arrive during power cuts and sit across from you, solemn as labor, asking only that you draw a circle and step inside.

  On certain evenings in Guwahati—when thunderheads bruise the sky and the electricity fails—he still feels the syrup-sweetness in his brain.

  He lights two kerosene wicks.

  He waits to see which self will enter the room.