Author's Note
A word before
you begin
This book has been inside me for thirty years.
It was not a plan or an outline. Just something I kept noticing and could not leave alone. Something about the way feelings move through a life. Through my life, first. Then, everywhere I looked.
I am a musician. I have spent my life in sound — making it, chasing it, losing it, finding it again. That is probably why I noticed patterns before I had words for them. I also work as a risk consultant, which taught me the same lesson from a different direction. Every system has a pattern. Every pattern announces itself before it breaks.
One of those houses stood alone, leaning against a tamarind grove at the edge of our village. Its roof sagged. The mud walls had turned dark from years of rain. That was where I went whenever I could.
Silence. Not ordinary silence — a silence that pressed against my skin. And then the sound would arrive. A single note, steady, almost shy. Then layers, until an entire arrangement swelled inside me. Haunted houses were not scary. They were where the music lived.
For a long time, I tried to manage all of it. Meditation to soften the anger. Affirmations for the grief. None of it worked. The feelings simply outlasted every method I brought to them. That is when the real question arrived — not what is wrong with me but why does this keep coming? And behind that, quieter: what if there is nothing to fix?
What I offer you is not a fix. It is a way of seeing. And from that seeing — if you let it happen — a way of living that is more honest, more yours, more alive than the one you have been managing.
You, holding this book. Me, writing as though we are sitting somewhere together. A chai stall in Mumbai, steam rising between two cups, the city carrying on outside, neither of us in any hurry. Not guru. Not student. Just two people sitting with the same questions.
— Santjee
