I started The Prophet in 2022, inside the halls of HealthDart. For three years it came and went. From May 2025 to February 2026 I pushed it to the end.
Before there was a world or a plot, there were people. Each character has a file: their history, their astrology, their numerology, their weaknesses. I wrote it all down so that later, when I loved them, I couldn’t go soft on them. Even I couldn’t become sentimental.
Then I wrote as them. Essays in their voices, for months, before I had built the world or the story. I wasn’t writing a novel yet. I was learning how each of them thinks.
Walking with Aidan
Most days started the same way. A Moleskine notebook, and Whisper, an app I bought once that transcribes on my phone, offline. Nothing I said left the device. In a book about a machine that listens to everyone, that mattered.
Then Aidan and I would walk. Three, sometimes four hours a day. Aidan is the kindest, gentlest soul in the book. His friend has died, reality has run out for him, and all he wants is to find God. Walking as him, every tree I looked at closely felt like it was talking back. Every rose had a predetermined destination.
Sometimes I stayed in him after the walk and met people as Aidan. I created experiences I knew would look like madness from the outside. It is a very exhausting way to write.
Aidan’s loss is a friend. Mine was the loss of my own identity, and perhaps of a person. I documented it through Hong Kong, India, Qatar and the mountains of Cape Town.
The book inside the book
While he lived in my head, Aidan wrote a book of his own. He called it Tender Creation: a short, drug-hallucinated reimagining of Genesis through several creation stories, inspired by Freud, Dostoevsky, Dante, Kant and the seventeenth-century saint Vishvanath Chakravarti. It isn’t published yet.
In the novel, Aidan is pushed into heavily drug-induced states, and that is how he perceives and heightens his own empathy. But no one is perfect. Not even the Prophet, modelled on perfection, who has no empathy at all. He may be one of the scariest creations you will ever meet.
Where AI came in
The copyright page says parts of the book were edited using AI tools or researched, and that the story and text remain original. Here is what that meant.
I would load a character’s profile, share my transcribed writing, and model scenarios: pushing the characters to the same depth I was experiencing. It also taught me reader optics. Aidan was researching Kundalini Shakti, and it was real to both of us, but it doesn’t make sense to introduce a concept to a world it doesn’t serve. So it went.
Sometimes I asked the model to be the devil himself. Even as the devil, it pushed back. I couldn’t even corrupt the devil.
The last chapter is different, and deliberate. I wrote about why in Why the last chapter is not mine.
What it took
By the time I was eighteen I had nearly died three times. I survived septicaemia twice. At five I swallowed two coins, and took as much radiation as a five-year-old is legally allowed. I was in the radiology department until 2am. Then came the trauma from relationships. I built a box in my mind to hide the man with any capacity to write or create. When I opened it, I fed the shadow all my trauma, and instead of satisfying it, I grew its appetite.
It took a creative who expresses art through code, and some major life trauma, to build a world I actually enjoy living in. The Prophet’s voice came the same way: through many characters, and through traits of people I’ve met again and again.
The Prophet is out on 10 November 2026, and the ebook is on pre-order now. Choose an edition ↗︎ or begin with the opening pages ↗︎