He took her to Vetal Tekdi.
Saturday morning, 6:15 AM. Arjun pulled up outside Blue Ridge on his bike — a Royal Enfield Classic 350, matte black, the kind of bike that every IT guy in Kothrud either owned or aspired to own. He handed her a helmet and said, "Wear this. We're going up."
"Up where?"
"Trust me."
She put on the helmet. They rode through early-morning Pune — past the Chandni Chowk signal where the traffic hadn't yet achieved its daily state of spiritual chaos, past the Paud Road flyover, into Kothrud, and then up the narrow lane that climbed toward the tekdi.
Meera had heard of Vetal Tekdi but never been. The hill sat in the middle of Kothrud like a green pause button in the concrete noise of the city. At 2,600 feet, it was the highest point within Pune's limits — not by much, but enough to give you a view that made you forget you were still inside an urban boundary. On any given morning, the trail was crowded with uncles in white sneakers, aunties in salwars doing their power walks, college students jogging with earbuds, and the occasional dog who had figured out that this was where the interesting smells lived.
They parked the Enfield at the base and started walking. The trail wound through scrubby trees and dry grass — March in Pune, the season when everything was holding its breath for the monsoon. The sky was clear, that pale blue that happened between winter and summer, before the heat fully committed.
For the first ten minutes, they walked in silence. Not an awkward silence — a breathing silence. The kind that happens between two people who've spent enough time in each other's company that words are optional.
Meera noticed things. The way the light hit the hill at this hour — golden, slanted, making the dust particles in the air look like they were floating on purpose. A bird she couldn't name doing something complicated in a neem tree. The sound of her own breathing, slightly heavier than she'd like, because she was still in the early stages of her fitness arc and hills were not yet her friends.
By the time they reached the top, she was properly winded. But the view made up for it.
All of Pune. From here you could see the whole thing — the construction cranes of Baner, the IT towers of Hinjewadi glinting in the distance, the old city clustered around Shaniwar Wada, the university campus, the thin thread of the river, the hills beyond the hills. Everything she'd been living inside, working inside, hurting inside — all of it spread out below her like a dashboard she'd never zoomed out of.
Arjun sat on a flat rock near the edge. She sat next to him.
"Okay," she said. "We're up. Now talk."
🌊 The Loneliness
"First tell me something," Arjun said. "After everything you've read — the Gita, the UVA research, the Shanti Devi case, the cell biology, the NDE studies — how do you feel?"
She thought about it. How did she feel?
"Informed," she said. "More informed than I've ever been about... myself, I guess. I know I'm the soul, not the body. I know the evidence supports it. I know BG 2.13 isn't just poetry — it's a claim that holds up. And that's... stabilizing. It's the steadiest I've felt since Sahil left."
"But?"
There was always a but. With Meera, there was always a but.
"But it's cold, Arjun. It's... I don't know how to say this without sounding dramatic. It's lonely."
"Say more."
"Okay. So I'm the soul. I'm eternal. I pass through bodies. Fine. But that means... I'm alone. Like, fundamentally alone. My connection with Aai — that's a connection between her body and mine. Between her role as mother and my role as daughter. If we're both souls passing through, then next time around, she might not be my mother. I might not be her daughter. Sahil, Priya, Baba — all those relationships are... temporary. Costumes we're wearing together for one scene in an infinite play."
She paused. The morning breeze moved across the hilltop. Somewhere below, an auto horn honked — Pune's most persistent soundtrack.
"And that makes me feel like... a really good piece of software with no server to run on. Perfectly written code floating in the void. Technically impressive. Functionally homeless."
Arjun nodded slowly. She could tell this was the reaction he'd been expecting. Not hoping for — expecting. Like a teacher who sets a problem knowing the student will hit exactly this wall.
"You're right," he said.
"I'm right that it's lonely?"
"You're right that the first answer is incomplete. Knowing what you are without knowing whose you are is like... knowing your employee ID without knowing which company you work for. The ID is accurate. But it's meaningless without the org chart."
"So there's an org chart?"
He smiled. "There's an org chart."
✨ The Spark
"Let me try something," Arjun said. He picked up a dry twig from the ground and held it up.
"If I light this twig on fire, it'll produce a spark. A small, bright, individual spark that flies off and exists for a moment on its own. That spark — is it the fire?"
"No. It came from the fire, but it's not the fire."
"Is it separate from the fire?"
Meera paused. "I mean... it came from the fire. It has the same nature as the fire — heat, light. But it's tiny. The fire is enormous. The spark is... a fragment."
"Exactly. Now — does the spark have its own identity?"
"Yes. It's a spark. It's not the log, not the ash, not the smoke. It's a specific, individual point of light."
"And where is it most alive? Where does the spark burn brightest?"
She thought about it. "When it's close to the fire. When it flies too far away, it... cools down. Goes out."
Arjun let the twig drop.
"That's the Gita's second answer."
📖 The Verse
He opened the yellow book. The pages fell open — but not to Chapter 2 this time. Further in. Chapter 15. She hadn't gotten this far in her own reading yet.
"Verse 7," he said. "This is the verse that changed everything for me. After my mom died, after I'd understood the soul — just like you have — I hit the same wall. The loneliness. The so what. And then I read this."
He read it aloud. Slowly. The way he always did — not chanting, not performing. Just speaking, the way you'd read a message from someone who mattered.
"The living entities in this conditioned world are My eternal fragmental parts. Due to conditioned life, they are struggling very hard with the six senses, which include the mind."
Bhagavad Gita 15.7.
Meera stared at him.
"Read it again," she said. The same thing she'd said when he first read 2.13 at Vohuman.
He read it again.
"The living entities in this conditioned world are My eternal fragmental parts."
"Mamaivāṁśo," Arjun said. "That's the Sanskrit. Mama — My. Eva — certainly. Aṁśaḥ — fragmental part. Krishna is saying: you are My part. Not a random soul floating in the void. Not a cosmic accident. Not a piece of consciousness that showed up out of nowhere and will disappear into nowhere. You are a fragment of Me."
The wind picked up on the hilltop. Meera's hair moved. She didn't notice.
"So the soul isn't... alone?"
"The soul has never been alone. That's the whole point. The loneliness you're feeling? It's not a bug in the system. It's a feature. It's the spark feeling cold because it's far from the fire. The spark doesn't merge into the fire and disappear — it stays a spark, it keeps its identity. But it burns brightest when it's close to its source. Your loneliness is the soul's way of telling you: you belong somewhere. You belong to someone. And you've been away from home for a very long time."
🏢 The Company
Meera was quiet for a long time. Below them, Pune was waking up. The traffic was thickening on the roads. Smoke from a chai stall curled up somewhere in the valley. The morning was getting warmer.
"Okay," she said finally. "Let me make sure I understand this. Because this is big. This is really big."
"Take your time."
"The first question — 'Who am I?' — the answer is: I'm the soul. The ātmā. I'm not the body, not the mind, not my name, not my job. I'm the driver, not the car. I'm eternal. I pass through bodies. The evidence supports this. Chapter 2. Got it."
"Got it."
"The second question — 'Whose am I?' — the answer is: I'm Krishna's. I'm a fragment of the Divine. Not separate from God, not identical to God, but a part of God. The way a spark is part of the fire — same nature, but not the same scale. I came from somewhere. I belong to someone."
She paused. Arjun waited. He could see the gears turning.
"But here's the thing, Arjun." Her voice had shifted. Not dismissive — precise. The voice she used during code reviews when she found an unvalidated assumption. "Everything you just said depends on one thing being true."
"Which is?"
"That God exists."
She said it plainly. Not aggressively, not mockingly. The way she'd say "this function assumes the API key is valid" during a code review. A factual observation about an unverified dependency.
"The soul — I can accept that. We went through the evidence. UVA, Shanti Devi, the NDE studies, the cell biology. There's data. But God? Krishna? A personal being who says 'you are Mine'? Where's the evidence for that?"
Arjun looked at her. Not surprised. Not offended. The way a senior developer looks at a junior who's just asked exactly the right question at exactly the right time.
"That's fair," he said.
"I'm not being difficult. I'm being honest. You showed me I'm not the car — and the data backed it up. Now you're telling me the car has an owner who designed it — and I need the same level of proof. Because right now, the most I can say is: maybe the soul exists. But a personal God who fragments Himself into billions of individual souls and says 'you are Mine'? That's a much bigger claim. And I'm not going to accept a bigger claim on less evidence."
"You shouldn't. And I wouldn't want you to."
"So?"
"So let's talk about it. Not here — it's getting hot and I need chai. But the evidence is there, Meera. Not the evidence you're used to — not a peer-reviewed paper with a p-value. But evidence that an engineer would recognize. The kind of evidence you see every day in the systems you build. Think about it as a question: when you see design, what do you assume?"
"That there's a designer."
"When you see code, what do you assume?"
"That someone wrote it."
"When you see laws — consistent, mathematical, universal laws that never break — what do you assume?"
She was quiet for a moment.
"That someone set them."
"Hold that thought. We'll pick it up next time. I'll make the full case. Logic, observation, what you can see with your own eyes. No blind faith. No 'just believe.' Deal?"
"Deal."
🌅 The Descent
They walked down the hill slowly. The morning crowd was in full swing now — uncles swinging arms, aunties in groups of four discussing someone's daughter-in-law, a golden retriever bounding up the path with the joyful energy of a being who had never once questioned its place in the universe.
Meera was quiet. Processing. Two threads running in parallel — the verse that wanted to be true, and the question that wouldn't let it be true without proof.
"Arjun."
"Yeah?"
"For what it's worth — I want 15.7 to be true. The spark thing, the belonging thing. I want it the way you want a diagnosis to be treatable. But wanting isn't knowing."
"I know. And that's exactly why you'll get there — because you won't settle for wanting. You'll push until it's real."
"Or until it breaks."
"It won't break. The evidence is there. You just haven't looked at it yet with the right lens."
"What lens?"
"The same one you use every day at work. Design implies a designer. Code implies a coder. You already believe this — you just haven't applied it to the biggest system you've ever seen."
They reached the base of the hill. Arjun unlocked the Enfield. Meera stood there for a moment, looking back up at the tekdi.
She'd climbed a hill and heard a verse that said she wasn't alone. She'd felt something — a warmth, a pull, a recognition — that she couldn't explain and wasn't ready to trust. And she'd asked the biggest question of her life on a Saturday morning before most of Pune had finished its first chai.
It had been, by any measure, a strange month.
🌙 That Night
She opened the yellow book. Chapter 15. Found verse 7.
"The living entities in this conditioned world are My eternal fragmental parts. Due to conditioned life, they are struggling very hard with the six senses, which include the mind."
She read it three times. The way she'd read 2.13 three times.
But this verse sat differently in her chest.
2.13 had been clarifying. It told her what she was. It was a diagnosis — accurate, clinical, stabilizing. The doctor tells you what's wrong, and the knowing itself is a kind of relief. And the evidence had backed it up. She'd verified 2.13. It passed the tests.
15.7 was... warmer. It told her she wasn't alone. That the loneliness had a name — homesickness — and that homesickness meant home existed. It told her she was someone's.
But her engineer brain wouldn't let her rest there.
My eternal fragmental parts.
My.
That one word. My. Krishna didn't say "the living entities are fragmental parts of the universe" or "consciousness is a property of the cosmic whole" or any of the vague, depersonalized language she might have accepted more easily. He said My. First person. Possessive. Personal.
And personal required a person.
The soul she could work with — there was data, there was research, there were 2,500 cases at a university. But a personal God who created souls as His own fragments, who claimed them as "Mine" the way Aai said "my daughter" — that was an entirely different category of claim.
She wanted it to be true. That was the unsettling part. She wanted it the way you want a job offer to be real before you've verified the company exists. The loneliness of the last six weeks — no, longer, the loneliness of her entire adult life, the one she'd been papering over with relationships and job titles and Instagram engagement — that loneliness wanted a home. It wanted an owner. It wanted to be homesickness instead of emptiness.
But wanting wasn't evidence. And she'd promised herself, back in Chapter 2, that she wouldn't take any of this on faith.
She opened her Notes app. The list had five entries. She added the sixth — carefully, precisely, the way she'd document a hypothesis before testing it:
- BG 15.7 says I belong to someone — "My eternal fragmental parts." If God exists, the loneliness is homesickness. IF. Need to verify the IF.
She put the phone face-down. The ceiling fan turned. Priya was watching Kota Factory in the living room again. The smell of dal tadka drifted under the door — Priya was stress-cooking, which meant something had happened at her office, which meant tomorrow's breakfast conversation would be entirely about HR politics at a company Meera couldn't keep track of.
Normal life. Messy, mundane, beautifully normal life.
But underneath it — like a background process that had started on a hilltop at sunrise — two things were running simultaneously.
The first was a verse that felt like coming home.
The second was a question that wouldn't let her walk through the door without checking the address.
Does God exist?
Not the God of temple bells and coconut offerings and Aaji's evening aarti. Not the God of "just have faith, beta." The God of BG 15.7 — a God who is the source of consciousness, the origin of the soul, the fire from which every spark emerged. A God who says My and means it.
Was He real? Or was He the most beautiful piece of unverified code she'd ever read?
She'd find out.
Who am I? The driver. Not the car. (Verified.)
Whose am I? Krishna's. A spark from the fire. (Pending verification.)
Where am I? ...(Not yet loaded.)
The loading screen was still up. But now it wasn't just one question loading — it was two. And the second one was the kind of question she'd been avoiding her entire life.
Not "does my engagement work?" Not "am I good enough at my job?" Not "what will people think?"
Does God exist?
She was going to find out the way she found out everything else.
With evidence. ✨
📖 Next chapter: The Designer — Meera applies her engineering brain to the biggest question of all. If code implies a coder, and design implies a designer, and laws imply a lawmaker — then what does a universe with 10⁶⁰ fine-tuning and DNA that stores 215 petabytes per gram imply? The evidence isn't in a lab. It's everywhere she looks.