Dear reader, it is important for you to understand that whatever people like us do is for a reason. The outsider will not know the reason because they cannot see what is going on in our heads. But we know it.

I had started hearing voices now. The noises in me had proliferated into clear voices. One day, the voice of The-light was very loud in me. I could not stay in my room. I went out to take a walk. It was dark. She counted me the number of men she had slept with when she was on campus. She asked me to take women out and have sex with them. She gave me different tips to do it. I heard her out in rapt attention.

In the night, I lay on bed. I felt she had gripped my spine and I was in her total control. I felt my whole body had lightened up. It felt empty. It was all white and clear. Peace descended upon me. I felt I had been raised from the bed and was levitating in the air. There were many noises and voices in me then and they were asking me to come down. It was a state of deep serenity for me. I was in the opening scene of Fellini’s 8 1/2.

I danced with her after that. We made some lovely moves together. I was Lt. Col. Frank Slade doing a tango with Donna in the Scent of a Woman. I made love to her that night as I would do often. By now I could visualize her and feel her in every move we made. I was a man and a woman at the same time. She taught me how to enter a woman and not want to force oneself upon her. My idea of sex had come from porn movies. She said that I should learn how to kiss her passionately and love her like a lover. I did what she said among the voices telling me to get away from her. When I think of it now, I am reminded of a book in Hindi by writer Swades Deepak titled ‘Meine Mandu nahi dekha’. He had similar hallucination about a woman he had met and who asked him to do things. Swades finally ran away from his family and got lost.

I wanted the real woman. I did not feel comfortable with this arrangement. I wanted to get out of it. I told her a story from the movie Cinema Paradiso. In the story, a soldier falls in love with a princess. She tells him she will accept his love if he stands outside her window for hundred days. He keeps standing in sun, rain and snow, day after day. He does it for ninety-nine days. On the last day, he stops doing it after all the hard work and never comes back. I tell her this will happen with us. She tells me to write it over email to the real woman. I send the real woman the link of the scene on YouTube over email so that she understands. As usual, there is no reply.

The noises and voices in my head were growing up in volume over time. I could not make sense of them. A sense of delusional aura had surrounded me. I don’t know what to call it but it was not a normal feeling. When you are going through something like this, the mind would take certain steps to make sense of what was happening. I had no idea how they had bugged me. But I could listen to the noises and they could read my mind. I was sure of that.

To make sense of it, my mind ended up making a story. The-light had not been replying to me. Something must have happened to her. The faculty here had done something with her. They had made her pregnant. By now her hallucination was deep inside me. I felt something heavy standing in me and it was her. I had started seeing other hallucinations as well. The hallucination of a female PhD student narrated the story to me. I had never heard her voice in me before. The story gripped my mind like a cobra grips over its prey. Overtime, the voices became loud and clear. There was no way The-light could tell me about her pregnancy, so this is the way they were communicating with me. It did not occur to me that she could send me an email or call me. Perhaps this was a well-kept secret.

The voices engaged me day and night with this story as it unfolded. I was smoking as if I was a steam engine permanently in need of fire. Two of the faculty had entered into a relationship with The-light. She had gone to them for helping me out but they had used her for their own lust. One of them told me that he had taken her to six conferences, while here I was sitting in my room unable to go to even one. I deduced The-light was not the perpetrator here but the victim. And they had not only taken her to exotic places on earth, but slept with her and filmed her. They had the videos with them and were blackmailing her.

Building up on the story, I deduced that as the faculty did not let me work on collusion, there must be something wrong with them. They are corrupt themselves or work with corrupt people. The story of The-light’s secret pregnancy got a new twist. The faculty had paid her money to keep her quiet. She had accepted the money but now wanted to get out of it and find a husband. For all the people in my mind, I was the unanimous choice.

By now, many voices and hallucinations had come in me. Some of them were good and some of them were bad. They were either students or faculty. I would like to introduce them to you one by one.

‘You have to rescue her from their clutches,’ said the female warrior with a club in her hand.

‘Is he good enough? Does he understand what women go through?’ the feminist said.

‘He rapes her every night,’ said the female leader.

‘He doesn’t rape her, he loves her,’ said the elegant female.

‘I will tell you a secret about her. She is in love with someone else,’ said the little birdie.

‘Do not get into these issues. Do not work on the collusion problem,’ said the devil.

‘He will be killed if he works on it,’ said a faculty who called himself captain of the Institute.

‘Complete your PhD and get out,’ said the manager.

‘Come to me and I will help you out,’ said the wheelchair man.

‘They use her and dump her on him,’ the warrior said.

‘Use game theory to get out of it,’ said the strategist.

‘You disease born, you man of pain, you eater of shit, you will give pain to everybody around,’ said an abusive female voice without a face.

‘Nothing will come out of you. You will rot. You are going to be a no one in life. Nobody can save you now,’ said a grieving faceless male voice.

‘$%^ @# # $%^ #$%, #$%^ &*%$. $%^& $%# $%^ @#$%^&* %^& !@#$ ^&* #$%^ #$% #$%^, #$%^ #$%^&. @#$ #$%^ #$%^ #$ $% $%^ #$% $%^&. $%^& $% $%,’ said another sexual voice of a faceless man. His words were lustful.

I got angry at this last voice and muttered it to shut up.

‘#$%^ @ #$%^ #$%^ #$% #$%. #$%^ #$%^& #$%^. #$%^& $%^. #$%^ $%^. #$%^ #$ #$%^,’ said the sexual voice.

How did I achieve this feat of talking to my voices? Every person who came into me got a position in my body. Some were in the neck, some on my chest, some at my back, some in my ass, and some in my legs. Each time a person spoke, I focused on the part of my body they were present in. If the person got aggressive, he or she would jump out of my body into a real person in front of me and speak. I did not have an inner voice. So, I had to move my head to signal my opinion. If I agreed with them, I would move my head up or down and in case I disagreed, I would move it sideways. In case I wanted to speak, I would whisper. I followed this routine all the while. On my walks, a careful observer would have found me moving my head in curious ways whispering to myself.

I had started showing many physical symptoms as well. My appetite had reduced. I had stopped taking any breakfast and snacks. I would take lunch on a few days. Dinner was the only thing I was regular in. I smoked a lot. I often felt like vomiting. My eyes would pain. I had stopped playing football so there was no physical activity.

It would take another novel to take you through my mind of those times. Such was the drama playing in my mind. The elegant one wanted me to take up the case of corruption and investigate it. She said she would give me money for it. The captain and the devil did not want it. For a few days, I tried to investigate on Google and then gave her some results. She said I should keep working further on it and find the culprits.

The female voices spoke of the discrimination they suffered. How it was difficult of them to progress and have peace of mind at the Institute? How men leered at them? How men raped them in their minds? I heard them out nodding my head in a yes, all the time. They said the world was not fair to them and that I should not do it to The-light what many other men do to women in them. They cautioned me on what I was doing.

The male voices asked me to go to the other women at the Institute. They said I should stop thinking about her and find a partner. I asked some of these female colleagues of mine who were also in me. They said they were not interested in me anymore. The-light told me that she wanted a house, a car and a good and proper partner. All the females wanted me to be proper. I should eat well, sleep well, go to the gym and then once I had the money after getting a good job, go to her. I got angry at this. I said she should accept me the way I am and love me so. They said it didn’t work that way.

At one point of time, witches and curses made their entry too turning the whole thing into a witch story for a few days. When the witch story did not sustain, some voices of the faculty asked me to write a book about the corruption at the Institute. I spent many days listening to their story walking through the campus or oscillating at the tea and cigarette shop on the campus. Many things came up and went out as I developed a style to talk to the voices in my head. People accused each other as I tried to find the solution to the central problem. Which was of course the pregnancy and the upcoming child The-light was about to have. In the process, they accused me of being unfair and discriminatory towards my mother. Women in my mind vilified me for what I had done to her.  

I tried to convince them that I had not been unfair to my mother. I told them stories since the beginning of my life about how I had helped and supported my mother. They did not accept my statement. They mocked me about it. They said I am the same as other men. I tried and tried to convince them otherwise. Once I was so overwhelmed by all this that I started crying while telling them the pain of my mother. Later, when I met my mother, the first thing I did was to touch her feet and ask for forgiveness.

I did not study in that period. I had already learnt the model operation and was pretty confident that I could finish my thesis. I had produced the results of carbon taxation on the freight sector in India and kept the results to myself. I was not very sure of sending it to the Professor. I knew that no one had ever completed a PhD under him before five years. Knowing him, I knew I could not do it either. So, I kept the results for future use when the time came.

 In the meantime, the Economics area assigned us as teaching assistant for one of the first-year courses. I had a distraction to engage myself with aside from wallowing in my delusions. I would sit in the class and try to listen to the professor who was a good teacher. But my mind would never be at it. Either I was daydreaming in my delusions or looking at the students. I did not feel like working at all. It was difficult to sleep because of the constant bickering with my voices. But I went to each class, marked attendance, and gave marks for class participation. At least, in these times I had some respite from the demons I had been dealing with.

Because people would come out of me, I started believing that it was their holograms. I could see people sitting on my table or moving around my room talking to me. These were people from the Institute. I wanted my hologram as well but there was none. The voices said that the holograms can be created by individual controls. My control was with The-light or with the professor. I wanted my control back. So, I wrote to some faculty about it. For a few days, I kept formulating ideas on how to get my control back.

At the Institute, we used to have regular guest lectures. One time, two different guest lectures, both of my interest, were scheduled on consecutive days. It occurred to me that the faculty would want me to attend these lectures, something of the sort that I was in demand. There is a problem of grandiosity with this illness. I felt the lectures were being held for me. That I was some great student who would do wonders in his work and the Institute wanted to help me achieve it. By this time, I had started seeing the entire connected faculty sitting in their offices in my mind. I could see them encouraging me to attend the lectures.

On the day of the first lecture, I had gone out to buy milk. On the road, I felt the captain was walking in me. It was not me but he who was making me walk. He was asking me to attend the lecture today whereas I was resisting. All this made me very anxious. On reaching home, I took the coin in my hand, folded them and asked god to give me proper directions. My body started shivering. It was like I was having epilepsy fits. I stooped and lay on the floor, the coin still in my hand. God was talking to me then. I saw the picture of my village deity and deduced that she was calling me. She came into my mind, the woman I had kissed. God Shiva came along with her. I deduced that God wanted me to be with this woman. He said that this woman was my Parvati, the God’s wife. ‘Jai jai shiv Shankar, kaanta lage na kankar, ke pyala tere naam kar diya,’ was playing in my mind. I wrote an email to her detailing what had happened with me. She was kind enough to send a reply but we didn’t take off. Finally, I didn’t go to any of these lectures. I ended up calling my mother and asking her if she would go with me to visit my village deity.