My thesis work had been on stall for the past few months. I had calculated my results earlier and was sitting on them. One day I was sitting in the tea stall and thinking about sending my thesis results to my guides. The tea stall owner sneezed. I took it as a sign to send my work to them. I came back home and emailed them the results. That is how after a hiatus of almost an year I got in touch with my guides in the real world. In my mind, I had always been with them.

I started attending meetings with my advisors. From now on, there was a meeting every month. I don’t know why there weren’t any meetings for so long. They would have helped me. Anyways, I went to these meetings with a presentation of what I had done. But I hardly spoke. It was the Professor and other members who gave me tips and discussed how to write the thesis. All through the meetings I was trying to connect the real people I could see with their hallucinations and voices in my head. The voices would instruct me. It was the Professor who spoke in these meetings most of the time. I had lost the willingness to speak in front of him. The meetings did give me an idea of how to structure my thesis.

Among all this hara-kiri, I was also working on my thesis. It was difficult to study with all these voices in my head. The most difficult part was what was happening to my eyes. It looked as if I had lost control of the focus and movements of my eyes. They would either wander off or gather an enormous speed as I moved from one word to another giving me no understanding of what I was reading. I used to sit with my voices and my rebel eyes for hours and hours, managing to write few paragraphs. Both the story and the thesis would run in my mind as if they were two wives living with the same man. My efficiency was low because of this. Self-doubt engulfed me of whether I actually understood what I was writing. The voices would pick on this self-doubt and persecute or mock me on it. There were other issues which would come up.

For example, The-light would claim that it was not me who had been writing the thesis but her. She said I had taken ideas from her mind. She wanted to go to an American university to study and wanted credit for my work. Some of the faculty were with her. I tried my best to convince them that I had done the work. I would spend nights after nights when these faculty would go through what I had written and ask me questions about it. I would try and answer those questions. Then they would ask The-light questions about my thesis and she was unable to answer those. Finally, they accepted that the work was mine, not hers. But she was adamant on taking credit and recommendations from the faculty. She gave me a lot of trouble and sleepless nights because of her wishes.

I also had this terrible problem of shivering while I read. As I shivered, my tongue came out of my mouth like a dog’s tongue and stayed there for some time as I moaned. My muscles started flexing and my lips would stretch out. I looked like Heath Ledger’s Joker when this happened. I would get up and flex my body like a bodybuilder, all in pain. This was an involuntary activity and thankfully, no one was there to see me do this. Otherwise, they would have deduced that a monster had overtaken me. Sometimes, I would stand in front of the mirror in the wardrobe and talk to myself. I was Travis Bickle in the Taxi Driver asking you talking to me? I used to do these things often as I discussed with my voices. 

In my TAC meetings, one part of my thesis was discussed once. The members had asked me the value of an economic variable which I was going to use in my thesis. I was always afraid this question would come up. The problem with this variable was that like many other things in the field in economics, it was widely debated. I had tried to find the appropriate value of the variable to use but was pretty confused. The major part of the confusion was that many of the papers that discussed this variable were theoretical. I wanted a precise mathematical method to calculate the variable for sector I was working on. Thinking about it one day and dreaming to write a paper to calculate the variable with mathematical precision and end the global debate once and for all, an idea flashed into my mind. It was like a Eureka moment. I was connecting physics with economics. It got me excited. I believed the impact of my work, if I could prove it, would be enormous on a global scale right from climate change to finance to economics. I started dreaming that I would win the Noble Prize someday. The voices in me also thought so. Once this idea came into my mind, the way the voices dealt with me changed. Now instead of persecuting me, they wanted me to work with them. Now I was the future Nobel Prize winner. And who doesn’t want to get associated with a Nobel Prize winner!

This event split the faculty into two camps. One camp which included my committee members was a supporter of the right-wing political party in India. The other camp, which included faculty who had taught me but were not in my committee, were the supporters of the other major political party. The first camp was rigid, a little less progressive and a strong supporter of Hindu culture and practices. The second camp was progressive, modern and liberal. The conversations went like this:

‘It is only we who have the resources to support your ambitions. You are the son of the soil, and this country needs people like you to take it forward. So come and work with us. And not them,’ said the Captain, who belonged to the first camp.

‘What bullshit! Son of soil and all this is patriotic vitriol. They are as much a son of their soil as the ice a yogurt. Their sons and daughters are all studying and settled abroad. None of them have any interest in this country other than their own personal progression. Come and work with us. We have all the contacts. It is we who run this Institute and have taken it where it has reached. We know your talents.’ The wheelchair man who was in the second camp said.

‘Contacts, did he say contacts? I have the best contacts here of all these people. You know it already. I can connect you to Nobel Prize winning economists. We can work together to crack this problem. I can take you places,’ said the devil. I nodded my head.

‘He has no idea of what we can get you. If he can get you to Nobel Prize economists, so can us. So, don’t worry about that,’ said the elegant one from the second camp.

‘And you must be careful of these people. They can sell their country like a vegetable vendor sells vegetables outside the gates of this Institute. These guys lick the asses of foreigners. It is we who run this country. It is we who are at the roots and hold this country together. Remember you come from there as well. Do not forget your roots,’ said the poodle from the first camp.

‘Nobody licks their asses. We are friends. And remember, if the country went to them, then this country has no future. The country runs on the constitution, not the whims and fancies of these people,’ said the female leader from the second camp.

The abusive, sexual, and grieving voices were also there.

Days and days went by as the faculty tried to lure me into their camp. I sometimes saw the saffron flag over the Institute. On other times, it was the flag of the country and sometimes the flag of sickle and hammer. Their demand was that I take one side and stay on that side forever. I opined that I will not take any side and take the middle road to the PhD. I do not know why I did not take any side. Sometimes in times of war, taking a side is so important. People should know, you should know, which side you are in. It forms a part of your identity. My mind had turned into a warzone. Here I was, my mind split into so many people, who were arguing, pulling each other’s leg and asking me to take a permanent side. It was as if my identity was in question. And I could not take one side. I kept talking to all of them. Maybe if I had taken a side, I would have gotten rid of some of them. But I was not sure and kept all the voices in me.

The issue of marriage of The-light was still at stake. The issue of my marriage with her had come up again and again. I had refused to marry her after listening to her experiences. For now, The-light was with the second camp. They had been the one persecuting me the most for doing things to her in my mind. The voices from the first camp pleaded with me to leave her as she was a species of a much higher quality than me and would never marry a low-grade person like me. The devil asked me to forget her and move on.

The arguments continued. More people joined the others in my mind. The faculty of the Institute are powerful people. The female leader from the second camp brought the finance minister of India to solve this problem. The finance minister said he had been closely monitoring the situation. The projects I was working on were too sensitive and too much of national importance to leave it alone. He said that the purpose of the chip was different but the people of our country had as usual started using it for having sex. He reprimanded the two faculties for sleeping with The-light. But asked me to marry her and solve the problem. I refused.

The-light supported the finance minister. The minister seemed to like her too. The other side, the devil, brought the road transport minister into our mind. All this was the beginning of the story getting grander and expansive. It was no more limited to the people of the Institute. It had spread its fangs into the arena of power.

You can imagine dear reader, how grand and important one would feel if something like this happened. I felt an important person now. And the story which I had woven took different turns and got grand as well. I saw that this chip connected me to the whole country. This meant every person in the country had the chip. The government could connect whosoever it wanted. This terrified me. A faculty from the second camp was urging me to write this story down. To help me out, she brought a famous writer of my country and a famous film director. The government would bring the head of the chief investigating agency to me. One day they connected the Prime Minister to me. The first camp connected the head of the far-right Hindu organization as many of the ministers belonged to the organization. To help me out, the faculty of the second camp connected India’s best psychoanalyst to me. He had been associated with the Institute.

All of the above connections happened within a span of few days as the story moved forward and intertwined like the branches of a banyan tree spreading its roots on the ground that was my mind. I had lost every contact with the real world. I had stopped sleeping and stopped eating, except taking my dinner at the dhaba just outside the Institute. This brings us dear reader, to where we started. Remember, I was sitting on the chair talking to these people placed on different positions in my mind. It had taken me a little more than four and a half years at the Institute to reach to this condition. I would spend around six more agonizing months with these people.