The Invisible Path





They walked for a while in silence, the ocean breathing beside them. Gulls dipped in the sky, the tide rolled in and out like the rhythm of some ancient mantra. The breakwater stretched like a spine into the sea, weathered by salt and silence.

Here, where ocean met stone, she sat beside him the wind tugging gently at her shawl, the sky a pale mirror of the vastness ahead. He didn’t speak for a long time. Only the waves did, rising and falling with the rhythm of breath.

And as she listened to the waves, a memory resurfaced. It wasn’t a meeting beneath banyan trees or in a Himalayan cave. It was a chat room. A forgotten Yahoo group created for spiritual seekers, though most came there to argue.

He came in one day, quietly. Just a greeting at first. Then, a message. “Hello. I’ve heard quite a bit about you from someone in the group. Nasty things, to be honest. So I thought I’d find out for myself what kind of person inspires that level of obsession.”

She remembered laughing.

“You’re not the only one,” she had replied. “I get hate mails daily. Multiple ones. All from the same woman.” He asked her, “What do you make of her?”

And she’d answered without thinking just truthfully: “She’s in deep pain. And she expresses it in the only way she knows how. It just so happens that I’ve become the face of her suffering. If my presence helps her release that then I’m okay with it. It doesn’t affect me.”

His reply had been short. But it stayed with her. “Yes. Indeed.”

After that, they became chat buddies. Quiet conversations that ran deeper than most voices ever dared go. That was the beginning. Not a ceremony. Not a calling. Just two people meeting in the space between conflict and compassion.

After that, they spoke often nothing formal, nothing forced. Just two people exchanging thoughts, fragments, silences. And from that conversation, something deeper began to take root.

Eventually, it led to her making the trip to meet him in person. No ceremony awaited her. No promises were made. Her initiation. And now, here they were. Side by side. Years later.

He was thirty years older than her. A retired judge, once robed in black and bound to the law measured, precise, a man who weighed words like evidence. To the outside world, he had been a man of reason. A man of rules.

But beneath the surface, there was another current. He had walked away from that world not with rebellion, but with clarity.

And somewhere between silence and sea spray, he had become something else.








A Tantric guide. A reluctant guru. She never called him father, but sometimes it felt like that. Not because he protected her, but because he taught her how to stand unguarded without fear.

Even in their earliest online conversations, he never told her she was wrong. He simply asked her to look again. Sometimes, he would say only: “Interesting view. What else could it be?”

It reminded her of the way a father might teach a child not to walk in straight lines, but to notice where the lines curved. There was no punishment. No rebuke. Just space. And silence Enough silence for her to find her own truth inside it. She once tried to explain the symbols — the goddesses with ten arms, the gods with skulls and smiles.

She said: “I understand them here,” pointing to her head. “But I’m stuck. There’s too much up here, and I can’t get it out in words.”

“Speak from the mind.” His only words and just like that, the words began to flow clear, clean, certain. As if he had quietly reached inside her and untied every knot.

“whats in your mind now” he suddenly asked to break the silence.

“I keep asking myself, am I the right person for this?”

He didn’t answer immediately. He watched the waves break, retreat, then whispered: "You did not seek the path. The path seeks you. Chooses you.” She frowned.

“But why? I didn’t prepare. I didn’t even know I was looking.”

“That’s exactly why,” he said. He turned to face her fully. “Those who chase the path often carry too much ambition. Too much noise. You—”

He paused, eyes soft but unwavering. “You were simply living. And in living fully, the path found a space in you.”

He paused again, eyes soft but unwavering. She lowered her gaze, fingers tracing the edge of her shawl.

"I never asked for it,” she said. “But now that I’m here, I feel like I have to explain myself. Justify it.”

He waited and suddenly, it wasn’t just the path she was thinking about. It was all the other things she had never asked for but was given anyway. She remembered the day they moved to Kuala Lumpur. All her life she’d lived in tight spaces a nurse’s hostel, an HDB flat, rooms where walls breathed close. But in KL, her husband took her to a penthouse. She stood in silence as the door opened to a sweeping skyline.

We don’t need a place this big,” she had whispered. “A smaller apartment would be more than enough.”

But he had replied, gently but firmly, “This was allocated according to my role. The company’s already approved it. How can I stay in something smaller than the people working under me?”

She remembered her mind going blank. And the only words she could find were: “I never asked for this.”

Now, sitting here beside her guru, that same sentence echoed inside her but it no longer sounded like protest. It sounded like a prayer. He looked out toward the sea, where the waves kept their steady rhythm.“There is no need to justify anything. You are not obligated to explain anything to anybody,” he said, voice low, as if speaking too loudly would break the world.

“Even if you do, they will not understand. And it’s not their fault"

”Why not?" she asked.

"Their state of mind," he replied. "Like a cup sealed with wax. They cannot receive."

She looked away, troubled. "Then what should I do?"

"Leave them as they are. This is not for everyone. Only a few will hear the silence between your words. This…. this is meant for the few."

Silence followed the kind that doesn’t end, doesn’t need to end.

“Do what you need to do, then leave. Do not wait. Do not linger. Disappear. Do not wait for praises or rewards. Make yourself invisible"

She blinked. "Disappear? Invisible? How?"

He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he simply watched her as if measuring the depth of her readiness. Finally, he spoke.“Invisibility is not hiding. It is not escape. It is the art of presence without weight, of action without trace.”

“You ask how to become invisible,” he said, “but what I am doing now is the opposite.

”She looked at him, puzzled.

“I have stopped,” he said. “I have turned back to hold your hand to help you walk this path. But I cannot do this forever. Once you are steady, once you arrive at where I stand now…” He paused.“…I must let you go. And you must walk forward alone. Not in my footsteps, but on your own path. Your own way.”

She listened, heart still, breath shallow.

“Because if you keep following me,” he continued, “you will never find yourself. And that is the only thing worth finding.”

She waited.

“Most people want to be seen, to be remembered. But you must walk the other way. To act without being seen. To give without holding. To vanish without absence…” He didn’t finish the sentence.

“Invisibility,” he whispered, “is not erasure. It is essence. Like the scent of rain. The presence of roots beneath the earth. Felt but not noticed.” A breeze passed between them, quiet and cool. The reluctant guru and the accidental disciple.

She looked at her own hands."But how will I know if I’ve done it right?"

“The moment you ask that,” he said gently, “you haven’t.”

"Then I’ll always fail," she said, her voice barely audible.

He smiled. “No. You’ll learn. The one who no longer clings… becomes.”

She closed her eyes, letting the breeze pass through her not around her, not over her, but through her. And in that moment, something inside her began to fade. Not into nothingness but into everything.

"Invisibility is not something I can give you. It is something you must become.”




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nmadasamy@nmadasamy.com