The Autobiography of X(HU-M-I)

Before I could remember my own life, someone had already begun writing it down.

There is a page in my father’s handwriting — Sanskrit verses, written months before I was born, addressed to a son he had not yet met. I did not read it seriously until I was an adult. When I finally did, I found I needed almost everything he had spent my childhood quietly teaching me: Morse code, paper ciphers, mnemonics, an old Indian system for hiding numbers inside poetry. He never told me why he was teaching me any of it. I only understood, decades later, that he might have been teaching me how to read something he had already left behind.

The Autobiography of X(HU-M-I) is the first volume of that investigation — part memoir, part family history, part decoding project, built from what can actually be shown: real family memory, a real manuscript, a real numerical system, and the disputed, still-unresolved place and circumstances of my own birth. I do not claim to have solved everything. I show you exactly what I found, exactly how I found it, and exactly where the evidence runs out — and I ask you to sit with the same uncertainty I have lived inside for most of my life.

This volume covers the years before memory: a night I walked out of my family’s house at eight years old and disappeared into the Himalayas for reasons I still cannot explain; a childhood spent asking questions that outgrew every answer I was given; the father who taught me that information rarely looks like what it is; and the page itself — the verses, the number system hidden inside them, and a coincidence involving a set of coordinates I am still not willing to call proof of anything.

Who wrote this for me? Volume 1 asks the question properly. It does not pretend to have finished answering it.