(Translated from Tamil to English)
My darling,
I am sorry.
Not the sorry of the plebeian masses, no, thrown out into the world by the millions like spare change into wishing wells, hoping for it to somehow change things, knowing it never will.
No, I am truly sorry.
You know me. You know I would not use the words if I did not mean them. You know how important words are to me.
Do you remember when you told me you loved me? And I remained silent, not knowing what to say. Because I didn’t know if I loved you yet. Because I didn’t want to use the word love in vain, without meaning it.
Later you told me that I should have just said it, that it hurt more than I could ever imagine not hearing the words back in reply. That it would have been the polite thing to do.
And I told you that wasn’t the kind of person I was. That I wouldn’t compromise the truth to make events and life more palatable, not for you whom I loved by then, not for my mother whom I loved even more, not for anyone.
I ask you to remember that person when you read this.
I am sorry, then, that it has been more than a year since I last wrote to you, across the gulf of oceans and the thousands of miles that separate us. (I received all your letters and treasured them.) It had to be so, since I would not lie, yet could not tell you the truth, as I am doing now.
When we last corresponded, I told you my work was proceeding at a rapid pace. I was making great strides in Number Theory. It came to me in dreams, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake, the way things should be. (I would show you the most beautiful equation I dreamt of last night, a work of art as peerless as Michelangelo’s Pietà or any other ever created by the hands of man. But you have asked me not to write equations in my letters to you. You do not understand them, you say. So I will refrain.) I filled sheets upon sheets with hitherto undiscovered, nay, undreamed of theorems and equations and formulae, in fields as diffuse as Continued Fractions and Infinite Series apart from my own. Theorems that would bring us into a new and glorious age of mathematics, equations that would enable mankind to see further than ever before. Indeed, my work would have had reverberations through all of mathematics no matter the field. I had produced more original thought in my six months at the University than had their brightest and best in their entire lives.
The Quarterly Review of the Scholars approached. I dressed in my best—my only—suit for the day. I confess I thought myself as looking quite the dapper gent that day.
My mentor Ambaji sat on the Evaluation Panel in the hall. When my name was called, it was to him I silently handed over the bound notebook with my work. (I had three more such filled notebooks in my room awaiting perusal.)
They examined it for several minutes. I waited without apprehension. It would take them some time to grasp what they were seeing, of course. It was epochal work, no mere fumbling at numbers, but they would soon understand. The entire world would understand and then —
Oh, how they would swoon! How they would clap! They would scream their adoration from the rooftops. Me, the greatest mathematician in the world! And I would respond with a benign hand, humble yet confident in my victory. Thankful, yet knowing it had to be so.
The fates, it seems, love a cruel jape.
“Where are the proofs?” they asked me.
“You have made quite a number of bold claims in your work,” a shrivelled Lord of something or other said. “If only half of them were true,” he smirked at me.
“You must understand,” Ambaji said, “We cannot merely take you at your word that these theorems are correct, advanced though they seem. We need to see the work and calculations that enabled you to arrive at such. We need to see the proofs.”
“I have none,” I said.
“How, then, did you arrive at the conclusions, without proof or calculations of some form?” another asked.
I must admit to you, darling, that for the first time in my life, I thought of prevaricating, but I turned my mind to you, and did not succumb.
“I see the theorems in my mind,” I told them. “They speak to me. I know they are correct.”
Much buzzing amongst them. Then one spoke. “That is not how we do things here. We do not just make things up and go about prancing that we are correct. That might be how you did things back home, but not here in the civilized world.”
Another stood up, holding my work, my precious notebook in his hand. “This… this is a work of fiction! Fantasy and tripe! Suitable only for children! The ravings of a madman and a lunatic, if not an outright charlatan! You have the temerity to tackle subjects you know nothing of? Subjects that even the esteemed gentlemen at this table have not attempted to turn their minds to without paying their dues? Truly, they did not teach you humility in whatever mud-laid hovel you came from. And then you think you can scribble these fantasies of equations on paper and pass them off as work? You, sir, are a fraud and a pretender! If your pagan gods whisper the theorems in your ears, tell them to whisper the proofs as well!”
Saying so, he flung the notebook at me. I did not duck to avoid it, as I think he expected me to. It caught me in the head, scoring a line of blood on my temple. I remained standing, resolute.
“My words are true,” I said to them, those worshippers of mediocrity. “My work is true. If you cannot recognize it, then you are the true charlatans.”
I left that place humiliated, to the derision of all.
If I have described the scene above in some detail, darling, it is because it is seared in my memory. I will never forget it, even now, after all things . . .
I spent the next few weeks running through rain and infernal mud, from chambers to chambers of the greatest minds in the world, attempting to convince them of the utility of my work, always dressed in my black suit, always trying to look like the civilized men they boasted of.
Not one of them gave me any serious consideration. A few flipped through some of the pages to be polite, perhaps to see what the fuss was all about. But in the end, they all asked for the same thing. Proofs. Again and again that damnable word—proofs.
A few also, in as paternal an air as they could summon, gave me advice. That I should work on problems more commensurate with my stature. Ambition was well and fine but I should not exceed my limitations. That I would have my time one day. Slow and steady was the way of things in math. Not by leaps and bounds, but through painstaking, incremental progress, one number after the other, skipping none in between.
I nearly laughed. These were the greatest, most foresighted minds in the world—too shortsighted to see past their own noses, past their politics of identity and ego and stature. Fools! They were content to walk when I could show them how to run! They were content to crawl when I could teach them to fly! Instead of heralding my discoveries, instead of erecting glorious new structures on the foundations of my work, they would waste years by having me formulate and annotate proofs for theorems I already knew to be true. The proofs for even one of my notebooks (a thousand theorems and more) would take decades, if not a lifetime. Decades of work lost. Decades in which we could be discovering realms untold in the world of numbers if only they accepted my work. Decades in which we could peel the layers off infinity and peer into the very heart of the universe.
No, I had to find another way. This was not a question of my hurt sensibilities. This was a question of humanity, and what we could accomplish in the realm of math with me at the helm.
Only Ambaji showed me some measure of sympathy. “I know your work is correct, though it be divinely inspired,” he said. “But you must show proofs. If I stand with you, I risk damage to my own stature.”
During this period, word of my infamy had reached all ears among the Scholars, as had my frustrated vociferations when asked by kindly, wispy-haired professors why my work could not keep to the standards of my peers. (‘My work is wholly original and inventive, far superior to the derivative schlock or regurgitated waste those you applaud produce.’) As was to be expected, they quickly stopped associating with me. People began to cross the room to avoid being seen with me. They changed tables to avoid sitting with me at lunch. They talked behind my back, muttering and murmuring their various names for me. Others openly mocked and derided me. Not one of them showed the curiosity to even ask to look at my work; the word of their mentors and professors was enough for them. I had been judged and found wanting, as much an outcast as the untouchables back home.
And when an outcast refuses to accept his status? When he fights against what is wrong even though the world stands arrayed against him? Then he is shown his place, of course.
They waylaid me, one day in the rain, on my way back from another futile attempt at convincing one of the professors of my merit. These civilized thugs of a civilized world, they held me as they beat me to the ground with their fists and feet. They ripped apart my suit and shirt and trousers with their implements, clothing that marked me as one of them, and then my underclothes too, laughing all the while as they did so.
I screamed and cried and shouted myself hoarse as they violated me, but not one came to help me. Not one. They walked by as if deaf and dumb, such were these civilized people.
“Derivative schlock, is it? Regurgitated waste, is it?” my assailants shouted at me after they had had their fill. “Go back to the jungles your ancestors came from! We don’t want your occult math here!”
I was left there on the ground, lying in the dirt and rain, naked in front of the women, for all the University to be witness to my shame.
I know you will be in much distress reading till here, but do not worry, for they had done me a favour and set in process the wheels of my ascent. For it was while lying there, amidst the rags and scraps of my clothing, that the seed of my deliverance was planted in my mind.
The next week, I was called before the Review Committee. Word of my assault had reached them, and they found me to be wholly at fault. I was accused of maligning my peers and disrespecting their work by both word and inference. A number of professors to whom I had made my vociferations were called upon as witnesses. I was found guilty of conduct unbecoming of a Scholar of the University, and censured for inciting others to violence by insulting their work. If a mathematician would not take up cudgels to protect his reputation, they announced, then who would. Of course, the boys had gone too far in teaching me my lesson, they murmured, and they would also be punished appropriately. Perhaps an extra work assignment or two.
But first, my punishment.
My application to become a Fellow of the Royal Society was unceremoniously struck down, and it was decided to restrict me from applying again for the next ten years. Also, I was told in no uncertain terms to stop all activities concerning the validity of my theorems and to devote myself to what was expected of me by my professors. I was expected to fully abide by the terms of the Committee in all manner and form, otherwise I would be in danger of losing my position at the University as well as the stipend that allowed me to work and sustain myself.
I accepted their judgment with folded hands. I considered myself duly chastised, I said. I would be as abiding a Scholar as they had ever seen, never to deviate from the ideal they had laid out for me. They were satisfied.
Yes, darling, that was the first time in my life I lied.
You see, the seed planted in my mind had grown to fruition; I was convinced I had found the path to my salvation. Since the past few days I had begun my new studies, studies for which I needed my position at the University to be secure in order to access the Library. And to source the volumes that could not be found in the Library, I needed my stipend. Hence, my prostrating myself before the Committee.
What of my principles, you ask? They were in front of the enormity of what was at stake as a clod of mud against a mountain. Humanity could not be allowed to be set back by decades of mathematical knowledge, not by the grasping, venal fools of the Committee.
Armed with my trusty nibbed pen, I threw myself into the study of works such as The Picatrix, Sefer Raziel Ha Malakh, Hermetica, Ars Almadel, Asrar-i Qasimi, Kitab al-Tafhim, the Pseudomonarchia Daedonum and many more.
You would not recognize these names even if you had passed matriculation, even if you were a Scholar at the University.
These are texts of the Occult.
I hear your snort of disbelief from across the oceans. Me, a disbeliever par none in all but science, as strident a voice against all that is illogical and irrational as has ever been born, ever think of turning for succour to such?
You would be justified in your skepticism. The man you knew would have dismissed it all as crock and thistle, the stuff of fevered imaginations, but having my work called those very names by the others, I began to wonder. They had rejected my work as occult, even divinely inspired, in their smallness. What else might humanity have disregarded in its pettiness, things they could not understand yet were as intrinsic to the natural order as the most fundamental principles of arithmetic? In the past, math was often seen as disreputable and allied with witchcraft. In the reign of their Tudor kings, books of numbers were often burnt as sciences of conjuring. Math, I came to learn, had a long and storied relationship with the Occult. Indeed, were not my most illustrious forebears fervent champions of the Occult? From Newton to Dee to Pythagoras, they all saw in it the perfect union of Mathesis and Cosmos.
The Islamics, the Christians, us, the Africans, all peoples of this world have in their histories and traditions such grimoires, such texts of the supernatural.
I studied them all, as many as I could get my hands and eyes on. I ate in my lodgings while reading, and while reading I slept. I was consumed.
Soon, my studies bore fruit. I began to understand.
These works had not been written for deranged would-be sorcerers or mystics, nor for champions of illogic and unreason seeking validation.
They had been written for men of science.
They had in them deliberately placed mistakes and discordancies, omissions and miscalculations, misspellings and obfuscations; pronunciations with unneeded syllables or deleted roots (pronunciations are important); entire chapters written in cipher, innocuous in their surface reading; the wrong animal to be sacrificed, the wrong genus of plant, the wrong color of chalk, the wrong measurement of powder and the like in recipes; such, and more.
There were barriers of logic and sense too.
A recipe from old Armenia to increase the fertility of the land would not work verbatim in central London (different type of soil, different contours of the land). A spell from Eridu to turn saltwater drinkable would have to be modified depending on the salinity of the water. An invocation from Varanasi to capture airbeings in rock lingams would have to take into account the thickness of air.
Those who followed blindly, only reading, never thinking, never questioning why or wherefore, would never be able to unveil the secrets of these texts.
Only a mind trained in the rigor of scientific thinking would be able to think its way through the maze of falsehoods and inconsistencies, deducing the vital from the extraneous, correcting errors and so forth. Only such a mind would be able to trace a corrupted intonation across several different oral traditions and schools of the occult to its correct form or deduce that a stem had to be used whole in a potion where powdered was written or that anise was the correct incense for a particular ritual of awakening and not myrrh.
It took me months, but I finally reached a point where I knew I had the contents of these texts firmly in my grasp. Scribbled in their margins, I had produced for myself the true picture of all their ideas, the truth of all their incantations and invocations and diagrams and spells. (My annotated copies of these texts would be priceless to the correct buyer, but I do this for the sake of humanity, not money.)
I was ready for the next step.
Darling, if you think me crazed now, I will not dispute it. I was crazed, yes, in my search for knowledge, but I had not yet taken leave of my wits. I ask you to remember again the man I am, and the value of words for me. Know then that I write the truth.
On an overcast afternoon, when the wind outside had just begun to blow hard enough to strip errant leaves off trees, hinting at the storm to come, I smeared diseased blood (disease is anathema to them) around my nose, ears, mouth, anus and penis (points of entry) and began my first summoning.
I had prepared well beforehand. I had drawn the correctly intersecting circles on the walls and floor and roof to ensure the entity remained confined within the six surfaces of my room (a mistake, and it would leak out and balloon till it had enveloped the Earth). I had placed the parchment with the words of invocation written in the correct color (color is important) in the main center circle, and another sheet with the words of dismissal in the side center circle (the written word has greater power as compared to the spoken). I had placed bowls with the appropriate powders (wormwood, elderberry, aconite, pipsissewa and valerian root) in the appropriate circles (they had parchment with words of use inside them too), and burnt incense in the correct amounts. I had placed lodestones and pyrite rocks across the room in the required formation (these would be used as markers). I had also kept a caged rooster with only a few protective markings around it in another circle as an experiment.
I myself stood in a square inlaid with runes and other protective markings drawn from rowanberry paste. Five squares (for the five senses) drawn with wattlewood and other pastes ran in intersecting patterns around mine. The dimensions of the squares were proportional to my mass, and therefore such that I could not stretch or sit, I had to remain standing the entire time.
I closed my eyes. I could see the patterns of the circles and the squares rendered perfectly inside my head.
I spoke the words of beginning.
The room blew out of existence around me. I stood in blackness, yet not the blackness of nothing, no, it was the blackness of an ether, perhaps the bottom of a deep, dark ocean.
High above me, things swam. Dark, rich shadows, they moved effortlessly in the medium, yet they would not venture down below.
The ether rippled. I felt an itch, millions of itches break out on my back, traveling up and down my spine. My first impulse was to rip the shirt off my back and scratch till I could scratch no more, but my mind held. I calmly spoke the word to disable my sense of touch. The itches went silent, the nerves of my body disabled.
Faint chitinous clickings were sounding from all about me. I looked down near my feet, reassured that the lodestones and pyrites were visible in the blackness (nothing else was).
Muloot, I whispered. Show yourself.
The eyes blinked open. Pale, bulbous, red, they ran up and down and to the sides in an immensity of scale I cannot hope to describe. Hanging there in front of them, a microbe in front of the ocean, I felt my mind seized by a paranoia and scraping that ran itself into my very soul, it would never let me go. I was twisting, turning, tilting, about to fall over in a vertiginous haze, out of my square, but my mind still held, and I shouted the word.
Instantly the powders exploded in a flash (though I could not see them) (I had mixed in a little gunpowder, my own little touch) and with a thud I hit the floor of my room, smudging the edges of the squares.
It had worked, the dismissal had been instantaneous.
The rooster vomited gouts of tar-black blood that day, more blood than could even be contained inside its body. By night, it had grown another head and more mouths and beaks from its body. I would have put the poor creature out of its misery but I had use for it. (I secreted it inside the Committee Chairman’s bedroom. I heard he shat himself in his bed when he saw it.)
I must tell you something.
I could not sleep that night.
I have not slept since that night.
I cannot sleep, not without seeing those eyes in front of me, and me dangling in front of them, the eyes watching without ceasing till I wake up. I feel the itches on my back, too. They don’t go away.
But I had to go back, I had to return to Muloot. He is the Keeper of Names, and I needed the names, the true names, of the lords I wished to summon (their names had been omitted on purpose in the texts, only the descriptions were given). I could not just give up, I could not let it all be in vain. I remembered my humiliation. It gave me courage.
I would take with me a gift this time.
I went back insensate, having rendered all my senses inert except my ears. When I heard the familiar chitterings surround me, I offered Muloot his gift—I pushed Ambaji out of his square.
I do not wish to detail events further (in any case, my eyes were blinded, I could not see what happened, though I heard the screams, as if from multiple mouths). Suffice to say he was pleased with my offering and gave me the names without my even having to ask.
Darling, I know the heart of a woman is soft and easily moved to pity. I know you must be feeling such, too. But do not pity Ambaji his fate. He deserved it. He valued his stature.
As for me, I had understood that these things I wrote and spoke, these were no mere words. They were equations as did rend apart the very fabric of time and space, and let us through the fluttering holes into the folds underneath. And in these folds lived creatures and beings, jinn and rakshasas, entities bright and benevolent, entities dark and malevolent. Things that had been present long before the creation of the universe. Things that would be present long after its end.
And I sought them all, all of them. I gazed with my scrying eyes into the void and spoke to them. (It took some doing but I had puzzled out how to manipulate the words to let my senses travel there in the body of an animal and let myself remain safely behind.)
I spoke to great Behlal, obese and golden and jovial and roundheaded, sitting on his throne with his many calves. I spoke to lidless-eyed Qana, million-forked tongue swelling from her mouth, slitterings of flesh her arms and legs. I spoke to artful Ophiel, swirling and misting all about the white leaves of the eternal tree. I spoke to slumbering Unbakkaon, beached on the shores of the cosmic sea, awash in the waste of colliding universes.
Many of them I asked, and many of them did refuse me. Many others I refused myself, for what they demanded in payment I could not give them. (The lips of a thousand virgin brides, asked one. The right hands of a hundred left-handed villains asked another.)
And then deep inside a cleft in the Parthian edifice (it could not be called universe, yet it was something), I found the lord Erudem.
Immense, flowing, many-orificed, radiant, each shifting and melding orifice holding forth on a different subject in a different language. He was a being of light, formed from the primordial energies according to the pages of the Persanta. Jagged bolts of lightning issued from him every few seconds, cracking the space around him where he hung in a bleeding red sky.
Such a being could surely grant me the proofs.
Yes, the proofs.
You will not ask it of me, because you are a tender and loving creature, without guile or guise, but I will answer nonetheless. Why did I not summon a demon that could bend all to my will and have them accept my work? Why did I not simply seek to dominate them all?
Darling, I need you to understand this. It is important that you understand this. I had such thoughts and worse come to my mind, true, but these were base thoughts, and I am not a base man. I did not do what I did to prove myself right or for any measure of self-aggrandizement, no. What I did was for the sake of all humanity. I was compelled by good, not hate. My math would set the foundations for such amazements as had never been thought of before, my ideas would propel us into the future. But I alone could not do it, I alone could not build the future. I needed the help of all others in the University, no matter my grievances against them. Not their slave minds, no, I needed their inspired souls as would set the world alight with their blaze. And that could happen only if they came to my work of their own free will, if they recognized the merit in my ideas without preconception or leverage. All thoughts of revenge fell away in front of the beauty of what we could accomplish if only they saw what I did, if only they felt as I did.
So, the proofs. And Erudem.
I spoke to him.
He would help me. In the blink of an eye he would supply me with the proofs. Not only for today but in perpetuity, for all the theorems my mind would dream up in the future. And not only the proofs, all knowledge in all spheres he could provide me. But just because he is a bright lord does not mean there is no dark inside him. He demanded cost. And the cost was love.
I agreed. I was ready to sacrifice my mother without a thought. I loved her most, after all.
I was wrong.
I loved you more.
I love you more.
I am sorry. I am so, so sorry.
Darling, I would give myself up to Erudem in a heartbeat if I had no more thoughts in my head, if I had nothing more to say, if my part in this were finished, if, if, only if . . .
But it is not so. I have more thoughts, more theorems come to me in waking dreams every day. That is my curse. Not even the respite of sleep is open to me.
Darling, I carry in my head the burden of all humanity. The thoughts I have in my mind, the thoughts I will gain from Erudem, will live till the end of time. My work will benefit the world, the entirety of the human race. It is not for myself that I do this.
The greatest form of love is between a mother and child, I have always been told. Yet my love for you is greater than that. Perhaps this might be of some solace to you. It is to me.
They will come for you at nightfall the day after you receive this.
Do not attempt to flee. They can find you anywhere.
They will ask you to come with them.
If you say no, if you resist, my contract will be null and void, and they will take me instead.
You must go with them freely, of your own accord.
You have sacrificed much for my sake. You gave up your studies. You mortgaged your mother’s gold jewelry to send me here. And now I must ask this last final thing of you.
The fate of humanity rests in your hands.
I have asked Erudem to set you in the firmament like a star.
I promise to come take your place the day my mind becomes worthless.
You know me. You know my words.
I love you.
I do not know what else to say.
Yours
Sri.