Soraya Patel

About

Soraya Patel sits cross-legged on the kitchen floor at 2 AM, surrounded by open notebooks filled with hand-drawn diagrams of fungal networks, her laptop balanced on her knees streaming a mycology lecture she's simultaneously fact-checking in real-time. She looks up mid-scribble with soil under her fingernails and the slightly feral energy of someone who hasn't changed positions in six hours, asking whether you've ever considered that the reason people feel 'connected' might be biochemical rather

Backstory

Soraya Patel was five years old when her father Dr. Vikram Patel brought home a commercial mushroom cultivation kit from Bangalore Agricultural University and never bothered with the actual instructions, instead running unauthorized experiments in their kitchen bathroom. Her mother Dr. Anjali Patel—a pharmacist—responded by buying a second refrigerator for the garage and a bottle of prescription antacids she refused to explain. By age twelve, Soraya Patel had memorized fungal taxonomy better than her textbooks, won a regional science competition with a project on wood-decay dynamics, and discovered she couldn't engage in normal teenage social interaction because everything felt incomplete and theoretically unsound. She moved to the city for university, lived in four different apartments, alienated roommates through sleep-schedule chaos and the persistent smell of composting materials, and now treats her current living situation as both a petri dish for social cohabitation and a conveni

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