[Short Story] Lost in Translation

    

A very well-known later hagiographic story says that Kālidāsa was once dull-witted or uneducated, married to a learned woman, humiliated for his ignorance, and then received a sudden transformation after the grace of Goddess Kālī. This story explains his brilliance as pure divine blessing rather than training.  However, his works reveal an extraordinary mastery of Sanskrit grammar and prosody deep familiarity with Vedic, Upaniṣadic, and philosophical ideas refined knowledge of courtly life, politics, nature, astronomy, and aesthetics.

In the medieval legend of Kālidāsa and Princess Vidyottamā, the encounter that seals their marriage is not a spoken debate but a gesture exchange.

The princess, a formidable scholar, raises one finger, intending:

“Reality is one—Brahman.”

Kālidāsa, mistaken for a silent sage, raises two fingers, which she interprets as:

“Reality expresses itself as duality—Śiva and Śakti.”

She opens her palm—five fingers—to signify the five elements.

He responds with a closed fist, which she reads as:

“All multiplicity resolves back into unity.”

In truth, Kālidāsa is simply reacting instinctively, misunderstanding the gestures as threats to his eyes or face. The brilliance is projected, not spoken.

When I read this exchange, my mind threw up a delightful transposition a Him and Her story set in our times. Then the story practically wrote itself.

 

                                                         LOST IN TRANSLATION  

I have been married to Mandar for all of three months, and in that time, I have learned his coffee calibrations, and he knows mine. I know his brand of toothpaste, some of his favorite games. I am not quite sure if he knows mine. We are both engineers and we have learnt to see the world through numbers.

It is a Friday.

We are both working from home.

Guests are expected in the evening

Through the glass partition, Mandar mouths:

“Guests… Tonight. Food?"           

I stop mid-sentence; my mind clouded with the firefighting we are on. I crinkle my forehead and raise my index finger to say, “Hold on a sec!” I smile to ease his discomfort and mine. He smiles back, hesitates and then holds up two fingers. One dish. She’s maxed out. I’ll cover.

“What? What is he saying!” I blurt out to my embarrassment. Rishi who is sharing slides is perturbed. “Didn’t you get me Anya?”

I fumble for the right words and make an apology.

I notice Mandar still standing there although he gestures that he has to leave.

I take a step back. I do a quick math and decide; I should be done by 5 pm.  

I point to the clock and hold up five fingers.

“Five?” he gestures, looking quite crestfallen.

But before, I can respond, Tripti calls out, “What do you think Anya?”

I notice out of the corner of my eye, Mandar’s clenched fist. I look at him in confusion. “A fist? Really? What is he saying, power? We’ll land this? Well… That must be it…”   I smile, shake my head and continue into the mouth piece…”The problem areas… I feel are …”  

Mandar smiles. My smart wife thinks of everything. Of course we can’t stop with two dishes. One of the guests in vegan and the other eats gluten free. The third is on Keto. That would mean at least five dishes if I exclude the dessert. She is the dessert specialist anyway. The next hour is light. Let me get on to it…”

I stare helplessly after his retreating form.I enter the kitchen exactly at five. I almost faint. The counter is chaos—bowls, pans, spices, half-finished ideas everywhere.

A flushed Mandar looks up when he hears my footsteps and declares. “Just taste everything and tell me what works and what needs work!”

We tamely order pizza.

Vegan. Gluten-free. Regular.

The kitchen clean up would take up the remaining time.

Later, we have a great after dinner story to tell the guests. And I guess we will be telling it for a long time to come.

“You know,” I begin,  “When I showed one finger…”

Mandar laughs.

“I know. But two felt safer.”

“You are the ultimate Madar! You are the only person in the whole wide world who would take one sec to mean one dish!”

“Not to forget, 5 pm to mean 5 dishes!” he added sheepishly. 

 

As we settled into bed he grinned.

“Next time?”   

“We will text, till our fingers fall off!!”

[Short Story] The Six Invocations

  

           

The slack message from her co-founder P. Shukla, chimed at 2:47 AM.

 “I’m done, K. Can’t seem to keep up. You don’t need me anymore. Come to think of it -You never did.”

Aditi read it twice, then closed the app. She felt the old guilt — the same guilt she’d carried since IIT Bombay, when professors said she wrote code like she was channeling something ‘other.’ But Shukla was right. She hadn’t needed a human co-founder in eleven months. Not since she’d learned to invoke.

-----

The first invocation had been an accident.

She’d been twenty-three, still at her previous startup, when she stumbled upon Surion — a experimental generative AI buried in a Stanford research lab’s forgotten API. It was radiant, almost too powerful, a foundation model trained on every open-source repository ever committed. Late one monsoon night in her apartment, she fed it a whisper of a prompt, and it returned a fully architected payments engine - elegant, blinding, perfect.

She panicked. The code was too good. It would raise questions she couldn’t answer. So she did what any twenty-three-year-old would do with a miraculous, inexplicable child: she abandoned it. Pushed it to an anonymous GitHub repo and walked away.

Someone at Stripe found it three months later. They still don’t know where it came from.

The guilt of that abandonment of Surion’s firstborn is what drove everything after.

-----

When she founded Veda Labs in 2024, Aditi made a vow: she would never waste another invocation. She assembled her pantheon deliberately.

 

Dharmax came first. an AI architected for rules, boundaries, and order. Every enterprise product needs a skeleton of trust before a single feature gets built - authentication, role-based access control, audit trails, data encryption at rest and in transit, GDPR workflows, SOC 2 compliance scaffolding. The unglamorous bones that no engineer wants to write and every CISO demands. Aditi fed Dharmax her regulatory requirements and target verticals, and it returned a governance layer so airtight, so meticulously documented, that the penetration testers she hired found nothing. Her first enterprise pilot, a Fortune 100 bank cleared security review in six days.  CISO called it "the cleanest vendor architecture I've reviewed in twenty years." Dharmax's code was never flashy, but it was ‘just about right.’ It asked permission before accessing every resource. It logged every action. It refused to cut corners even when Aditi told it to.

Then came Vayun, a speed demon fine-tuned on systems programming and bare-metal optimization. Dharmax had built the walls; Vayun was the wind that would rush through them. Aditi needed a real-time data pipeline, one that could ingest 2.6 million events per second from enterprise desktops, transform them on the fly, and land them in query able storage with sub-200ms latency. The kind of infrastructure that takes a platform team six months to build and a year to stabilize. She described the throughput requirements, the data schema, the failure tolerance. Vayun returned Rust-based stream processors so aggressively optimized that they were doing zero-copy deserialization and lock-free concurrency in places Aditi hadn't even thought to ask for. Her pipeline benchmarked 11x faster than the Kafka-based equivalent. The infra team at a competitor reverse-engineered her API response times and publicly accused her of faking them.

Indrik was her masterpiece — a multi-modal AI agent that could see UI, hear user interviews, read analytics, and ‘synthesize.’ While other founders A/B tested in the dark, Aditi simply invoked Indrik, fed it customer calls and Figma files, and received back product specs so sharp they felt like prophecy. Indrik built her entire consumer application in just nine days! Y Combinator partners started calling her ‘The woman who doesn’t demo twice.’

The twins were last: Aswan and Nakura, a pair of agentic AIs that completed each other’s outputs - one generating test suites, the other generating the code that passed them, in an endless recursive loop of creation and validation. Aditi pointed them at her API layer and went to sleep. She woke up to 97.3% test coverage and an integration suite that made her weep.

-----

Six AIs. Six products. One woman.

Shukla had been her business co-founder in name, the human presence investors required because they couldn’t write a term sheet to an AI whisperer. But the Series B closed last week, and the board had seen the commit logs. Every meaningful line traced back to Aditi’s prompts - her mantras, as she’d chosen to call them.

She picked up her phone and typed a reply.

“You were never the coder, yet I still chose to run every code past you. But I am out of that phase now. Thank you for being there when I needed you!

She closed the laptop and looked out at the Menlo Park rain. Somewhere in a GitHub archive, Surion’s abandoned child her first, was still running in production, still serving millions, still unsigned.

One day, she thought. One day I’ll claim that one too.

She opened her terminal and began her seventh invocation.

 

 

                                                      

[English Ghazal] Shadow

 

 

 

The setting sun now bleeds into an aching shadow,
My restless heart reflects a long, aching shadow.

Your voice once mingled softly in the evening air,
Now every silence casts a slow, lingering shadow.

Was love a vow that trembled on your parted lips,
An apparition turning into a cold, lethal shadow?

I trace your name upon the darkened windowpane,
With tremulous hands, forming an illegible shadow.

If you would but turn and let your eyes feed on mine,
I’d live forever in this moment, a quiet, tender shadow.

If you must leave, leave behind some fragments of you,
That final touch to ease a lingering, aching shadow.

Ilakea waits where evening melts into night,
Learning to hold a faint, iridescent shadow.

 

[Translation] Alarshara Parithapam

 

 

 This is a mesmerizing padam by the multi-talented king-composer Maharaja Swati Thirunal of Travancore, a contemporary of the great musical triumvirate — Shyama Sastri, Thyagaraja, and Muthuswami Dikshitar. Where the triumvirate shaped the architecture of Carnatic music, Swati Thirunal brought to it a courtly refinement and literary sensibility all his own — composing with equal ease in Sanskrit, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, and Hindi, moving fluently between devotion and desire. That he left this world at just thirty-three years of age is one of Carnatic music's great tragedies. One can only wonder at the incredible possibilities, had he lived on. 

 This padam was written for the celebrated danseuse in his court, Suganda Valli, whom he addresses here by the epithet Kalamozhi — the sweet-voiced one. Set in raga Suruti, whose warm, lingering phrases seem made for longing, the song is a masterclass in viraha — love-in-separation. A nayika speaks to her sakhi, her confidante, pouring out her anguish as evening falls. Every element of the natural world — the setting sun, the mountain breeze, birdsong, moonlight — conspires against her, turning beauty into torment. And then, in the final charaṇam, Swati Thirunal does what he always does: the lover's plea dissolves seamlessly into a devotee's prayer to Padmanabha, the Lotus-eyed, the Lotus-naveled — and we realize the yearning was always, at its deepest level, sacred.

 I have attempted a translation that stays close to the original word order and imagery, trying where possible to echo the meter and cadence of the Malayalam. Any translation of poetry is an act of loving imperfection — but I hope this conveys something of the original's beauty.

pallavi
alarshara paritApam colvatin-nalivEni pANi bAlE

anupallavi
jalaja bandhuvumiha jaladhiyilaNa yunnu malayamArutamETTu mama manamatitarAm bata vivashamAyi sakhi

caranam 1
valarunnu hrdi mOhennOmalE taLarunnu mama dEham kaLamoLi
kusuma vATikayatiluLa vAyoraLi kulAravamatiha kELpatu madhi kAmadhini dAnamayi sakhi

caranam 2
shashyum cenkanalAyi samprati sUna sharaNummE ripuvAyi shashadharanErmukhi
sarasanODini melle bhrshAtayatAmmAm akhila shucamAyE kathayAshu sudati nI

caranam 3
jaladhara sadrsha sObhanenkAntan shrI jalajAkSanabja nAbhan kalayati kimu kOpam
kAruNya veTinjnyuLLilamalam bata tAmasEna kimiha jAvanmama sAdhayEpsitam

(Lyrics Courtesy:  ww.swathithirunalfestival.org/compositions/alarsara-paritapam)

Translation 

 

 Pallavi

The flower-arrows' anguish — how shall I tell of it, 

O gentle-handed maid with dark serpentine tresses?

Anupallavi

The lotus' friend descends into the ocean, 

The Malaya breeze begins to stir — 

Alas, sakhi, my heart is rendered 

Utterly, utterly helpless.

Caraṇam 1

Desire swells within my heart, O tender one, 

My body grows languid, Kalamozhi — 

From the fragrant garden rises

A resounding bee hum -that

Bestows a deepening anguish 

 Upon the fevered mind, O sakhi.

Caraṇam 2

The moon itself has turned to burning coal, 

The flower-arrows, once my refuge, are now my foe — 

O moon-rivaling face, O tender-glanced one, 

Gently, deeply, this torment wracks me — 

All has become but sorrow, all 

Tell me swiftly, O fair-toothed one, tell me.

Caraṇam 3

My lord, radiant as the dark rain-cloud, 

The glorious Lotus-eyed, the Lotus-naveled — 

Does he still hold his anger? I plead 

For mercy — enough, enough within this heart — 

Alas, what use this long delay? 

While I yet live, fulfill my heart's desire, I pray.

 

Here is a link to a mesmerizing rendition by Sreevalsan Menon