Pritha Paul
1
Niharika Rao had precisely three rules in life: never eat cold idlis, never disrespect a raag, and never—ever—download a dating app. Unfortunately, on a humid Thursday morning in Bengaluru, two out of those three rules were broken. She sat cross-legged on her reed mat, sitar resting on her lap, and her forehead twitching in disbelief as her best friend Sonal leaned over with a smug smile. “Kultr,” Sonal said proudly, flashing the app’s screen. “Culture-only dating. No shirtless gym bros, just people who know who Mirza Ghalib is.” Niharika glared. “This is cultural heresy. I play raags, not roulette.” But Sonal had already uploaded her photo—taken post-recital in a maroon saree, bindi perfectly centered, sitar peeking into the frame—and swiped her way through dozens of “potential admirers,” all under the guise of “curated connection.” Niharika, who preferred tanpuras over text alerts and whose idea of flirting involved discussing taals, was now the unwitting participant in digital matchmaking. Her phone pinged that night as she tuned her sitar, vibrating like a disgruntled tabla. She frowned, picked it up—and saw the Kultr logo flashing. Her first match. “Jay. 32. Tech atheist. Logic over rituals. Irony is my second language.” His bio read like a slap to her musical sensibilities. She nearly deleted the app. But just as she was about to swipe left, something in his photo caught her attention. Behind his rakish smirk, there was a bookshelf—and nestled between sci-fi novels and game theory manuals was a dusty copy of Raga Mala by Ravi Shankar. Her finger hovered. And hovered. And then… traitorously, traitorously… she swiped right.
Jay Mehta was testing the new sarcasm filter on the backend of Kultr when he got the notification: “It’s a match!” He snorted. “Of course it is,” he muttered, sipping his black coffee from a mug that read Cynicism: My Cardio. He hadn’t actually meant to swipe right on anyone that evening. It was part of his quality assurance routine—make sure the algorithm didn’t confuse Bharatnatyam with Brazilian Zouk again. But there she was: Niharika Rao, 30, professional sitarist, lives with her Guruji, describes herself as ‘a vessel for ancient melodies’. He rolled his eyes. “Another incense-scented vegan,” he said, clicking into her profile. But then he saw it—her recital video. There she sat, spine straight, fingers dancing across the frets with such command that even the compression on his laptop couldn’t flatten the fire in her music. Jay blinked. Damn. She was… good. She messaged first, which surprised him: “Your algorithm matched a technophile with a tanpura addict. Explain.” He grinned and typed back: “Kultr is currently in beta. Apologies for your spiritual inconvenience.” Thus began their digital sparring. She mocked his belief in logic; he teased her attachment to ragas. She called his apartment (which had Alexa, motion sensors, and a smart light called “Enlighten Me”) a shrine to soullessness. He called her lifestyle “Gandharva Grunge.” Neither admitted they were enjoying it.
Three weeks in, and Niharika found herself anticipating his texts more than her morning riyaaz. She hated it—almost as much as she hated how well he could make her laugh. They hadn’t met in person yet, and she intended to keep it that way. Jay, however, was not as patient. “Come on,” he messaged one night, “let’s meet. I promise not to bring an AI tanpura.” She typed back: “Only if you bring your soul. I hear it’s been missing since 2014.” But something about their digital rhythm was starting to feel… harmonic. She mentioned a rare raag once—Raag Patdeep—and the next day he sent her a link to an obscure Iranian fusion artist who’d experimented with it. She shared a blurry photo of her Guruji teaching children under a banyan tree. He sent back a meme of Yoda holding a sitar. She laughed aloud in her silent courtyard, then caught herself. Guruji, who had silently observed her behavior from a distance, finally spoke one evening. “Who is this data boy you text with during sandhya time?” he asked, peering over his glasses. Niharika flushed. “Just a person… from the app.” Guruji smiled faintly. “Even algorithms are part of divine rhythm, child. Maybe he was meant to swipe.” And just like that, her carefully plucked strings began to tremble with possibilities.
2
Niharika arrived ten minutes early at Café Tarana, the boho café near Malleswaram that Sonal had insisted on, chosen for its artsy decor and lack of Wi-Fi, as if the ambiance might buffer awkward silences. The walls were covered in old LPs and faded posters of Begum Akhtar and Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, while antique instruments hung from ceiling hooks like oddly placed chandeliers. The scent of cinnamon chai and aged vinyl filled the air. She had chosen a deep green cotton saree, hair tied in a loose bun, jhumkas swinging gently, and minimal makeup—though her eyes were lined boldly, a silent declaration of self-possession. She sat by a window, back straight, glancing only once at her phone before putting it away with visible distaste. Jay was late, obviously. In her mind, she imagined him rolling in on a rented scooter, jeans too tight, probably chewing gum and quoting some Silicon Valley bro on efficiency. But when he walked in—exactly thirteen minutes late—she was momentarily disarmed. No chewing gum. Black kurta, jeans, glasses with a faint crack on one corner, and that same maddening half-smile. “Namaskaram,” he said dramatically, palms pressed together in exaggerated reverence. “Is that the appropriate greeting for… a vessel of ancient melodies?” She raised an eyebrow. “Only if you can pronounce it without sarcasm.”
They sat opposite each other, separated by a carved wooden table and nearly a century of ideological difference. Jay ordered a cold brew with jaggery milk “for irony,” while Niharika stuck to masala chai. The first ten minutes were brutal. He told her she was living in an analog illusion; she countered that his digital arrogance would collapse the day the power grid failed. He scoffed at the idea of ‘Guru-shishya parampara’ being viable in 2025; she laughed that ‘agile productivity’ sounded like a form of indigestion. When their orders arrived, they paused, took cautious sips, and something shifted. Niharika asked, “Why Kultr? Don’t you believe culture is too sacred for algorithms?” Jay leaned back, fingers tapping his cup. “I believe culture needs to be saved from algorithms. Or at least, negotiated with.” She blinked. That was… less soulless than expected. He explained that the app started as a joke among friends—a reaction to the chaos of Tinder—but somehow, it attracted sitarists, Sanskrit scholars, temple architects, and film archivists. “Basically,” he smirked, “all the people my mother wanted me to be but I outsourced to strangers.” Niharika laughed despite herself. Then she surprised him: “I downloaded it only to delete it. But then your bookshelf had Raga Mala. That’s the only reason I didn’t swipe left.” Jay blinked. “Wait—you recognized the spine of a book in a blurry photo and still didn’t swipe left?” “Don’t flatter yourself,” she deadpanned. “I assumed it was your ex’s.”
As they finished their drinks, something subtle began to hum between them—not quite harmony, but a curiosity neither could deny. Jay offered to walk her to the bus stop, and she didn’t say no. They strolled past the crumbling colonial bungalows and coconut carts, the city buzzing around them like a fast tabla. At the crossing, she mentioned how every raag is tied to a time of day. “You can’t just play Bhairav at noon. It would be like… wearing a wool sweater to a beach wedding.” Jay chuckled. “What if someone codes a raag that defies time? Like, Bhairav at 2 a.m. with lo-fi beats?” She groaned. “That’s not a raag. That’s cultural mutiny.” But there was a smile behind her disapproval. Before they parted, he handed her a small paper napkin with a doodle—her, holding a sitar, fighting off a giant robot with a QR code for a face. She stared at it, surprised. “You draw?” “Only what I can’t debug,” he shrugged. “Goodnight, Miss Analog.” As the bus pulled away, she watched him shrink into the Bengaluru dusk, the napkin clenched in her palm like a strange new talisman. And though she’d never admit it, the faintest melody of Raag Yaman curled around her thoughts that night—an evening raga, soft and stubborn—refusing to leave.
3
Niharika had been to her share of arts cafés, but none quite like Café Carnatic, Jay’s idea for their second meeting. Tucked away behind the chaos of Church Street, it looked like a restored music room that had accidentally become a café—walls lined with shelves of rare vinyls and biographies of forgotten ustads, with warm brass lamps hanging low from ceiling beams. A veena-shaped menu greeted her as she walked in, with names like “Filter Kaapi Fugue” and “Jazz Rasam.” She sighed. It reeked of curated irony. Jay, already seated at the back with two drinks and what looked suspiciously like an oat dosa, waved her over. He wore a faded T-shirt that said CTRL + Sitar, a joke so offensive to her sensibilities that she had to close her eyes and exhale before joining him. “Welcome to the most tone-deaf shrine to sound,” he greeted with a grin. “I figured if we’re going to argue again, we should do it with acoustics that flatter our rage.” She took the seat opposite him, her saree a rust-red silk that offset her disdain like a well-played alap. “Did you actually come here to talk,” she said evenly, “or just to make fun of everything I respect?” “A little of both,” he admitted, “but also… to listen.” That last word caught her off guard. It was soft. Uncoded.
Their conversation spiraled through octaves—starting in banter, dipping into philosophy, peaking into something neither could name. Jay told her about his college days in Pune, where he studied computer science but spent his evenings obsessively remixing old Kishore Kumar hits into electronic tracks. Niharika blinked. “You… remixed Kishore da?” “Relax, I didn’t add dubstep,” he grinned. “Just some minor key inversions. You’d hate them.” She probably would. But she was curious, too. She talked about her first public recital, at age ten, how the stage lights made her palms sweat and she missed the opening phrase of Raag Bageshri—but her Guruji only smiled and said, “Good. You’ve now started your journey with humility.” Jay fell uncharacteristically quiet at that. “Must be something,” he said, eyes tracing the rim of his glass, “to know your path that early. I didn’t even know how to spell ‘career’ until I was 25.” Niharika replied gently, “Knowing your path doesn’t make it easier. Just more guilt when you stray.” Their food arrived—millet khichdi for her, jackfruit tacos for him—and with it, a subtle warmth settled. She even offered him a spoonful, ignoring the part of her brain screaming that oat dosa-eaters were not to be trusted. In return, he shared his taco with exaggerated generosity. “A peace offering from Silicon Valley to Sitar Gharana,” he said. “Let it never be said I came empty-handed.” She rolled her eyes, but her smile had softened by now. And somewhere in the background, a soft instrumental version of Raag Hamsadhwani played on the speakers—digitized, slightly auto-tuned, and somehow, still moving.
As they left the café, night falling gently on MG Road, Jay slowed his stride to match hers. “So,” he asked, “if I were to ask you to a concert—not the AI remix kind, an actual sitar performance—would you come?” Niharika looked at him sideways. “If you can stay quiet through a full vilambit alap without checking your smartwatch, maybe.” “Deal,” he said instantly, then added, “What’s vilambit again?” She sighed. “It’s the slow, meditative introduction. Where time stretches.” “Like our arguments,” he mused. “Exactly,” she deadpanned. They stopped at the street corner where their paths diverged. Jay looked uncharacteristically hesitant. “Hey… I know I’m the guy who represents everything you find spiritually offensive. But this—whatever this is—it’s kind of…nice.” She looked up at him, arms folded. “Don’t go soft on me now, app boy.” But her voice was gentler than the words. He took a step back, mock-saluted her, and turned. Just before he disappeared into the crowd, he called out, “Next time, I’ll bring headphones and an open mind.” She stood there for a moment longer, fingers idly tracing the strap of her sitar case, before turning toward her bus stop. That night, as she untied her ghungroos and folded her saree away, she replayed his words in her head. Headphones and an open mind. For someone who lived in binaries, he was beginning to sound alarmingly nuanced.
4
The mornings began to change. Where once Niharika’s dawns had been sacred, wrapped in the quiet resonance of a freshly tuned sitar and the faint rustle of jasmine petals placed at her Guruji’s feet, now they arrived with a soft vibration beside her pillow—the now-familiar ping of Jay’s messages. At first, it was casual. A photo of his disastrous attempt at brewing filter coffee (“Does it count as cultural treason if I used oat milk?”), followed by a selfie of him wearing a dhoti (“User error: I tied it like a bathrobe”). Niharika, who had once declared emojis to be a modern-day plague, now used the laughing-face one more than she liked to admit. One morning, she caught herself humming a tune unfamiliar to her riyaaz repertoire—it was a progression Jay had sent over, a simple electronic beat layered with a looped tanpura, created during one of his midnight coding breaks. “It’s your fault,” his voice note had said, “I started reading about raag theory and somehow ended up building a synthesizer plug-in called Yaman.exe. I might be cursed.” She listened to it three times before replying. “Your intonation’s off,” she said. “But it has heart. Almost.” Jay responded with a GIF of a dancing tabla and the caption: “High praise from High Priestess of Analog.” The banter never stopped, but now it came with warmth. Like the slow unfolding of a vilambit composition, their rhythm deepened—measured, deliberate, and resistant to anything artificial.
Jay, for his part, was shocked at how deeply he’d fallen into her world without realizing it. He started looking forward to things like “Sitar Saturday” at local cultural centers, began recognizing raags by mood alone, and downloaded a documentary on Annapurna Devi that made him cry at 2 a.m.—though he told Niharika it was “just allergies.” His colleagues at Kultr noticed a change too; he missed two meetings, redesigned the UI to look “less like a dating app and more like a concert invitation,” and added a feature that allowed users to list their favorite raags. “Bro, you’re simping for a sitarist,” said Akshay, his office roommate, peering over his monitor. Jay shrugged. “Maybe I just found someone who plays better music than my Spotify algorithm.” But deep down, he knew it wasn’t just about her music. It was the way she looked at the world—measured, sincere, reverent—and how that gaze unsettled everything he thought was permanent in his own. She invited him to a recital at Rangashankara one Friday. Jay showed up early, sat in the third row, and stayed absolutely still for the entire performance. It was Raag Marwa—sunset music. As Niharika played, eyes closed, fingers commanding the stage with grace and fire, Jay forgot to breathe. The applause at the end was thunderous, but he didn’t clap. He just stared. When she finally joined him in the foyer, radiant and flushed, he only said one word: “Damn.” She laughed. “No tech-speak critique?” “Nope,” he said. “Just pure… damn.”
It was inevitable, then, that something would shift. That night, under the wide Gulmohar tree near the parking lot, Jay kissed her. It wasn’t dramatic—no background score, no staged romance. Just two people standing too close, the air thick with the scent of malli flowers and neon from a nearby dosa cart. He leaned in mid-sentence, unsure of where the conversation ended and silence began, and she didn’t stop him. For a moment, the logic he lived by vanished. When they pulled away, she whispered, “I still don’t trust technology.” He whispered back, “Neither do I.” From that point, things accelerated. They began sharing their rituals—she showed him how to string a sitar, he taught her to use voice-to-text without yelling. They even tried each other’s worlds: Niharika sat through an AI conference in Whitefield, furiously taking notes on concepts she barely believed in, while Jay attended a four-hour Hindustani lecture-demonstration, chewing on dry paan and scribbling comparisons between MIDI inputs and meend transitions. But the highlight came when Niharika gifted him a hand-drawn music chart of Raag Charukesi—“For emergency beauty,” she said. He, in turn, gave her a tiny Raspberry Pi he’d coded to play tabla loops on voice command. “Say ‘ta dhin dhin dha’ and it obeys,” he beamed. “See? Tech can submit to tradition.” She pretended to scoff, but her eyes lingered on the blinking LED light longer than necessary. Something sacred and ridiculous had begun to bloom between them, as awkward and beautiful as an offbeat jugalbandi that somehow finds perfect sync by the end.
5
It was bound to happen—this wasn’t a fairy tale raga, after all, but a modern-day jugalbandi played out between heartstrings and hard drives. One morning, Niharika woke up to find her phone buzzing with headlines forwarded by Sonal: “Kultr to Launch Raag-AI: The Future of Indian Classical Music Is Now Algorithmic.” Another read: “Can Machine Learning Replace Mehfil?” Her fingers froze mid-scroll as the image of Jay standing at the Kultr press podium beamed back at her—sharp kurta, sharper grin, and a tagline beneath: “Bringing Raagas to Gen Z, One Beat at a Time.” The betrayal hit her like a discordant note in Raag Darbari. She hadn’t spoken to Jay in two days, claiming she had a recital and poor reception—both lies. Her fingers hovered over his number a dozen times, then retreated. When he finally messaged: “Hey, big week. Missed our Friday chai. Want to meet? Big news to share!” she replied only with a time and place: Guruji’s courtyard. It was her turf, her tempo. If there was going to be a confrontation, it would be surrounded by neem trees and tanpura hums, not pop-up ads and press releases. When he arrived, she didn’t offer tea. “So,” she said, arms folded, voice like an unsheathed string, “you’re going to AI the soul out of Indian classical music?” Jay blinked, surprised at the venom. “Wait, what? You saw the launch? It’s not like that—it’s a tool, not a takeover.” “You’re calling it Raag-AI,” she snapped. “You think you’re preserving tradition by… commodifying it?”
Jay took a breath, trying not to react. “I’m trying to make it accessible,” he said, hands raised. “You know how many kids discover lo-fi beats before they even know what a raag is? What if they start there and end with you?” “End with me?” she echoed, voice rising. “How gracious of you to allow tradition a footnote in your techno-utopia.” She turned her back on him, the silk of her kurta rustling like a warning. “You don’t understand,” she continued, “you can’t just reduce a raag to code. You can’t teach an algorithm what it means to lose yourself in a bandish, or to feel a note’s ache at dusk.” Jay stepped closer, quieter now. “And yet you were the one who taught me how to feel it. Because of you, I stayed up nights trying to code something that wasn’t sterile. Because of you, I even heard Raag Marwa.” She turned then, sharply. “So you could what? Package it for earbuds and playlists called ‘Chill Sitar Vibes’?” There was a long silence. Even Guruji, seated at a distance under the neem tree, seemed to stop plucking his tanpura. Jay finally said, “I thought you’d understand. I thought we were building a bridge between worlds.” She shook her head, biting back what she wouldn’t let herself cry. “I thought you were listening. Turns out, you were just decoding.” And with that, she walked past him, through the courtyard, into the shaded room where her sitar waited in mourning.
Days passed. Bengaluru rumbled on, coffee brewed and rain puddles deepened, but between Jay and Niharika, silence ruled. Jay buried himself in launch prep, but the joy had gone flat—each beta test, each code string of raag.ai felt like a betrayal typed in JavaScript. Niharika refused to look at screens; she focused on her riyaaz with militant precision, turning each note into an act of defiance. Guruji noticed. “You’re playing to prove something, not to feel something,” he said one evening. “Even your rage has rhythm, child, but it has no rasa.” Niharika didn’t respond. Meanwhile, Sonal barged into her room with a phone. “He’s on that podcast—the TechniCulture one. Listen.” Niharika resisted, then finally hit play. Jay’s voice filled the room: “We’re not replacing classical music. We’re just inviting people to the concert in a language they understand. If they walk through that door, there will be real artists waiting. The music begins with AI—but it ends with soul. Always.” She swallowed hard. That night, as the monsoon thundered through the city, she sat by her sitar and played Raag Desh. Her fingers were hesitant at first, then full of ache. At the other end of town, Jay sat at his desk, headphones off, Raag Desh streaming from a scratchy live YouTube clip she’d once sent him. He didn’t need any AI to tell him what this music meant now. It was a heartbreak coded in twelve notes.
6
For three days after the podcast aired, the Bengaluru monsoon poured like it had been hired by Niharika’s emotional state. Her courtyard flooded, the neem leaves looked sullen, and even the pigeons on the window grill cooed in minor scale. Guruji, ever watchful and eerily well-informed, broke his customary silence at breakfast with a cryptic observation: “The sky’s rhythm is off. Feels like someone disturbed Raag Megh.” Niharika, still stewing in a heady mix of betrayal and regret, responded with a grunt. But Guruji wasn’t finished. He unfolded a tiny square flyer from his shawl and placed it beside her aloo paratha. “This came for you.” The paper read: ‘The Ragaverse Retreat – Bridging Tradition & Technology’. Her eyes widened. “Jay’s idea?” she asked, voice flat. “Half of it,” Guruji said. “The other half… mine.” Niharika stared at him like he had declared he was becoming a YouTube influencer. “You… agreed to this?” He nodded, chewing calmly. “If the boy is going to misrepresent music, better he does it in front of people who can correct him. Besides,” he added, eyes twinkling, “I’ve always wanted to see him sit cross-legged without a gadget in reach.” Niharika nearly choked on her paratha. “You’re sending him to a classical music retreat?” “I’m inviting him,” Guruji corrected. “Seven days. No tech. Just mud floors, mosquito coils, and morning ragas.” Niharika nearly laughed—but paused. Somewhere deep inside, a stubborn tabla began to thump. “You think he’ll survive it?” Guruji smiled. “Let’s see if his algorithms can handle ants.”
Jay was not amused. “I agreed to what?” he shouted into his phone, pacing his office. “It’s a… retreat?” Akshay chuckled from his beanbag chair. “Dude, it’s a week. Think of it as unplugging your mental motherboard.” Jay was already scanning the email: Leave your phones at the gate. You will be assigned a tanpura partner. There will be frogs. He groaned. But something—perhaps the thought of Niharika, or the nagging guilt, or the part of him that liked a challenge—nudged him forward. Two days later, he arrived at the retreat centre near Nandi Hills, suitcase rolling awkwardly on uneven cobblestone, dressed like a hostage in cotton kurta and a suspiciously clean dhoti. The air smelled like incense, wet soil, and fermented curd. On arrival, a man in saffron robes confiscated his phone and handed him a tin cup of buttermilk. “Your soul detox begins now,” he said solemnly. Jay stared. “My soul just wants Wi-Fi.” His assigned roommate, a Kathak dancer named Raghav, insisted on chanting every hour and made Jay share his toothpaste “because mint disrupts throat purity.” Meals were taken in silence. The first sitar session involved a ten-minute discourse on how silence is the loudest note. By Day Two, Jay had broken a tanpura string, meditated face-first into a cow patty, and sprained his back attempting to sit cross-legged for forty minutes. But by Day Four—something shifted. He began waking up before sunrise. He stopped craving screens. He started humming phrases of Raag Bhimpalasi under his breath while fetching water. And by Day Five, when Guruji arrived for a surprise visit and caught him attempting to play a perfect komal gandhar, Jay didn’t even flinch. He simply nodded and said, “Almost got it. One note off.” Guruji looked at him for a long moment. “Not bad, data boy. Not bad at all.”
When Niharika arrived on the sixth day—unannounced, saree windswept, eyes narrowed—Jay was sitting under a tree, eyes closed, tapping gentle theka rhythms onto his thigh. She stood in silence, arms folded, until he opened his eyes. “Hey,” he said, voice quiet. “I almost forgot what cities sound like.” She sat down beside him without a word. For a while, they just listened to the retreat: the rustling trees, a distant harmonium, someone laughing at a goat. Finally, she said, “Guruji told me you haven’t complained once.” “I did,” he grinned. “Just not in English.” They laughed, the tension between them loosening like a string finally tuned. He turned to her. “I don’t want to replace classical music. I want people to fall in love with it the way I did—with you. But not everyone gets to sit in front of a master. Some of us need a glitch first.” She looked at him, long and searching. “You still believe code can carry soul?” He thought for a moment. “I believe soul can be the reason code exists.” She exhaled. “That’s dangerously poetic for someone who once compared Todi to techno.” He smiled, hopeful. “So… do I get another chance? Not just to build the bridge, but maybe… walk it with you?” Niharika leaned back against the tree, gazing upward. “We’ll see,” she murmured. “First show me if you can play Bhairavi without turning it into a remix.” Jay laughed. “Deal. But only if you promise not to judge my taal too harshly.” “I’ll try,” she said softly. And as the sun dipped behind the hills, the two sat side by side—no tech, no tension—just the distant pulse of tabla and the quiet tuning of something slowly, stubbornly real.
7
By Day Seven of the retreat, Jay Mehta—former worshipper of Wi-Fi, builder of beta apps, and defender of digital disruption—had transformed into someone almost unrecognizable. He had stopped asking questions in bullet points. He no longer tried to “optimize” his sitting posture using yoga YouTube hacks. And perhaps most shockingly, he had learned to tie his own dhoti without YouTube assistance or panic. The morning began, as it always did now, with a wake-up gong that sounded suspiciously like someone hitting a copper thali with a ladle. Jay sat on the stone platform outside his cottage, sipping tulsi tea and watching the mist roll over the Nandi Hills like some kind of divine data cloud. Raghav the Kathak dancer jogged past, humming Raag Ahir Bhairav. In the distance, someone was struggling with a tabla solo that sounded more like a dropped coconut. Jay smiled. He’d grown used to this chaos, this quiet. He’d even begun liking it. His phone—last seen locked in a bamboo box—no longer haunted his fingers. Instead, they itched for the tanpura, a borrowed one that still buzzed unpredictably but buzzed with spirit. When Guruji asked Jay to assist in the morning music session, the techie-turned-temporary-tanpura-player didn’t flinch. He took his seat beside the lead vocalist, a woman in her sixties who treated everyone like her grandchildren, and strummed with sincerity. There was no machine, no plug-in, no metronome. Just breath and beat and something beautiful holding it all together.
The retreat had now drawn a curious crowd: techies from Hyderabad, Odissi dancers from Bhubaneswar, a tabla vlogger from Indore, and even a German guy named Felix who insisted on clapping in teentaal every time someone sneezed. In the afternoon “interactive” session, Jay was asked to explain Raag-AI to the assembled artists. He stood barefoot on the stone stage, dhoti slightly askew, and began not with a slide deck, but with silence. “When I started building Raag-AI,” he said, voice steady, “I thought I was helping music evolve. But now I think it was helping me learn how to listen.” He paused, eyes scanning the gathered faces—some skeptical, some serene, some suspicious. “We don’t want to replace tradition,” he continued. “We want to give it more hands to reach farther. If a kid in Ludhiana hears a looped version of Raag Kafi on Instagram, and that makes him Google where it came from, then I think we’ve planted something—not diluted it.” One elderly tabla player snorted. “And what if he stops at the loop?” Jay smiled. “Then that’s not the algorithm’s fault. That’s ours—for not making the next step easier, more welcoming.” There was a murmur of agreement. Even Guruji, seated under a banyan tree and polishing a copper bowl with intense concentration, lifted his gaze and nodded faintly. Later that evening, Niharika sat beside Jay on the stone steps. “Not bad,” she admitted. “For someone who once said ‘raag’ sounded like a Star Trek character.” Jay grinned. “We all grow.” “Some of us more stubbornly than others,” she teased.
The final night of the retreat was always marked with an open-air mehfil—no microphones, no chairs, just music and moonlight. Jay, who had once confused alap with “a loading screen,” was now nervously preparing to debut the only piece he’d ever composed completely by ear. It was a simple melody, based loosely on Raag Bhimpalasi, that he had stitched together over the last few days using just memory, mistakes, and intuition. Niharika had helped refine the phrasing, rolling her eyes every time he got the meend wrong, but there was warmth behind every correction. When his name was called, he stepped up, tanpura in hand, heartbeat louder than the audience murmurs. “I call this ‘Raag Glitch’,” he said, half-joking. A few laughed. He began. The opening was tentative, then steadier, then… something else. Something raw. Not perfect, but honest. When he finished, the applause was surprisingly loud. Niharika stood at the back, arms folded, smiling like a music teacher who wouldn’t admit pride even under oath. Later, as the retreat faded into sleepy hugs and shared WhatsApp groups, Jay found her under the same neem tree where she’d once confronted him. “I still think you’re dangerous,” she said. “I still think you’re stubborn,” he replied. “But,” she added, “I also think you’re finally listening.” Jay didn’t answer. He just took her hand—hesitantly, then with confidence. And for the first time, they didn’t need words or witty comebacks. Just breath, pause, and rhythm. As natural as a raga. As surprising as love.
8
The invitation came wrapped in saffron paper and modern irony: “GenNext Fest — Tradition, Reimagined.” A cultural showcase for Gen Z, backed by sponsors ranging from khadi startups to chai-flavored energy drinks. One corner promised NFT bharatanatyam tokens; another, AI-powered rangoli generators. But at the heart of it all was the marquee event: The Bhairavi Showdown — a live duet-slash-duel between Niharika Rao, the fiery sitarist and keeper of tradition, and Jay Mehta, now branded as the “Coder of the Raag.” Niharika had refused at first. “I don’t perform in carnivals where people think tanpuras are Instagram filters,” she had snapped. But Guruji had smiled sagely. “Then show them what a real raag sounds like.” Jay had been hesitant too. “I didn’t come back to remix your soul,” he’d said to Niharika. But she’d only replied, “Then don’t. Just play what’s true for you.” The stage was set in a courtyard of an old Bengaluru college, fairy lights strung between banyan branches and food trucks humming in the distance. A fusion crowd gathered — teenagers in Indo-western saris holding bubble tea, aunties in Mysore silks with AirPods, and influencers livestreaming from ring-lit stands. Niharika arrived with her sitar in a cloth wrap, wearing a cobalt blue silk saree and an expression that dared anyone to interrupt her tuning. Jay, dressed in a rust-colored kurta and sneakers, brought his laptop, a MIDI controller, and a small handmade tanpura as backup. It was the oddest duet Bengaluru had ever seen. And the most anticipated.
The performance began with Niharika. No screens, no loops, just the slow, sacred ascent of Raag Bhairavi—her fingers flowing over the frets like water over memory. The crowd stilled. Even the bubble tea stopped slurping. She unfolded the raag with the grace of a story passed down generations—each note deliberate, mournful, blooming. By the time she entered the jhala, the entire courtyard pulsed with reverence. Jay stepped up next, nodding toward her before cueing his equipment. A loop began—low drone, faint tabla taps, and then something unexpected: a fragment of Niharika’s jhala, replayed, stretched, then layered with soft strings and ambient echoes. The audience gasped. Niharika’s eyes widened, her expression unreadable. Jay closed his eyes and kept playing, fingers tapping the pads like a coder breathing through code—his remix respectful, not gaudy, interweaving her melody with his own composed counterpoints. A conversation, not a takeover. The track rose, then fell, then faded into a silence more powerful than applause. And then… they played together. Just a brief moment. Her sitar answering his sample. His loop echoing her live improvisation. The lines between digital and divine blurred, and for once, it wasn’t a clash. It was confluence.
The applause was thunderous. Some clapped. Some stood. Some cried. An old Carnatic vocalist in the front row whispered, “That… was not noise.” Backstage, Jay was wrapping up his gear when Niharika walked over, face unreadable. “You used my jhala,” she said. “From the last retreat?” “Yes,” he admitted. “It was the only melody that felt real enough to anchor the code.” She stared at him. “That was either shameless or… surprisingly intimate.” Jay didn’t speak. He reached into his bag and pulled out a small USB drive. “It’s yours,” he said. “The full remix. It belongs to the raag. Not me.” She took it without a word, then slowly smiled. “I still don’t believe in AI ragas.” “Good,” he grinned. “Neither do I anymore.” They stood quietly, the applause still echoing faintly through the trees. “So,” she said finally, “what happens next?” Jay looked at her, not as a coder or a suitor or a rival—but as someone who had taught him how to hear the soul behind sound. “Next,” he said, “we play—together. No remix, no battle. Just music.” Niharika nodded. “But I still get to go first.” “Always,” he whispered. And in that courtyard filled with data, devotion, and one very emotional food truck guy playing Raag Bhairavi on a Bluetooth speaker, two very different people realized they’d written a love song—without ever saying the words.
9
The days that followed the Bhairavi Showdown were a strange harmony of quiet fame and quiet confusion. Niharika’s inbox was suddenly full of invitations—from music academies, streaming platforms, even a London-based startup offering a “heritage influencer” contract. She deleted that one instantly. Jay, meanwhile, found himself in an unexpected whirlwind of cultural validation. “You broke the algorithm,” Akshay said, watching the trending tags: #SitarAndSyntax, #BhairaviBattle, #SwipeRightForRaag. But Jay didn’t seem to care. He’d started spending more time in the practice room than the boardroom. Niharika had reluctantly agreed to begin rehearsing with him for a few low-key concerts—though she refused to call them “gigs.” Every evening, they met at an old bungalow-turned-music-space in Basavanagudi, where the scent of petrichor and cut-fruit wafted through open windows as their rehearsals grew longer, and warmer. At first, they stuck to familiar territory: she on sitar, he on tanpura or keyboard. But one night, during a particularly long alap in Raag Yaman, she paused mid-phrase and said, “You’re anticipating me.” Jay, mid-drone, blinked. “In a good way or bad way?” “In a… duet way,” she replied. “Like you’ve started listening beyond the notes.” Jay looked at her then—not as code or chaos, but as something unfolding in rhythm. “That’s what you’ve been teaching me all along, right?” he said. “How to listen for the silence between two sounds.” Niharika turned back to her sitar, pretending not to smile.
Then came the rain—the long, sudden downpour that Bengaluru was famous for, as moody as a morning raag and just as unpredictable. The bungalow’s roof leaked. The power went out. The room turned into a cave of shadows and candlelight. “Perfect,” Jay said, lighting a match. “Just like one of your concerts—minimal electricity, maximum emotion.” Niharika snorted. “You’re lucky I like candlelight. Otherwise you’d be tuning tanpuras in the dark for the rest of your life.” She struck a few notes. The sound bounced off the plaster walls like memory. Jay set up his tanpura and joined in, softly. Without planning, without an audience, they began to play. No agenda. No showdown. Just music, old and new. Niharika led with a slow, wistful Bageshri. Jay followed—not with loops, but with a raw keyboard line that echoed her meend, slightly off at first, but then gently sliding into consonance. The rain became their taal. The thunder, an occasional unexpected percussionist. Something shimmered in that room—something beyond sound. When they finished, neither of them moved. Niharika whispered, “That… wasn’t bad.” Jay grinned. “It was maybe the best thing I’ve ever played.” She looked at him in the glow of melted wax. “You’re finally learning that not everything needs to be processed.” “Except feelings,” Jay quipped. “Those still need a patch update.” She threw a flower garland at him. He caught it.
By the end of the week, the idea of “Jay and Niharika” had begun to take real shape—not just as performers, but as… something else. Something fragile but fearless. Sonal was the first to say it out loud. “You’re in love with him,” she declared over coffee. Niharika didn’t deny it. “Maybe,” she murmured, tracing the rim of her glass. “Or maybe we’re just two ragas in the same thaat.” Guruji said nothing, only nodded with his usual inscrutable approval when Jay returned his borrowed tanpura and offered to restring it himself. Meanwhile, Kultr quietly retired its Raag-AI module. “It was never meant to last,” Jay said, shrugging. “Sometimes the prototype teaches you enough to know what not to build.” Instead, he and Niharika began designing a hybrid series—real concerts, live-streamed minimally, no filters, no interference. Just sound. Raw, unfiltered, flawed. Human. As the rehearsals turned into rhythms, and the silences turned into symphony, something remarkable happened. They stopped trying to prove who was right. And started playing like they already were. A little sitar. A little code. A little rain. A lot of resonance. And though neither of them said it aloud, both knew—this was their vilambit. The slow unfolding. The part before the crescendo. The part where love, like a raag, begins.
10
The evening was set at Ranga Sudha Hall, Bengaluru’s beloved temple of acoustics, where generations had come to sit cross-legged on coir mats and let music untie their tightly wound souls. It was the last concert of the Raag Rewired series that Niharika and Jay had launched three months ago—no sponsors, no flashy screens, no algorithms or hashtags. Just intimate baithaks broadcast with a single camera, one condenser mic, and absolute surrender to sound. Tonight was different, though. The crowd was larger, a strange mix of elders in handwoven shawls, students in kurtas and jeans, and a few curious techies who now meditated to Raag Desh between deadlines. Jay stood backstage, adjusting his tanpura, visibly nervous. “Do I look like I belong here?” he asked, voice low. Niharika, dressed in a deep violet silk saree with a border of silver vines, looked him over. “You look like a glitch in the matrix,” she deadpanned, then added softly, “but the kind that makes it better.” He smiled, but it faded quickly. “What if I mess up? What if they don’t hear the music—just the guy who tried to code a raag?” Niharika touched his hand gently. “Then we play anyway. That’s the point, isn’t it? Raag doesn’t need perfection. It needs truth.” The lights dimmed. The tanpura hummed alive. They stepped onto stage together, side by side—not rivals, not opposites, but something in sync.
They began with Raag Shree. Dusk raag. A raga of contradictions—calm yet chaotic, bright and brooding. Niharika led with a slow, unfolding alap, each phrase like an invocation to something ancient and breathing. Jay’s tanpura shimmered underneath, steady and respectful, and then he gently layered in soft, live keyboard textures—minimal, atmospheric, not overwhelming. The audience leaned forward as if afraid to disturb the balance. They moved into a gat composition, tabla entering like a whisper, and Niharika closed her eyes, letting her fingers dance. Jay followed—not with technology, but with intuition. He’d stopped trying to impress her, or the crowd. He simply listened. Responded. Let the raag shape him. They ended with a spontaneous jugalbandi, a playful dialogue between sitar and his analog synth pad, matching each other note for note, until the music dissolved into a final unison that hung in the air long after the strings fell silent. The applause was not thunderous—it was reverent. A slow rising ovation from people who knew they had heard something that shouldn’t have worked… but did. Backstage, someone whispered, “That was like watching a raag fall in love with its own echo.” Niharika and Jay looked at each other, breathless, grinning. “You didn’t mess up,” she said. “You listened.” He shrugged, mock-humble. “I had a good raag model to train on.”
Later that night, after the crowd had dispersed and the stage had gone dark, they sat on the edge of the empty hall, feet dangling, sipping cutting chai brought in thermoses by Sonal, who’d appointed herself their manager-slash-priestess. The city buzzed outside, indifferent. Inside, something sacred lingered. Jay leaned toward her, voice quieter than ever. “So this is it? We ride off into a fusion sunset?” Niharika laughed. “Hardly. We fight, we play, we tune and retune. Like always.” He nodded. “You know, when I first met you, I thought you were impossible.” She raised an eyebrow. “And now?” “Still impossible. But perfectly so.” She rolled her eyes, but took his hand. “I still don’t trust apps,” she said. “And I still don’t understand raags without YouTube,” he replied. “But,” he added, “I trust us.” The lights of the auditorium glowed faintly behind them, and in that silence, Jay took out a tiny box—not a ring, but something stranger. A handmade tanpura keychain. “It’s off-key,” he said, sheepish. “So are we,” she replied, pocketing it like it was gold. The moon rose. A late rickshaw honked. And the night, like a perfectly played alap, stretched wide and open. No app could capture this. No algorithm could decode it. This was the kind of music that could only be lived. One imperfect, beautiful note at a time.
___
