Aranya Vaani: Where the People I Carry Will Finally Live

Late at night, when I was still young enough to be sent to bed on a schedule, my mother would sometimes tell me stories about her own childhood instead, the ones that only ever seemed to come out after dark, after the day's obligations had emptied out of the room. I didn't know it then, but I was already doing the thing I still do to everyone I love. I was listening the way you listen when you plan to keep something, not just hear it.

I think I've been a great observer since before I had any language for what that meant. People I talk to don't always know that the conversation we're having might end up, months later, folded into a manuscript, dressed in a metaphor they never said out loud themselves but would probably recognize as true. I don't think I trained myself into this. I think it's closer to something I was simply born holding, the way some people are born with perfect pitch, except what I have perfect pitch for is the exact moment someone reveals more of themselves than they meant to.

What's Already Written

The book is called The People I Carry, a collection of literary portraits, one chapter per person who shaped me, written in the third person. I've already finished full chapters on myself, my mother, my teacher, the woman I loved, and my sisters, and none of it came from forcing anything. It came the way my mother's stories used to come, late, unplanned, meditative, arriving because I'd finally sat still long enough for it to arrive. I don't think I could have written any of those chapters on a deadline. I think I could only write them by living an ordinary day closely enough that a sentence eventually surfaced on its own.

Why Third Person

I didn't choose the third person for distance from myself. I chose it for distance from my own certainty about the people I was writing. Writing my mother in first person would have kept the sentence tethered to our relationship, to me as the son receiving her. Writing her in third person lets the sentence exist slightly apart from that, closer to observation than memory. It doesn't make the portrait less loving. I think it makes it more honest, because it forces me to describe her as a whole person who existed before I did, rather than as a character whose entire meaning is defined by what she gave me.

Virginia Woolf did something related in an unfinished memoir called A Sketch of the Past, trying to write her way toward her own mother, Julia Stephen, who died when Woolf was thirteen. She distinguished between what she called moments of being, instances so sharp they demand to be understood, and the far larger stretches of moments of non-being that make up most of a life, the cotton wool, as she put it, that ordinary days are wrapped in. Writing a portrait, I've come to think, is the act of finding which moments in a person's life were actually moments of being, for them, not for you, and having the discipline to leave the cotton wool out.

The Life That Makes This Possible

I don't think I could write this way inside a different kind of life. Mine has always been slow, mostly free of the busy rituals the working world seems to treat as non-negotiable. I'm not sure if I'm lucky to have this much leisure, or if I simply kept insisting on finding leisure inside a schedule that could have been busier, but either way it's with me, and I've come to think of myself, plainly, as a thinker before I'm anything else. My days have room in them for long podcasts on philosophy, on comedy, on literature, room for a walk with nowhere urgent to be at the end of it. I wrote, in an earlier piece in this series, that poetry might be going extinct because almost nothing in modern life rewards sitting with a feeling long enough to find the words for it. I think this book is only possible because I've built a life that still does.

There are still so many people waiting for their chapter. Friends who became philosophy to me, the ones I found rather than inherited. Friends from the years I spent close to organized belief, before I moved past it. Friends who are just for laughter, no metaphysics attached, which is its own kind of essential. Brothers. Teachers who only passed through for a season but left something behind anyway. Cinema, and the people who taught me to watch it properly. Fifteen more chapters, at least, and I don't think I'm in a hurry to force any of them before they're ready.

What I'm Learning to Build Now

Lately I've been trying to learn something harder than portraiture, writing short stories about human evolution and consciousness, building fictional characters from scratch and asking them to carry ideas too large for a single essay to hold. I've written before, in this series, about rejecting the god I was raised with and finding only the mystery of consciousness left standing afterward. I think these stories are my way of sitting inside that mystery through fiction instead of argument, giving it a character and a plot instead of a thesis.

My daily reading right now is the Upanishads and the Vedas, not because I've returned to following their mythological claims about the universe as literal truth, but because the questions inside them are still the right questions, even when I no longer accept their answers. Swami Sarvapriyananda, Richard Dawkins, and Alex O'Connor are in regular rotation in whatever I'm listening to, three people who would probably disagree with each other about almost everything except the seriousness with which a question like this deserves to be asked. The Ashtavakra Gita has been quietly reshaping how I think about all of it lately, more than I expected it to. This entire routine is more fruitful than anything I had during the Covid years, when the days were long but strangely empty. My learning curve, for whatever that's worth, still feels like it's climbing.

Aranya Vaani

I'm also building a home for all of it, an online portal called Aranya Vaani, voice from the forest, where my books, journals, poetry, and stories will all eventually live under one roof. I never went to college. Everything I know, I learned from the internet, on my own schedule, at my own pace, and I taught myself to code not long after finishing school, never professionally, but enough that I can now shape the architecture, the interface, the small administrative bones of a website myself, with AI tools helping me carry the parts I still don't know how to do alone.

I notice the strange symmetry in that, given what I wrote in an earlier piece about algorithms manufacturing desire we never asked for. The same broad category of tool, used differently, is helping me build a home for the opposite instinct, slowness, attention, portraits instead of scrolls. I don't think that resolves the tension I wrote about before. I think it just means the tool was never the real subject of that essay. What it's used for was always the actual question.

Where I've Landed

Epistemology, ontology, all the specific philosophical language I've picked up along the way, keeps teaching me to write more carefully about more things, and somehow it always leads me back to the same starting point, the people who shaped me first. I think that's the right order. Before I write a fictional character standing in for the history of consciousness, I needed to write my mother exactly as she is, hands and all, gestures and all, the late-night stories she gave me before I understood I'd spend a life keeping them.

Five chapters are finished. Fifteen or more are still ahead of me, and an entire second life of short stories about evolution and consciousness sitting just behind those. I don't know yet what shape all of it will finally take once it's living under one name, in one place, built by hand and by whatever help I could find along the way. What I know is that it started with a child pretending to be asleep, listening to his mother talk about who she was before he existed, and deciding, without knowing that's what he was deciding, to keep it.