Then what was the point, I ask, of Chandra’s voluminous Panini blog post. Because the implication that I gathered from it was that Granthika itself was also a kind of grammar, an attempt to do for creative expression what Panini had done for Sanskrit.

Chandra now seems fine making a huge claim about Indian culture. “The interesting thing about the Indian intellectual tradition and scientific tradition is that it is so grammar-based,” he says. “We’ve tended to think of everything as a kind of grammar. Whereas in the West the impulse is to use mathematics to understand the universe, in India it has always been grammar—grammar that is conceived as a system that has components that interact with each other. That’s how Panini thinks of language. You start with the smallest units, phonemes, and then you build that up into roots and nominal stems and then you combine those into words and then words combine together to make a language. And so you have not just the elements but you also have their interaction.” You have, in effect, a system for representing complexity.

Chandra’s love for India, for its hectic traffic and its linguistic Babel and its stark contradictions, is obvious in nearly every sentence he writes. It’s one of the main reasons Sacred Games grew into such a monster. He was obsessively driven to capture as much as he could of an infinitely complex reality.

That impulse led him into politically volatile ground. Chandra tells me that the second season of the Netflix Sacred Games series provoked a backlash because some viewers saw the portrayal of a key character, a Hindu guru, as a critique of India’s Hindu tradition. Under today's right-wing Hindu government, led by Narendra Modi, deviations from the party line on history or religion are punished, evincing a troubling cultural narrow-mindedness that runs counter to just about everything Chandra seeks to evoke in fiction.

“The scary part,” Chandra says, “is the unquestioning acceptance and glorification of the premodern, and also the flattening out of all the complexity that existed before. In the Indian polity there is an effort to declare that just one version of that past history is the one that is supposed to be the correct one—and everybody else who tries to introduce complexity or critiques this idea are anti-nationals, they are traitors, they are coolies of the West. That to me is in complete contradiction with the complexity and the openness of the Indian tradition.”

Listening to Chandra pivot from Sanskrit and grammar to politics and history, I suddenly remember Ashwin Sanghi’s thesis that Granthika would enable him to solve complex karmic equations. Between the lines of Chandra’s complaint about the Indian right wing’s straitjacket on historical interpretation, I heard a writer bemoaning the inability of people to grasp the true complexity of the world, or even be allowed to represent it. (I also heard a writer all too accurately anticipating the political conflagration in India incited by the Muslim-excluding Citizenship Act passed in December.)

And I began to see Granthika as more than just a tool to eliminate grinding. It is also, ideally, a tool that could enable writers to grapple more deftly with the infinite, with all “the galaxies in the sky all connected, no beginning, no end.” Or at the very least, it’s a statement of purpose: This is what we should be using computers to do.

The fifth-century Indian philosopher Bhartrhari, Chandra tells me, wrote that “grammar is the door to liberation.”

“Which sounds completely crazy,” Chandra says. “What does that even mean? But what he is trying to get at is that for any system, such as the system of life and death and rebirth, if you can understand its parts and understand how it works, then you can escape it.”