The university library had become Vikram's refuge, though refuge felt like too generous a word. It was more like a battlefield where he fought daily skirmishes with his own rage.
Three weeks since the video. Three weeks of hunting through books like a man possessed, looking for something—anything—that could explain how he'd been so completely fooled. The fortress of philosophy texts around his corner table had grown into something resembling desperation made visible.
He glared at the passage he'd been reading for the sixth time: "The transcendental unity of apperception remains the fundamental principle..." The words blurred together like Sanskrit prayers he could no longer stomach saying. What was the point? Another dead German telling him how consciousness worked, when his own had been so easily manipulated by a fraud in silk robes.
Gullible, his guru's voice echoed. They're choosing to be fooled.
Vikram slammed Kant's Critique shut hard enough to make the entire table shudder. A girl two seats over shot him an annoyed look. He wanted to snap at her—what are you looking at? At least your problems fit in a textbook—but the venom in his own thoughts startled him. When had he become this bitter?
His phone buzzed with a text from his mother: Beta, please eat something today. You're worrying me.
He typed back: I'm fine and immediately deleted it. Instead, he just put the phone face down and opened Descartes.
I think, therefore I am. The famous line stared back at him mockingly. Right. So, he existed. Congratulations. But everything else—every prayer, every meditation, every moment of what he'd thought was divine connection—apparently that was just his brain talking to itself.
The methodical doubt that Descartes promised would lead to certainty had only shown Vikram more sophisticated ways to question everything. He'd moved on to Dawkins, hoping scientific materialism might offer some kind of solid ground, but the crisp logic couldn't touch the deeper wound. It wasn't just that God might not exist—it was that Vikram could no longer trust his own capacity to know anything real from anything imagined.
His notebook lay open beside the books; pages filled with increasingly desperate questions:
Day 12: If I can't trust my experience of the divine, what can I trust? My senses? They were fooled too. My reasoning? Led me straight into a cult.
Day 18: Neuroscience says religious experience is just brain chemistry. But so is love, and beauty, and everything else that makes life worth living. Does that make it all meaningless?
Day 21: How do you tell the difference between insight and delusion? Between spiritual experience and wishful thinking? I thought I knew. I was wrong about everything.
The afternoon sun streamed through the tall windows, illuminating dust motes dancing in golden beams. Six months ago, he would have seen divine light blessing his studies. Now he saw particles of dead skin and fabric fibres suspended in air—debris floating in emptiness, just like his spiritual life.
The headaches were getting worse. Too much reading, too little sleep, too much anger with nowhere to go. Last night he'd lain awake until 3 AM, staring at his ceiling, wondering if this obsessive searching was just another form of self-delusion. Maybe some people were meant to live with questions. Maybe the search for absolute truth was itself the problem.
But even as the thought formed, something deeper rebelled against it. The twelve-year-old boy who had asked hard questions at his father's funeral was still alive in him, still demanding real answers. The difference was that now those questions had teeth.
His phone rang, making him jump. Dadi's name on the screen. He almost declined—he wasn't ready for her gentle probing, her concerned questions about why he looked so thin, why he'd stopped visiting. But guilt won, as it usually did.
"Beta," her voice carried that particular blend of affection and worry that only grandmothers perfected. "You haven't come to see me in three weeks. Are you avoiding your old Dadi?"
"I've been busy," he said, then immediately regretted the sharpness in his tone.
"Busy sitting in that library feeling sorry for yourself?"
The directness caught him off guard. "I'm not—"
"Your mother told me you spend every day there. She says you look terrible." Her voice softened. "Beta, come tomorrow for lunch. We need to talk."
"Dadi, I'm not really in the mood for—"
"I didn't ask about your mood. I asked you to come."
Something in her tone—not the usual gentle request but a quiet command—made him pause. "Fine. But I'm not good company right now."
"I know," she said simply. "Come anyway."
The next afternoon found Vikram in his grandmother's small kitchen, mechanically chopping onions while she worked at the stove. The familiar ritual of cooking together felt both comforting and painful—a reminder of the simple faith that had once come so easily to him.
"You're holding that knife like you want to hurt someone," Dadi observed, not looking up from the dal she was stirring.
"Maybe I do," he muttered, then immediately felt guilty. "Sorry. I didn't mean—"
"Yes, you did. The question is who." She turned to face him, her eyes sharp despite her seventy-eight years. "The guru who lied to you? Or yourself for believing him?"
The onion-induced tears mixing with real ones made it easy to avoid her gaze. "Does it matter?"
"It matters because one of those people you can actually do something about."
He set down the knife harder than necessary. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means you can spend the rest of your life angry at a man who doesn't deserve your thoughts, or you can figure out what you actually learned from this."
"What I learned?" The bitterness spilled out before he could stop it. "I learned that I'm an idiot. I learned that ten years of my life were a waste. I learned that everything I thought was sacred was just—" His voice cracked. "Just entertainment for a con man."
Dadi turned off the stove and moved to sit across from him at the small table. "Is that what you really learned?"
"What else is there?"
She was quiet for a long moment, studying his face. "When I was twenty-five, your grandfather died."
Vikram looked up, surprised. She rarely spoke about those early days.
"I was pregnant with your father, alone, and furious at God. The priests at the funeral spoke so confidently about the soul's journey, about dharma and karma and divine will. They had all the answers." Her weathered hands traced patterns on the table. "But I couldn't feel any of it. Just emptiness where God was supposed to be."
"What did you do?"
"I stopped going to temple. Stopped praying. I told everyone I was too busy with the baby, but really, I was too angry. If God existed, why hadn't He protected your grandfather? If the priests knew so much, why couldn't they answer my real questions?"
Vikram had never heard any of this. "How long did that last?"
"Two years. Two years of feeling like I was living in a world made of cardboard—everything looked real from a distance, but the moment you touched it..." She shrugged. "Then I met someone."
"Another guru?" The word came out harsher than he intended.
"Not the kind you're thinking of." Dadi got up to finish the dal, speaking over her shoulder. "He didn't claim to have special powers. He didn't want my devotion or my money. He just asked me a question that changed everything."
Despite himself, Vikram leaned forward. "What question?"
"He asked me—do you want comfort, or do you want truth?"
"And, What's the difference?"
Dadi ladled dal into bowls, the simple domestic action somehow making her words weightier. "Comfort is what we cling to so we don't fall apart. Truth is what we stand on once we've already fallen."
"But how can anyone know for sure? That's the whole problem—"
"Is it?" She sat back down, pushing a bowl toward him. "You're asking how you can know whether God exists. But that's not really your question, is it?"
Vikram stared at the dal, steam rising from its surface. "What do you mean?"
"Your real question is: how can you know anything at all? How can you trust your own experience? How can you tell the difference between what's real and what you want to be real?"
The words hit him like a physical blow. That was exactly what he'd been circling around in all those notebooks, in all those sleepless nights. Not just whether God existed, but whether he could trust his own mind to find out.
"Yes," he whispered. "That's exactly it."
"That," Dadi said quietly, "is a much better question than the one you started with."
They ate in silence for a while, the weight of the conversation settling between them. Finally, Vikram spoke: "So what did your Guru tell you?"
"He taught me that there are ways of knowing that don't depend on faith or doubt. Methods that work whether you believe in them or not. Something Beyond Faith" She paused, meeting his eyes. "Like the scientific method, but for inner experience."
Something stirred in Vikram's chest—not hope exactly, but a kind of recognition. "Is he still alive?"
"No. But..." She hesitated, as if weighing something carefully. "I heard his senior student still teaches. Very quietly. No ashrams, no publicity."
The stirring died instantly, replaced by familiar cynicism. "Right. Another guru with a secret teaching that will solve all my problems."
" "Are you saying all gurus are frauds because you trusted the wrong one?" Dadi's voice was firm.
Vikram pushed his bowl away, suddenly unable to eat. "I'm saying I don't know how to tell the difference anymore. I can't. I can't risk going through that again. What if this is just another—"
"What if it isn't?"
The question hung between them. Outside, the evening call to prayer began from a nearby temple, the familiar sound that had once stirred something deep in him. Now it just sounded like noise.
"I don't know how to trust anymore," he said finally.
"Then don't," Dadi replied. "What you need now is a way to verify."
That evening, Vikram sat in his apartment, staring at the single candle that was all he'd left of his former elaborate altar. Everything else—the books, the statues, the prayer beads—lay packed in boxes in his closet, too painful to look at but too significant to throw away.
The flame danced in the darkness, and he found himself remembering that day at his father's funeral. Twelve years old, standing at the cremation ground, listening to the priest recite verses about the immortal soul. Even then, surrounded by grief and ritual, something in him had wondered: How does he know? Has anyone actually verified this, or are we just repeating beautiful hopes?
Thirteen years later, he was still asking the same question. But now he understood something he hadn't then: the question itself was valuable. The need to know, to really know, wasn't a flaw in his character—it was the most honest thing about him.
His notebook lay open beside him, and he found himself writing:
Day 22: Maybe the problem wasn't that I asked the wrong questions, but that I asked them to the wrong people. I kept looking for someone to give me answers instead of learning how to find them myself.
Day 22 (cont.): Dadi's right—believing gave me belonging, but not understanding. What if the real courage isn't in holding faith, but in learning how to test it?
Day 22 (later): The question isn't whether God exists. The question is: how do I find out? Not through faith, not through doubt, but through some method that doesn't depend on either. Something beyond faith.
He paused, pen hovering over the page. Was this just another form of spiritual seeking that would lead to another disappointment? Or was it something different—not a search for truth, but a search for a way to recognize truth when he found it?
The candle flame flickered, and in its light, he saw something he hadn't expected: not answers, but a new quality of questioning. For the first time since the video, he wasn't asking questions from desperation or pain, but from genuine curiosity.
What do I actually know? he wrote. And how can I learn to know more?
The flame offered no answers, only enough light to illuminate the depth of the question. Tomorrow, he would have to decide whether this new kind of seeking was worth the risk of another betrayal.
But tonight, for the first time in weeks, the question itself felt like enough.