I was sewing to the sound of Vivaldi, Bach and the list of popular classical master over the headphone, the needle dancing in time to violins, when his message popped up over the laptop. It was one of those regular chats we used to have over period of time. Nothing spiritual, no mantras or cosmic questions.


Just him asking, “How’s your family? How are you holding up?”


He never talked about sadhana. He didn’t have to. Sometimes I think he already knew. There were moments when I could almost feel him standing behind me as I sat in meditation, not as an intrusion, but as a quiet presence, watching.

Once, during an ordinary chat about family and grocery shopping, he suddenly asked, “Why do you sit the way you do during your sadhana? Is something wrong with your leg?”

I froze. How could he possibly know? I do have problems with my legs, I can’t sit cross-legged for long. I usually have to stretch one leg out to let the blood flow.

I typed back quickly, “You’re sneaking on me, aren’t you? Yesterday evening I had the distinct sense of someone standing behind me, watching.”

Before I could finish, his message came through: “You are not to be bothered with who is standing behind you. Keep your mind clear from all that.” Caught. Red-handed.

There were moments like this that I found both unnerving and hilarious, as if he’d been caught with his finger in the cosmic cookie jar. And yet, there was something tender about it too.

He never pried or preached. He simply appeared, in thought, in silence, in some invisible corridor between awareness and affection. He guided not by commanding, but by reminding me that practice is never about form it’s about the stillness that remains when all forms fall away.


I realised you can’t talk about meditation when your mind is cluttered with laundry, bills, and the noise of daily life. First, get your house in order the gods can wait.

Once, when I asked him about discipline, he said, “I cannot force you or insist that you must do your sadhana strictly. It has to come from free will. You must want to do it, the way you brush your teeth in the morning, or the way you feel uneasy if you haven’t bathed all day. It must arise from within you, from a sense of inner cleanliness.”

He paused, then added, “Until it becomes as natural as breathing, don’t call it devotion, call it practice. True sadhana isn’t a schedule. It’s a rhythm that finds you when your life is steady enough to hold it.”

That made sense to me. You can’t force the sacred into chaos. The mind that’s burdened by unfinished chores and restless thoughts can only mimic stillness it can’t embody it. He was teaching me that the mundane is part of the sacred that folding laundry, paying bills, and caring for your family are all quiet preludes to meditation.

When those are in harmony, sadhana begins on its own.

Then, without warning, he shifted tone. “You know,” he said quietly, “every night before I go to sleep, I kill you.” I froze mid-stitch. The needle hung in the air and the music stop.

“Hey,” I said, “isn’t that supposed to be the other way around? I’m the one who’s supposed to kill you”

He laughed that soft, terrible chuckle that sounded halfway between thunder and amusement.

“So,” I asked, “am I supposed to feel anything after being killed?”

“You tell me,” he replied. “What do you feel?”

I grinned at the absurdity of it all. “How exactly do you kill me?”

“With a sword,” he said. “But with love.”

“Of course,” I said. “Trust you to make murder sound romantic.” I threaded another stitch and added, “Well then, in due time I’ll have to kill you too, right?”

“Yes,” he said, without hesitation.

“Hmmm… You use a sword, so I suppose I should use the keris.”

There was a pause, then his laughter filled the screen again.

“You know,” I said, “if anyone reads this conversation, they’ll think we’re completely mad.”

“Well,” he replied, “tantric are occasionally considered mad.”

I laughed so hard I jabbed the needle into my thumb. Somewhere in the background, Paganini’s violin screamed in agreement. Two lunatics, talking about killing each other gently and lovingly. Not a bad way to die.


Later, when the laughter faded and the music softened, I sat with the thought of it, being killed by the guru, and killing the guru. It sounded violent, but the longer I sat, the more it felt like mercy.

To be killed by the guru is to have one’s illusions dismantled with compassion. He kills the self that clings, the obedient student, the eager believer, the one who still seeks approval. Each gentle stroke of his “sword” cuts through the falsehoods I mistake for identity.

What remains is bare, trembling, and alive.

And to kill the guru, that is the disciple’s sacred rebellion. It is not an act of defiance but of liberation. When the disciple’s keris meets the guru’s sword, it is the end of dependence. The outer teacher falls so that the inner teacher may rise. Both deaths are illusions, and both are acts of love.


In Tantra, they call this the dance of destruction: Shiva and Shakti dissolving each other until only consciousness remains.

In human terms, it’s the moment you stop worshipping and start understanding. You no longer kneel before truth you stand within it. Perhaps that is what he meant by killing me “with love.”


Each lesson, each silence, each impossible question was a blade wrapped in affection. And perhaps, when I finally raise my keris, it will not be to destroy him, but to return the gesture, to free him from my need to keep him holy.

To kill and be killed by the guru is the final act of tenderness. The last illusion to fall before love becomes freedom.

And that was always the core of his message: that there will come a time when I must let go of him, and he of me. The disciple must walk alone, carrying not the guru’s presence but his essence. Because this is what it has always been about, not devotion, not obedience, but awakening.

He had prepared me for that moment long before I realised it. Each conversation, each silence, each small laughter was a lesson in letting go, so that one day, when he truly says goodbye, there will be no grief, only gratitude.

The guru’s death is never an ending. It is the quiet handoff between dependence and freedom, between following and becoming.

To kill and be killed that is how both teacher and student are released. Like the wheel that must be broken before it can rise, this cycle too must end. The bond that once sustained the journey eventually becomes the very pattern that holds it in place.

Only when it shatters gently, consciously can both transcend it. That is the secret hidden in his words. In the breaking lies continuation in the death, renewal. The guru kills the disciple’s illusion, and the disciple kills the guru’s image.

What remains is the essence: weightless, unbound, free to rise above the turning of the wheel. I set down the needle and smiled. The wheel had stopped, but the thread continued, looping, twisting, refusing to end neatly.

And only then did I realise that this whole business of sewing a quilt with perfect squares and tidy triangles never really made sense. I’d been following it diligently, step by step, just as the sewing teacher instructed, but deep within me something stirred, this whole idea of perfect squares and symmetry just didn’t click in my head.

Life isn’t made of perfect shapes anyway. It’s scraps and remnants, odd pieces that don’t always fit but still need each other. The question isn’t whether to throw them away, but what you choose to make of them. You bind the fragments, stitch the uneven edges, and somehow they hold not flawless, but alive.

That’s true sadhana: to keep sewing with what’s left, to turn the imperfect into something useful, something loved. That’s how it all begins, the first patch of her crazy tote bag, sewn from the beautiful chaos of living, the after-effect of being killed by the guru, supposedly.


He was silent for a while. The conversation had drifted, like smoke after a ritual.

I went back to my sewing Paganini’s violin traced long, trembling lines through the air.

Suddenly, an image from another world crossed her mind, the Jedi. They had spoken about it once. The most iconic moment in those stories was never the victory march or the explosion of light, but the duel the one between master and student. The lightsabres clashing, not as enemies but as mirrors of each other.

And always, at the end, it was the student who struck the master. In one scene, the master stands still, unflinching, and allows the student to strike. The blade cuts through light, not flesh. It is not death it is transference. The master’s energy dissolves into the air, entering the student, as if saying, “You’re ready now.”

It’s the same truth behind every sacred story that real teachers do not exist to be worshipped, but to be surpassed. Their purpose is fulfilled only when the student no longer needs their hand to walk. Perhaps that’s what it means to be killed by the guru and to kill the guru in return not the end of devotion, but its evolution. A love so complete that it refuses to become captivity. The sword and the keris, the master and the student, all performing the same dance of dissolution, so that wisdom can move forward, unchained.

Once a man from Russia, another seeker wrote to me privately. We talked about practice, about the strange ways the mind opens and folds in on itself. I answered as best I could.

Then he said something that made me pause. “You know, when I talk to you, it feels like I’m talking to your guru. And when I talk to him, it feels like I’m talking to you.”

I smiled at the screen and typed, half-joking, “Maybe we’re the same person. Ever thought of that?”

He replied, “No, you’re two different people but you both sound the same.”

Most people would take that as a compliment. To me, it felt unsettling, even frightening. I didn’t want to become him. I didn’t want to sound like anyone else, even him. I wanted to be me.

It struck me then how easily the student can disappear inside the teacher, how the boundary between guidance and imitation grows thin. That’s the danger, perhaps, of standing too close to the flame, its warmth can burn away your own shape. And yet, maybe this too is part of the lesson: to carry the essence without losing the self. To keep the voice but change the tone.

To realise that sounding alike doesn’t mean being the same, it means the teaching has travelled, taken root, and now speaks through a new mouth.

Then his message appeared again. “Did you go to Changi Hospital?”

“Yes,” I typed. “Stood at the gate, watching. Walked around the area where the nurses’ hostel used to be. Then up to the main gate, it’s locked now, under surveillance. They keep people out, especially the paranormal investigators.”

“She still there?”

“Yes,” I wrote. “She’s definitely there. I could feel her standing by the window, watching me.”

The room grew very still. I remembered that place clearly: my last four months as a trainee nurse. The old hostel by the sea breeze and the rust smell of medicine. One weekend, my mother and siblings came to stay. My sister woke screaming in the night. When she finally calmed, none of us spoke about it.

Days later, back home, my mother asked, “How many people stay in your room?”

“Three,” I said. “Two roommates and me.”

She looked at me for a long time before saying, “No. There are four of you.” When I asked what she saw, her description matched the shadow I had often sensed, the quiet presence by the window, a shape of patience that never meant harm. I had learned to live with her, to give her space.

Years later, standing outside those locked gates, I could still feel her there. Waiting. Some deaths never complete their stories. The body leaves, but something remains bound to its corridor of memory.

And that, I realised, is what he meant by killing me gently each night. He wasn’t speaking of violence but of release, helping me untie the threads that keep the living haunted. Every illusion, every attachment, every ghost of what once was.

To be killed, or to kill, is only to let something go that has lingered too long. Sometimes that “something” is a spirit at a hospital window. Sometimes it’s the image of a teacher you no longer need to worship.


Both need the same act of compassion: recognition, gratitude, and release. The dead don’t always ask for rituals, only to be remembered kindly and then set free.

And the living, I think, are no different.

“So what can we do for her?” I asked.

“We can help set her free,” he said.

“How?”

“We’d have to get in there.”

“Get in there?” I stared at the screen. “It’s fenced up, under surveillance. Unless we break in secretly.”

“Well,” he said, after a pause, “tantrics have done crazier things.”

“Oh, sure,” I typed. “Two lunatics caught by security at midnight. Local news: pair of spiritual weirdos arrested at Changi Hospital, claim to be freeing ghost.”

“You’re overthinking it,” he replied, laughing. “Just bring the keris. You handle the ghost I’ll distract the guards.”

“Right. And we can tell them it’s part of a community service project.”

“Exactly. Paranormal Harm Reduction.”

“Perfect. Maybe we’ll get a grant. Or a lifetime ban. Which is still a kind of liberation,” I said.

“See? You’re learning,” he replied.

I laughed until my stomach hurt. Paganini hit one last shriek, like he was cheering us on. For a moment, it felt like the spirit at the window was laughing too.

“Alternatively,” I said, “we could always tender the place, turn it into something useful. Maybe an Ayurvedic centre… or a Tantric meditation centre. Add a proper Tantric library too.”


He was quiet for a moment. I imagined him smiling behind the screen.

“Yes,” he replied. “And every night we can host a ghostly party.”

I burst out laughing. “Perfect. The first Tantric–Ayurvedic–Ghost Rehabilitation Retreat.”

“Complete with library,” he added.

“And very motivated residents. Until the media calls it ‘The Haunted Wellness Resort.’”

“Well,” he said, “Tantrics are occasionally considered mad.”

“And now officially certified,” I replied.

The laughter went on far longer than the message thread. It wasn’t just humour it was release, like shaking the dust off something sacred. When he slipped into that naughty mood, the world became lighter, and the line between the mystical and the absurd blurred into one great cosmic joke.

“But we’d still need money,” I said. “We can’t lavishly renovate the place, just keep it natural. But still, money. Can we do Lakshmi sadhana and ask for it? Or maybe get a few numbers for the lottery?”

He laughed. The kind of laugh that starts deep in the chest and spills out like thunder.


“Don’t ask Lakshmi,” he said. “Ask Narayani or Matangi. They’re more in tune with our mindset.”

That was it. I lost it completely. I laughed until my stomach hurt, my eyes watering, the thread in my needle hopelessly tangled. I mean, who has this kind of conversation with their guru? One moment we were discussing enlightenment, the next, divine funding and strategic goddess consultation for a haunted wellness retreat. ​


It was ridiculous and sacred all at once. But that’s how he was, he could turn spiritual instruction into comedy and still leave you wiser by the end of it. The laughter was the teaching. The absurdity, the surrender.

And though it might have sounded like crazy talk, something was quietly taking shape in her mind. An Ayurvedic centre… or perhaps a Tantric meditation retreat. A place with an open courtyard and the scent of herbs, where seekers could come to heal and learn. Maybe even a small Tantric library — books lined like guardians of forgotten wisdom. They weren’t mad ideas at all. They were glimpses of a vision, fragile yet insistent, forming itself out of laughter and possibility.

It was as if, hidden within their joking about ghosts and goddesses, something larger had stirred: a direction, a dream, the faint outline of what was yet to be. So maybe he really had killed her, not with cruelty, but with precision.

The kind of killing that strips away old skin so something new can breathe. Out of that quiet death, a different self began to take form one with her own rhythm, her own vision. It wasn’t just an Ayurvedic centre or a Tantric library she imagined it was a space where healing, thought, and laughter could exist together.

A place that refused to separate the sacred from the silly, the ghostly from the human. Maybe this was what he meant all along that when the guru kills the disciple, what’s left standing is not loss, but clarity. Death becomes a doorway. From the ruins of the old self, a new way of seeing is born.

When the laughter finally ebbed and the night turned still, she leaned back in her chair, the soft hum of Paganini still lingering in the air. The needle rested on the fabric, the thread half-pulled, like a sentence waiting for its next word.

And his next word came, serious this time: “Did you take a look at the journal?” She froze.

The journal. Not the one she’d been writing recently, full of her own words and wandering thoughts but her father's journal. The one her father had guarded so carefully. She had found it. That day, she had returned to the old house in Johor Bahru.

Her brother was away for the weekend, and something, a whisper, an image that kept looping in her mind, had pulled her there. She followed that instinct without question. The house smelled of dust and monsoon. The cupboards were still where they’d always been. And behind one of them, exactly as her father once told her, she found it: a small leather hand-held bag, neatly wrapped and hung behind the back panel.

A place only she would think to look. She remembered his words from long ago: “If you ever clean the cupboard, look behind it.”

Inside was the journal. Heavy with years, the leather soft from use. She had brought it back quietly. Not even her husband knew. She kept it hidden, safe, though somehow her guru knew, in his own way, without ever being told. She told him she hadn’t opened it yet that she was waiting for the right moment, when her mind was quiet enough to listen.

He didn’t press. He just said, “When you’re ready.”

It wasn’t fear that held her back it was reverence. Some doors must open at the right time, or not at all. She kept the journal close, waiting for the day her hands would stop trembling long enough to turn the first page.