The Four Mysteries

At eight years old, I walked out of my family’s house in the middle of the night — for reasons I still cannot explain — and disappeared into the mountains.

My family discovered I was gone the next morning. My father, who had a wide personal network, searched for me across the country for several days. I came down from the mountains the way I went up: unexpectedly, for no reason I can name.

I was found in Chandigarh, on the thirty-ninth day of my mother’s forty-day fast — undertaken over my disappearance.

I was born on the 14th of December, 1975. Where, exactly, is something my own family has never agreed on.

My father always said one place. My elder brother remembers it differently. The family recalls being on vacation around the time I was born — which complicates both accounts rather than resolving them.

Volume 1 does not pick a side. The disagreement itself is part of what the book investigates.

Asked what the Sun was, as a schoolboy, I took a long time to answer — and when I finally did, the answer was short: a ball of gases.

It was correct. It was also nowhere near enough. The gap between how long the thinking took and how short the answer sounded stayed with me — not the question itself, but the discovery that a correct answer and a complete one are not the same thing.

That gap is the intellectual origin of everything else in this book.

There is a page in my father’s handwriting — Sanskrit verses, written months before I was born, addressed to a son he hadn’t met yet.

I didn’t 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, and an old Indian system for hiding numbers inside poetry.

He never told me why he was teaching me any of it.