I filed an RTI with Ministry of New and Renewable energy to get the bid data. I asked them three questions. I started feeling that people around me wanted to know how much I had progressed in this work. That I was being watched. That I was doing something against their wishes. My mind started making up scenarios. I got an eerie feeling that I am going against big people and that they may make life hell for me. I started getting paranoid about it.

My condition deteriorated. One day I was sitting on my commode taking shit. I was thinking about The-light. A little voice told me about bugs in my room. That somebody was listening to everything I had been doing. I got up and rummaged my room for the bug. I looked on the table, the shelf, my wardrobe, the windows, even the tube light. I searched all the pens because the bug could be in the caps. Then I inspected the tube light. There were black marks on it. It convinced me that my professors had bugged the tube light. They were listening to me and watching me.

I was shouting in my room now. I was angry. I wanted to give them a very hard time. So, I decided to curse them so that they could listen to me. For half an hour, I cursed people. I accused them of siding with the corrupt. I was angry at The-light too. I accused her of running after money and not listening to my heart. I went mad in my room.

I kept shouting. No one heard because no one came. I covered the tube light with a cloth so that they could not see me. My psychosis was getting worse. It got into my mind that the faculty had bugged the whole room. The bugs were in different parts of the room. Some were on the tube light, some on the fan, some on the window and one of them on the door. They had surrounded me. I was the Laurent family in Haneke’s Cache.

At this point, I had started hearing little voices. My head was full of emotions and voices of all kinds. It was like an overcrowded local train in Bengal. I deduced that the bug was causing all this cacophony. A special sound like the bursting of a fuse was inundating my head. This, I concluded, was the sound of the bug. I had to run away from this place. I had to take shelter somewhere else.

I took another hotel in the city. It was a small hotel situated some distance away from the Institute. My focus was on the tube light in the room. It looked the same. Did they bug this room as well? I could still hear the fuse sound and so I concluded that this could not be the sound of the bug. Or that they had bugged this room as well. How could they know of me coming here? It was all perplexing for me. But I decided that if I had to hear the sound, better go and stay at my room in the dorm. I came back after two days.

I checked and rechecked the tube light. I called the electrical department and got it replaced. The sounds would still not leave me. That meant the bug was somewhere else. I don’t know how it entered my mind that the bug was in my glasses. That there was a connection between my glasses and the laptop camera. The-light and the faculty had bugged them when she was here. I had three glasses. I broke all three of them sitting on the floor, collected the pieces in a waste bin, and decided to throw them away.

I deduced that throwing them far away would severe the connection. I was half blind without my glasses. But I hired an auto rickshaw and went to the bus stand. It occurred to me that it was important that I do not know where I had thrown the pieces. If I knew they would somehow know. I boarded a random bus and took a two-hour drive to the nearby city. I took an auto rickshaw and asked the driver to take me to a nearby hotel. He dropped me to a place. I had deliberately not asked the name of the hotel. I went to the nearby dilapidated building which had overgrown wild grasses and shrubs. I threw the glass pieces there and immediately took a rickshaw to go to a nearby mall. I had succeeded in disposing off the glass without knowing the name of the place. Now when I would go back to my room, these noises in my head would go away.

I spent some time in the mall, then went back to the bus stand, and took a bus to my city. In the bus, I was waiting for the noises in my head to go away. They pestered me with sounds which felt like enhanced electrical signals. Even when I reached my city the noises did not go away. This disappointed me. I got back to my room drowned in those sounds.

 I would be anxious opening my Facebook or twitter account as I was afraid they will get the password through my mind. I had stopped opening my bank account online for the same reason. At the ATM, I would try very hard not to let the password come in my mind. I would browse anxiously through Facebook and twitter when I opened them. Every post I saw felt like giving me a message. When I saw the posts from my fellow PhD student, I deduced that a particular faculty was sending me a message. When I saw a post from the PhD student who had come in my dream, I deduced that The professor was sending me messages. When I saw a post from an MBA student, it was The-light who was giving me a message. I would compile all these messages in my brain and try to make sense of them. They were like problem statements for me. Solving the hidden truth in them would get me rid of all the issues I was suffering from. My brain had become a khichdi with everything mixed in it. My mind had started looking for messages in everything I saw. It was getting terrible to live.