From a Mumbai Cubicle to the Jyotirlingas
Rohan Desai, the protagonist of my novel, begins in a cubicle in Mumbai. Deadlines, traffic, a glowing screen, and the particular emptiness that creeps in around Wednesday afternoon. I wrote that opening from memory, not imagination.
For years I lived a version of that life — competent, busy, and quietly hollow. I was good at the things I was supposed to be good at. I just could not shake a single, inconvenient question that would surface in traffic jams and elevator rides: am I living, or am I only on autopilot?
The most dangerous risk is not failing. It is succeeding at something that does not matter to you.
The pull of the peaks
The Jyotirlingas — the twelve sacred shrines of Shiva scattered across India — are not just pilgrimage sites. For me they became a map of the opposite of cubicle life. Each one sits where the ordinary world thins out and something older shows through. Travelling to them, sitting in their silence, I started to feel the question loosen its grip.
I am not romanticising escape. You cannot simply abandon your life and live on a mountain — and the book never pretends you can. Rohan does not quit his job and find enlightenment in a cave. His transformation happens inside the life he already has. The journey to Kedarnath changes how he returns to Mumbai, not whether he returns.
Why I gave Rohan my question
I made Rohan ordinary on purpose. He is not a chosen one in any obvious sense. He is a man who has buried his own longing under routine, the way most of us do. When destiny pulls him out of the cubicle, it is not granting him a superpower. It is giving him permission to ask the question out loud.
That, I think, is what mythology has always done for ordinary people. It takes the quiet ache you carry to work every morning and tells you it is not weakness — it is a summons. The Himalayas in the book are real mountains. They are also the height of the self you suspect you could become if you stopped living by default.
If the story does its job, you finish it and look up from the page at your own version of the cubicle, and ask the question Rohan finally allowed himself to ask.