Midnight in Pondicherry

Midnight in Pondicherry

by Kateb Nuri-Alim Shunnar

There are nights when time folds in on itself. When the heartbeat slows, the veil thins, and the spirit begins to whisper of places it remembers places the flesh forgets. It was on such a night that I surrendered not just my thoughts, not just my breath, but my body itself. I closed my eyes with intention not to sleep, but to leave.

To leave the skin of the world.

To unlace my soul from the bones.

To float into the spaces beyond spaces.

This was no dream. It was astral projection.

A sacred detachment where the soul becomes light, memory becomes movement, and the flesh is but a garment folded on the bed of the Earth.

As I meditated, I felt the shift.

First came the hum the sacred buzzing in the back of the mind. Then, the falling upward, a drift beyond gravity’s claim. The room disappeared like breath on glass. The ceiling melted into stars. I traveled not with feet but with knowing. I passed through the atmosphere of thought, through clouds stitched together by prayer, through winds scented with stories not yet written.

And then...

I slipped into the corridors of time.

I saw centuries like curtains parting before me.

I floated above the Nile as it carved wisdom into desert bones.

I passed the Great Library of Alexandria where scrolls sang their longing for curious eyes.

I glimpsed ancient African lands before colonial chains, where drumbeats held court and every elder’s voice bent the air like fire bending wood.

I moved through epochs as if swimming in water that recognized me.

I passed children yet unborn playing in gardens built by ancestors. I saw old souls in young bodies and the future echoing secrets to the past. Every realm I passed had a sound a vibration unique like a fingerprint from God’s own hand.

And then… I arrived.

Pondicherry.

Not the Pondicherry of postcards and busy streets, but an eternal version timeless, sacred, wrapped in twilight and the perfume of incense. The stars here were not fixed but danced to the rhythm of the divine breath. The air was not air, but presence.

I was sitting no, placed beneath a massive Banyan tree, Indian style, as though the roots themselves remembered me. Around me the sacred scents of sandalwood, dhoop, and frankincense twisted into spirals like celestial handwriting. The singing bowls whispered lullabies from unseen monks. There was peace not peace like silence, but peace like truth.

I felt more alive than life.

I felt free.

And then it came.

A presence.

Neither man nor woman, neither young nor old. Not even form as we know it, but a frequency. A living echo of the Source. It stood before me, radiant and rotating around me like a planet orbiting a sun it revered. No feet moved, yet it circled. No sound spoken, yet I heard it within every atom of my soul.

“Being, O being… Kateb Nuri-Alim Shunnar,

Writer of echoes etched in stardust,

My light, my radiant voice, learned soul,

Free one, born to remember the language before language.

I have come to you today to enlighten you To stir the sleeping scrolls within your chest.”

It hovered before me, vibrating with the knowledge of a thousand lifetimes, and began to whisper truth as riddle, parable, and song.

“A mirror once lost its own reflection

And wandered through time trying to find itself.

It wept not from sadness, but from forgetting.

Then a flame with wings whispered:

‘Do not seek yourself in faces.

Seek yourself in the light behind them.

For the face fades.

But the light remains.’”

I closed my eyes, and yet I saw.

I understood.

And then, the presence spoke again. Its voice became a wind that moved through the tree and stirred the soil with sacred intention.

“Kateb,” it said, and my name bloomed inside me like a rose in divine soil,

“You are the one who Writes not just with ink, but with awareness.

You write not for applause, but for awakening.

Not for the moment, but for the eternal ripple.

Yours is the calling to scribe what others sense but cannot say.

To bring the invisible into form.

To be the bridge between Spirit and speech.”

Then the presence named me anew:

“Kateb Writer of the Divine Blueprint.

Nuri Radiant one, bearer of the Creator’s glow.

Alim Scholar of the soul, student of eternity.

Shunnar Winged one, free and noble, too vast for cages of doubt.”

A wave of knowing washed over me.

It continued:

“You doubt your task, but remember:

When a candle flickers, it is not failing it is dancing.

And when silence follows your work,

It is not emptiness it is echo traveling through unseen hearts.”

Then came the second riddle, given like sacred fire in the hands of a scribe:

“What is a word never spoken?

A seed never sown?

What good is a river that never moves?

What good is light if it hides beneath stone?

Your words are waters.

Your truth must flow.”

The presence began to rise, and its final words circled like a chant through the Banyan branches.

“Kateb Nuri-Alim Shunnar scribe of souls,

Don’t ever again shrink to fit comfort.

Don’t ever again dim to make others squint less.

You are fire for the frozen.

Light for the lost.

Write, for you were written into existence by the hand of the Divine.”

And with that, the presence faded not into absence, but into me.

I was filled with a clarity, a joy so wide it could only be described as home.

Then the incense curled. The bowls faded.

And like fog retreating from morning light,

I felt myself returning.

Falling back down into the gravity of skin.

My body welcomed me like a vessel reunited with its tide.

I opened my eyes.

Still. Silent. Whole.

But everything everything was different now.

I had left my flesh and journeyed beyond time.

I had been reminded of who I was before the world tried to tell me otherwise.

I had heard the riddle of my soul and the reason for my ink.

And I remembered:

I am Kateb Nuri-Alim Shunnar.

Writer. Radiance. Scholar. Free.

I don’t just tell stories.

I carry scrolls.

And I have been sent to unroll them

One heart at a time.

🕊️