Journey Of Hell: The Unforgotten Promise By Piyush Naik (Piyu4k)

CH 0: A Warning to the Reader

Before you turn the page and step into the shadow of my life, you must understand what this document is. And what it is not.

This is not a story crafted for your entertainment. It is not a fantasy to be consumed for a fleeting thrill, nor a horror novel to be set aside when the lights are turned on. Every word you are about to read was paid for with an agony I pray you will never know. It is a confession, extracted from my soul under the weight of a terrible and binding pact. It is a testimony.

A Note to the Reader of Any Faith

This book does not challenge your faith, no matter whom you believe in. Whether you are Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, or a follower of any other path, this story is not an attempt to contradict your scripture or convert you. Its purpose is to explore a truth so fundamental that it exists as a core tenet in nearly every spiritual tradition on Earth: The Universal Law of Karma, or Cause and Effect.

The names of the hells and the forms of the tormentors you will encounter are from a specific tradition, but the sins they punish—pride, lust, greed, deceit, cruelty—are recognized as poisons to the human spirit by all faiths. This is not a story about one religion's hell. It is a story about the hell we build for ourselves, one small, selfish choice at a time. I ask you to read it in that spirit.

This book is NOT for you if:

• You seek a thrilling escape. The horrors described herein are not inventions. They are a meticulous and brutal reality. To read this for pleasure is to mock the suffering it describes, and the Law of Karma does not look kindly on such mockery.

• You believe, with absolute certainty, that death is the end. If you are a staunch materialist for whom the soul is a fiction and the cosmos is a silent, random machine, then these pages will read as madness—the trauma-induced delusion of a broken mind. Do not waste your time. This book is not for you.

• Your heart is fragile, or your mind is plagued by despair. The journey you are about to witness is one of unrelenting torment. If you are struggling with your own darkness, I implore you to close this book. Do not let my hell become a part of yours.

This book IS for you if:

• You are "spiritual, but not religious." If you believe in a vague notion of "karma" or "the universe" as a benevolent force that overlooks small transgressions, this book is meant to be a bucket of ice water on your comfortable dream.

• You believe yourself to be a "good person." If you have built your identity on the idea that you are fundamentally decent, yet your private thoughts are filled with envy, your secret messages with gossip, your career with "harmless" ambition, and your heart with casual betrayals you call "mistakes"—this book is a mirror to the true cost of those "small" sins.

• You live a curated life. If you have ever posted a smiling family photo just moments after a bitter argument, or typed a caption about your "perfect life" while your soul was hollow with emptiness, then you understand the hypocrisy that this journey seeks to expose.

• You feel a splinter of guilt in your own heart. If you have ever looked at your life of comfortable compromises and felt a nagging, disquieting sense that you have forgotten something important, a promise made long ago—this book is for you. It is a reminder of that promise.

If you are one of these, then proceed. But do so with caution and reverence. Read this not as a fantasy, but as a map.

And pray you never have to walk the roads it describes. Let’s Start then.

CH 0: A Mother's Testimony

My name is Dimple Mehta. This is not a story. It is a confession. The testimony I am being forced to write in exchange for the souls of my family.

There is a being who calls herself Katha. She made a pact with me. Every night, she takes my soul from my body and plunges it into my daughter’s. In those hours, I am no longer Dimple, the grieving mother; I become Maya, the damned soul. I feel the spikes in my feet. I burn in the fires of my own making. I feel the shame of sins I had forgotten I’d committed, and sins I prayed no one would ever discover.

When I am returned to my body, trembling and broken, I must write. This journal is that testimony. It is the truest account I can give of what awaits a soul that forgets its promise to God. Do not read this as fantasy. Read this knowing that for a few hours last night, and the night before, and every night since the pact was made, this happened to me.

CH 1: The God of Small Betrayals

It has been a week since the silence began. It’s not an empty silence. It’s heavy. It’s a physical weight that sits on my chest, making my breathing shallow. It’s the sound of a life that has been hollowed out. A week ago, this house had echoes. Maya’s guitar, the tinny beat from her headphones leaking out from under her door, the sound of her laughing with a friend on the phone. Now, there is only the thick, humming quiet she left behind.

I came home from work. It was a Tuesday. I remember the trivial details with perfect clarity. I was irritated about a meeting that had run late. I was mentally composing a passive-aggressive email to a junior colleague. I kicked off my heels—they were pinching my toes—and tossed my bag onto the sofa. The first thread of wrongness was the quiet. It was too complete for 5:30 PM.

"Maya?" I called out, my voice sharpened by the day's irritations. "I'm home."

The silence that answered was deep and wrong. A mother knows. It’s a primal instinct. The hair on my arms stood up.

"Maya?" I said again, my voice softer now, a knot of dread tightening in my stomach. I walked down the hall. Her bedroom door was closed, which was unusual. I pushed it open.

And my world ended for the second time.

The mind is a merciful liar. In that first second, I didn't see my daughter. I saw a problem. A shape on the floor that shouldn't be there. A spill. Something broken. A task to be fixed. My brain fought, with everything it had, to keep the truth from me. Then the lie broke. The truth flooded in. And a sound I have never heard before tore from my throat.

In the middle of that first, shattering moment, I saw them. I swear on the souls of my children, I saw them. The air shimmered, like heat rising from pavement, and two figures solidified from the shadows. They were tall and dark, their forms indistinct, their faces cruel masks of indifference. They were not looking at me. They were looking down at a faint, glowing outline of my Maya, a shimmering echo of her, that was floating just above her body.

The four of us on a beach. Rohan, me, Maya, Avi. "My perfect family," the caption read. A lie. I remembered the fight we'd had just before taking it. I remembered snapping at the kids to just smile for the damn picture. Later that night, in a private chat, I complained about Rohan to my friend, Priya. A small, casual act of betrayal. A few taps of my thumbs to undermine the man I had vowed to honor.

I kept scrolling, deeper into my own curated history. A work event. I was standing next to my colleague, Sameer. His arm was around my waist. A little too familiar. I remembered the flirty texts that had followed. The nude photos I had sent him late one night, my heart pounding with a cheap, illicit thrill while my husband slept in the next room. I remembered the business trip, the hotel bar, the feel of his hands on me, the guilt and the excitement all tangled together. I had ended it. I had told myself it was a mistake, a moment of weakness. But looking at the photo now, I knew it wasn’t just a mistake. It was a choice. It was a sin.

The phone felt greasy in my hand. Tears began to fall. Hot, shameful tears. I was crying for my daughter.

But I was also crying for myself. For the convenient lies I had told myself for years.

"The truth is a heavy burden, isn't it, Dimple?"

The voice was like a small bell. I looked up. A young woman in a simple white saree stood before me. She was beautiful, but it was her eyes that captured me. They were full of a deep, ancient compassion. They saw everything.

"My name is Katha," she said, sitting on the grass. "What you saw was real. The Yamduts have taken your daughter's soul."

I couldn't breathe.

"She was in pain," I managed to choke out.

"And you were in pain when you betrayed your husband?" Katha asked, her voice gentle, but the question was a razor. "The Law of Karma does not judge our reasons. Only our actions." She paused. "I can bring her back. And Rohan. And Avi."

The world stopped. Hope, sharp and agonizing, pierced through my grief. "How?"

"This world has forgotten the truth," she said. "It hides its sins behind smiling photos and believes that a secret is not a sin. It has forgotten that every act, every thought, every casual betrayal is recorded. You will help me remind them."

She leaned closer. "You will be my witness. I will take your soul and merge it with Maya's. You will feel her punishment. And when you return, you will write it all down. You will write a book that exposes the truth. When it is finished, your family will be returned to you."

This was a nightmare. A terrifying, impossible choice. But to have them back…

"Yes," I whispered.

"Good," Katha said, a strange light in her eyes. "The journey begins tonight. And Dimple… you should know. The sins of the daughter are many. But the sins of the mother… they are the soil in which the daughter's sins grew."

CH 2: The Sins of a Mother

The dread that settled in my heart as night fell was a cold, physical thing. It wasn't the fear of a nightmare. It was the fear of a reality more terrible than any dream. Katha's words echoed in my mind. Her sins and yours are tangled together.

As if summoned by my fear, the soft, pearlescent light filled my bedroom. Katha was there. But she didn't ask if I was ready. She looked at me with those ancient eyes, and I felt like a specimen under a microscope.

"You weep for Maya's sin of suicide," she said, her voice a calm, cutting whisper. "It is a great sin. But it was one act, born of despair. Shall we speak of your sins, Dimple? The ones committed every day, born of pride and carelessness?"

I opened my mouth to protest, but no sound came out.

"Let's talk about your husband," Katha continued, drifting closer. "You showed the world the image of a perfect marriage. But you betrayed him, didn't you? Not with your body, but with your words, which can be so much crueler. You held up your phone like a shield, but it was also your weapon.

You complained about him to your friends in private messages. You shared his vulnerabilities, his struggles, painting him as a man who was holding you back from the career you deserved. With every tap of your thumbs, you chipped away at his honor. You made him small in the eyes of others so you could feel big."

The memory of those conversations, the casual, gossipy betrayals, flooded me. The shame was a hot flush that spread across my soul.

"And your children," Katha went on, her voice relentless. "You loved them. But you loved your ambition more. You missed school plays for meetings. You answered emails during bedtime stories. You provided them with things, Dimple, but you starved them of what they truly needed: your time, your undivided attention. You were a ghost in your own home long before you became a grieving mother."

You were so busy posting pictures of your 'perfect life' that you didn't have time to actually live it.

You chased promotions, deadlines, and the approval of strangers on a screen, and in doing so, you forgot the sacred duty you had to the souls entrusted to your care."

"I... I did my best," I stammered, the words feeble even to my own ears.

"Your best was not good enough," Katha stated, her voice devoid of malice but full of terrifying certainty. "Your life has been a series of small, comfortable betrayals. You think you are just the witness to this journey? You are wrong. You are a patient, and this is your therapy. You will feel Maya's pain because her despair was watered by the seeds of your neglect. Her sins and yours are tangled together. That is the law."

She reached out her hand. "Now, are you ready to truly begin? Are you ready to feel the consequences of a life lived… like yours?"

My choice was gone. This wasn't a bargain. It was a sentence. And my testimony was not just about my daughter's hell. It was about my own. I nodded, my body trembling, and took her hand.

CH 3: The Soul and The Body

I did not rest. I sat in my silent house, the lights blazing, watching the clock on the wall. Each tick was a countdown to a horror I couldn't imagine. My mind raced. What had she meant, merging with Maya? The fear was a physical thing, a cold knot in my stomach. But the image of Avi’s smile, of Rohan’s hand in mine, was a desperate fire that burned away the fear. For them, I would do this. For them, I would walk into the dark.

I finally crawled into bed, my body rigid with dread. Sleep felt like a betrayal, like willingly stepping off a cliff. But exhaustion is a patient predator. My eyes grew heavy, my thoughts began to blur…

And then the light came.

It wasn't a harsh light, but a soft, pearlescent glow that filled my bedroom, silencing the shadows. Katha stood by my bed. "The body is a house, Dimple," she said, her voice calm and instructional, as if she were a teacher beginning a lesson. "The soul is the resident. Tonight, you will learn what happens when the lease is up."

She touched my forehead.

The world ripped away. It was a sickening, violent plunge. A feeling of being torn from my own skin. For a moment, there was only a disoriented blackness, a feeling of being nowhere.

Then, my eyes opened.

I was on the floor of Maya's bedroom. I was looking at my own body. And in the doorway, I saw my mother. Me. Dimple. Her face a mask of horror.

I was Maya.

The merging was complete. Her memories, her fears, her last moments of despair—they were all mine now. I tried to call out to my mother, to the woman in the doorway who was also me, but I had no voice. A primal panic seized me.

And then, the Yamduts were there.

Their forms were indistinct, like shadows woven from fear. One of them spoke, its voice a rasping whisper that seemed to come from inside my own head.

The soul, when it is pulled from the body, is the size of a thumb. It is a thing of light and air and fire. It is called the yatana-deha. The body of suffering. It is designed so that it cannot be destroyed, only tormented."

I looked down at my hands. They were translucent, shimmering. I was a ghost.

One of the Yamduts uncoiled a rope of pure darkness. It snaked through the air and wrapped around my neck and arms. The searing pain was immediate, absolute, and entirely my own. I wasn't watching a story. This was happening to me.

As they began to drag me, the Yamdut's voice continued its cold lesson in my mind. "The soul is not pulled from the mouth, or the heart. It is a prisoner, and it must be dragged out through the most ignoble of exits. It is pulled from the body through the passage of waste."

The humiliation was a fire that burned hotter than the rope. I was being dragged from my body like garbage being taken out. My life, my loves, my precious identity—all of it reduced to this single, shameful exit.

They dragged me from the room, away from my mother’s broken form. The house I grew up in dissolved into mist. The world I knew vanished.

And I was on the road. The road to Hell. It stretched before me, an endless path of glowing, red-hot spikes under a bruised and starless sky. The journey was 86,000 yojanas. A distance so vast my human mind couldn't even grasp it.

"Walk," the Yamdut commanded.

As I looked down at the first spike, waiting to receive the sole of my foot, I finally understood. My life wasn't over. My life was just the crime.

This was the punishment. And it was just beginning.

CH 4: The Road of a Thousand Regrets

The first step is a choice you are not allowed to make. My new mind, Maya’s mind, screamed at my feet to stay put, to fuse themselves to the barren, rocky ground. But the rope around my neck was an absolute master. One of the Yamduts gave a casual, brutal tug, a motion as thoughtless as a man pulling a stubborn weed, and my body lurched forward. My right foot lifted. For a suspended moment of pure terror, it hung in the dim, twilight air. Then it came down.

The spike was not sharp like a nail. It was a thick, cruel point of iron, heated to a deep, menacing red. It didn’t pierce my foot so much as it swallowed it. The pain was not one thing. It was a universe of agony. First, the searing heat, a fire that flashed up my leg and exploded behind my eyes. Then came the tearing of my spiritual flesh, a wet, intimate ripping sound that I felt more than heard. Then came the grinding pressure as the spike pushed up, splitting the delicate bones of my foot, forcing them apart with a soundless crack that resonated in my jaw.

I screamed. It wasn't a human sound. It was the raw shriek of a soul being unmade. I collapsed, my weight driving the spike deeper, the fire now a white-hot nova of pure torment.

"Get up," one of the Yamduts growled. The voice was like gravel and glass. It held no anger, no pity. It was the voice of a factory worker telling a machine to do its job.

He yanked the rope again. The spike was ripped from my foot with a fresh, tearing agony, leaving a gaping, smoking hole. But before I could even register the relief of its absence, the flesh was whole again. My foot was perfect, untouched, ready for the next spike.

That was the moment I understood. That was the moment the true, ingenious cruelty of this place revealed itself. The pain was not meant to destroy me. It was meant to be felt. My body here, this yatana-deha, was not a vessel for life; it was an instrument for suffering, designed to be played forever without ever breaking.

They dragged me on. Step after agonizing step. Spike after agonizing spike. The physical pain was a constant, but it was the visions that came with it that began to break my mind. With each step, a memory. A sin made real.

Spike. The searing pain, and with it, a memory: I am seventeen. I am screaming at my mother—at Dimple—that I hate her, that she is ruining my life. The words are sharp, meant to wound, meant to punish her for some forgotten teenage slight. Now I knew what those wounds felt like.

Spike. A new memory, unbidden. I am twenty. At a college party. A boy I barely know, drunk and clumsy, is pushing himself against me. I am not enjoying it, but I am not stopping it. I remember the feeling of his hands, the stale beer on his breath, and the small, dark thought in my mind: this will make my ex-boyfriend jealous. I used another person's body as a weapon. Now my own body was being pierced.

Spike. I am fifteen. I see my little brother, Avi, holding up a drawing for me to see. It’s a picture of our family. I am staring at my phone, texting a friend. "Just a sec," I say, without looking up. He waits, his face full of hope. I never look up. The spike of my indifference is now a spike of red-hot iron through my foot.

This wasn't random pain. This was an accounting. A library of my own cruelty, and I was being forced to read it one agonizing step at a time. The road of spikes stretched on, endless, under a sky the color of an old bruise. And I knew, with a certainty that was colder than any ice, that I had to walk every inch of it. I had to feel every sin. And there were so many more to go.

CH 5: A Desert of Burning Rage

I don’t know how long I walked on the spikes. Time here is not measured in minutes or hours, but in the rhythm of pain. My screams became whimpers, my whimpers became a constant, silent prayer for it to end. It did not. It only changed.

The ground softened. The spikes receded, and I fell forward onto a surface that was blessedly flat. For a moment, a single, foolish, human moment, a wave of relief washed over me. Then the heat hit me.

I was in a desert. An endless, rolling expanse of fine, black sand under the same dead, twilight sky. The air itself was a physical thing, a furnace blast that scorched my lungs and made my eyes water. The sand wasn't just hot; it was alive with heat. With every step, it clung to my skin, raising blisters that would weep, burst, and then instantly heal, ready to be burned again. It was a torment of a thousand tiny fires.

"You were always so angry," a Yamdut's voice rasped in my head, its tone a dry rustle of ancient leaves. "So much fire in your heart after your father died. You burned everyone who tried to get close. Now, you can burn on the outside, too."

He was right. I remembered the simmering rage that became my constant companion. The way I would snap at my mother for no reason. The bitterness I felt towards my friends whose families were still whole. I had nurtured that anger, fed it, let it grow until it was a bonfire inside me. It had felt powerful then, a shield against the pain of my grief. Here, it was just another instrument of my torture.

A new agony arose, one that dwarfed even the fire. Thirst. A desperate, clawing need for water. My throat was a desert of its own, cracked and raw. My tongue was a swollen, useless thing in my mouth. I would have traded my soul for a single drop of water, but my soul was not mine to trade. I begged. I pleaded with the Yamduts, my silent voice a pathetic croak of desperation.

One of them stopped. I could feel a shift in its attention, a flicker of something that might have been amusement on its monstrous, indistinct face. It produced a long-handled ladle, its bowl filled with a beautiful, shimmering liquid that caught the dim light. Hope, a stupid, stubborn weed, grew in my heart. It was a trick, I knew it had to be, but the thirst was so absolute, I didn't care.

He brought the ladle to my lips.

I drank.

It was molten copper.

The fire of the sand was a child's campfire compared to this. This was a liquid sun consuming me from within. It incinerated my tongue, my throat, my stomach, turning my entire being into a hollow, screaming shell of pure fire. The pain was so complete, so all-consuming, that my consciousness flickered out like a snuffed candle. For a blessed moment, there was nothing.

Then I was back, whole again, the memory of the fire still blazing in my mind. The thirst was still there, perhaps even worse than before. And the desert stretched on, endless. I had received my answer. In this place, even the promise of mercy is just another form of pain.

CH 6: The Prison Before Birth

I awoke in my bed, my throat burning with the ghost of molten copper. The sickness and trembling are my new morning routine. Before I could even stumble to the bathroom, Katha was there. Her form was soft and luminous today, but her eyes held a clinical detachment.

"Tonight, we do not return to the path," she said. "Tonight, you must understand the first crime, the first betrayal. The sin that makes all other sins possible."

She touched my forehead. The plunge was different this time. It was not into Maya’s current torment, but back in time. Into the dark.

I was in the womb. Not as myself, Dimple, but as the tiny, unformed soul of my daughter. It was a prison of flesh. A suffocating, wet, darkness. The constant, thundering beat of my own mother's heart was a drum of doom. The heat from her body, her digestion, was a relentless fever that cooked my delicate spirit-skin.

And the food… oh, God, the food. I felt the burn of every spicy dish my mother ate, a fire on my skin.

I felt the jolt of every stumble, an earthquake that threw me against the walls of my prison. I was forced to live in a sea of her blood and waste, to breathe it, to drink it. It was a torment beyond words. Tiny, biting creatures, germs and parasites, were my only companions, feasting on me in the dark.

This was the first suffering. And from that suffering, a prayer was born. It was not a thought; it was a raw, primal cry from the core of my being, a vow forged in the furnace of suffering.

‘Save me,’ my soul screamed to a God I didn't know existed. ‘Whoever you are, whatever you are, get me out of this hell! I will be yours. I will serve you forever. I will sing your praises. I will never forget you. I promise, I promise, I promise, just get me out!’

And the universe heard. A force began to move me. The passage of birth. It was not a gentle journey. It was a crushing, squeezing, mangling expulsion from my prison. I was being ground through a passage too small for me, my soft bones twisting, my head compressing. The pain was absolute.

Then… light. Cold air. The shocking sensation of a world outside my prison. I took my first breath, and with it, I let out a cry.

And in that moment, as the cry left my lips, the memory was wiped clean. The agony of the nine months vanished. The terror, the heat, the biting creatures, all gone. And with them, the most important memory of all: the sacred, desperate promise I had just made.

When Katha pulled my soul back into my own body, I lay on my bedroom floor and sobbed. I wept for the child I had carried, for the torment I had unknowingly inflicted upon her. My cravings, my anger, my stress—they were her first taste of Hell.

"Every soul makes this promise, Dimple," Katha’s voice echoed in the quiet room. "And almost every soul forgets it. That is the first sin. The original betrayal. A life lived in forgetfulness of that promise is a life that walks away from God. Your daughter's suicide was just the final step on a long road of forgetting. A road that you, her mother, never taught her to remember."

Her words were a cold, hard truth in the pit of my stomach. The guilt was suffocating. I was not just a witness. I was an accomplice.

CH 7: A River of Self

After the horror of reliving the womb, I almost welcomed the return to the path. The pain there was at least a distraction. Katha plunged me back into Maya’s soul just as the desert of black sand was ending.

The landscape shifted. The burning sand gave way to a slick, muddy bank that sloped down into a river. The Vaitarna. The name resonated in my mind with a deep, instinctual dread. It was vast, wider than any river I had ever seen on Earth. And it wasn't water. It was a thick, slow-moving torrent of everything vile. A churning stew of pus, blood, mucus, and knotted clumps of human hair, dotted with bobbing, half-dissolved bones. The stench was a physical blow. It was the smell of sickness and rot and decay, so powerful it made my soul retch. It was the smell of sin itself.

"This is the river of your own pollution," a Yamdut growled, prodding me toward the foul-smelling edge with its club. "Every dirty thought, every ugly word, every secret, nasty pleasure. You enjoyed swimming in it during your life. Now, you can bathe in it for eternity."

I remembered my own secret impurities. The affair with Sameer. The thrill of the illicit texts. The way I would sometimes look at Rohan with contempt, my heart filled with a secret, ugly pride. I remembered Maya's own teenage explorations, the dark corners of the internet she visited, the cruel gossip she reveled in. All of it, all our secret filth, was here. It was this river.

Before I could recoil, I was shoved from behind.

The impact was not a clean splash. It was a thick, glugging submersion. The liquid was hot and viscous, clinging to my naked spirit-body like hot tar. It filled my mouth, my nose, my eyes. I was drowning in a soup of our own collective impurity.

But I wasn't alone.

Things moved in the thick current. They bumped against my legs, slithered around my arms. I saw a fish-like creature with jaws lined with what looked like spinning saw blades swim past. Something with needle-sharp teeth latched onto my arm, and a burning poison spread through me.

I flailed, trying to push them away, trying to get my head above the foul surface to breathe, but my struggles only seemed to attract more of them. They swarmed me, tearing, biting, devouring.

The pain was immense, but the psychological horror was worse. This was not an external punishment. This was me. This was us. I was being consumed by the physical manifestation of every ugly, lustful, or hateful thought Maya and I had ever entertained. Every gossip magazine I had ever flipped through, every cruel online comment I'd read with a secret thrill, every moment of objectification or contempt—it was all here. It was alive. And it was eating me.

I kicked and fought, propelled by a sheer terror. I had to get to the other side. As I struggled through the vile current, I saw other souls, thousands of them, all flailing, all screaming, all being torn apart, their despair was just another ingredient in this terrible, self-made river.

Somehow, I reached the other bank. I crawled out of the filth, my spiritual body shredded and dripping with a foulness I knew would never wash away.

I lay on the muddy ground, heaving and trembling, my soul stained. But there was no rest. The Yamduts were already there, yanking the searing rope, dragging me onward. The bath was over. The journey was not.

CH 8: The Twelve-Day Ghost

Before they dragged me to the first of the sixteen cities, they stopped. The hellish landscape around me flickered, and one of them spoke, its voice a dry hiss in my mind.

"The law decrees a period of observation," it rasped. "You have been granted the form of a pret. A ghost. For twelve days of Earth time, you will witness the world you left behind. You will see the true value of the life you threw away."

The world dissolved and then reformed. In an instant, I was back in Maya's bedroom. I was a phantom, an invisible wisp of memory floating in the corner. I saw my own discarded body on the floor, a broken doll. And I saw my mother—the other me, the one still living—frozen in the doorway, her face a mask of shattered disbelief.

I was being forced to watch what I had done, and it was a torment far more profound than any physical pain.

I watched the paramedics arrive. They were young, tired. They spoke in clipped, professional tones. They saw a scene, a job, a tragedy to be documented and then forgotten before their lunch break.

They were crying. They were hugging. They were sharing memories. And then the bell rang. I watched them walk to class, already talking about a boy, a party, a future that I was no longer a part of. My absence was a brief, sad story, a ripple in the pond of their lives that was already growing still.

On the fourth day, from a distance, I watched them burn my body. I saw the smoke curl against the gray sky, and a profound sense of nothingness washed over me. The last physical proof that I had ever existed was now just ash and air.

The worst part was the hunger. It was a gnawing, spiritual starvation. As a ghost, I learned, a soul is fed by the prayers and rituals performed by their living family. And there were none for me. My family, lost in their modern, secular grief, didn't know the old ways. There were no offerings of rice and water. There were no mantras chanted for my peace.

So I starved. And in that starvation, I was forced to feed on the only thing available to a neglected spirit: the filth of the world.

The spittle on the pavement that I had once walked on with disdain. The phlegm coughed up by a sick old man on the street. The foul essence of rotting food in a garbage bin. I, who had been a picky eater, who had demanded brand names and organic produce, now lapped at the essence of decay like a starving animal. The humiliation was absolute.

On the twelfth day, the Yamduts reappeared beside me. "You have seen," they growled. "You have seen that a life lived for the self leaves nothing behind but pain and fading memories. The world forgets you. But the Law does not."

They dragged me from my home for the last time. As we left, I didn't even look back. There was nothing there for me anymore. Nothing left but the journey ahead.

CH 9: The Refusal

The next morning, I woke up screaming. The memory of feeding on filth was too real, too close. I scrambled out of bed and was sick in the bathroom, my body heaving with sobs. I stared at my reflection in the mirror. My face was pale, my eyes wild and haunted. The face of a woman who had spent the night in hell.

I can’t do this.

The thought was a rebellion. A mutiny of the soul. I can’t. I won’t.

I spent the day in a haze of defiance. I didn’t write. I didn’t even look at this journal. I cleaned the house with a frantic energy, trying to scrub away the phantom stench of the Vaitarna river. I put on loud music, trying to drown out the memory of my own mother’s cries.

As night fell, I didn’t get ready for bed. I sat on the sofa in the living room, the lights on, a blanket wrapped tightly around me. A foolish, childish rebellion. As if a lightbulb could hold back the darkness Katha commanded.

When the clock struck midnight, the lights in the room flickered and died. The music cut out. The air grew cold, a deep, penetrating chill that had nothing to do with the air conditioning.

She was standing in the middle of the room. Not the serene girl from the woods. This was the other Katha. The one whose eyes were pits of black ice.

"You are not in your bed, Dimple," she said, her voice the sound of grinding stone.

"I'm not doing it," I said, my own voice trembling but stubborn. "I can't. It's too much. You can't make me."

A low, cruel laugh escaped her lips. "Make you? Oh, Dimple. You still don't understand." She drifted closer, and the cold intensified. "This isn't a negotiation. It’s a penance. Your penance."

"I told you," she hissed, "your sins are far greater than your daughter's. Shall we review them again? The affair with Sameer was not just a 'mistake'.

It was a calculated betrayal. You sent him photos of your naked body while your husband slept beside you. You planned your 'business trips' around his. You lusted after him, you craved him, and you did it all while smiling in your husband's face and posting pictures of your 'perfect family'."

Every word was a nail hammering me to the sofa.

"And Maya," she continued, her voice merciless. "Her suicide was not a singular event. It was the final harvest of a seed you planted. Her boyfriend, the one who broke her heart just before she died? You hated him. You thought he wasn't good enough for her. You deliberately undermined their relationship. You dropped poison in her ear about him. You wanted them to break up, and you got your wish. Her despair was your victory. You just didn’t expect the consequences."

Tears streamed down my face. It was true. All of it.

"I can't," I sobbed. "Please."

"If you refuse to write," she said, her voice dropping to a terrifying whisper, "if you break this pact, then the deal is off.

Maya will be lost forever. And your husband and son, whose journey to this realm is about to begin, will follow her straight into the fire. Their only hope of a peaceful passage rests on the completion of this book. On you."

Her dark eyes bored into me. "Think of them, Dimple. Think of Rohan. Think of little Avi. Do you want them to walk that road of spikes? Do you want them to bathe in that river?"

She had me. She had my heart, my soul, my entire family in her cold, cruel hands. My rebellion was a pathetic joke.

"The journey continues tonight, Dimple," she said, her form already beginning to fade. "And tomorrow, you will write. You have no other choice."

CH 10: The Universal Law

My surrender was absolute. The thought of Rohan and Avi enduring this… it was a lever that broke my will completely. When Katha came for me, I didn't fight. I let her take me. But before she could cast me back into Maya’s suffering, I had to ask. The questions had been tearing at me, a desperate need for some kind of logic in this cosmic madness.

"Katha, wait," I said, my soul-form trembling before her.

"Please. I need to understand."

She tilted her head, her expression unreadable. "Ask."

"This place… this path… is this for everyone?" I asked, my voice small. "I mean, we are Hindus. Is this Hindu Hell? What about Christians, or Muslims, or people who don't believe in anything? Do they go somewhere else?"

Katha’s response was immediate and chillingly simple. "You think the universe cares what you call yourself? You think the law of gravity checks your passport before it pulls you to the earth? This is not about religion, Dimple. This is about Dharma. It is the law.

The law of cause and effect. The law of action and consequence. It is older than every faith you have ever heard of. It is the operating system of the cosmos."

She gestured to the desolate landscape around us. "A man can call God by a thousand names. Allah, Jesus, Krishna, or even The Universe. The name does not matter. The law only cares what you do. Do you spread love, or you spread hate? Do you create joy, or do you create pain? A man who lives a life of compassion and service, no matter what he calls himself, will find a peaceful path. A man who lives a life of selfishness, betrayal, and cruelty will walk this road. His God cannot save him from his own actions. He is his own actions."

Her words stripped away all my cultural certainty. This wasn't a story from my grandmother's books. This was a universal, inescapable truth.

"So a good person…" I whispered, my mind latching onto the only branch of hope it could find. "A truly good person… what is their journey like? For them… for Rohan and Avi…"

For the first time, a flicker of something like sadness touched Katha's icy features.

"The path is a mirror, Dimple. It reflects what is inside the soul. For a virtuous soul, one whose heart is pure, this journey is not a torment, but a procession."

"The Yamduts," she explained, "do not appear as monsters. To the pure soul, they are radiant guides, their faces beautiful and serene. They come not with ropes, but with garlands of flowers. The path is not of spikes, but is smooth and cool, shaded by wish-fulfilling trees that rain down fragrant blossoms. The river Vaitarna is not a torrent of filth, but a gentle stream of sweet nectar. The sixteen cities are not places of punishment, but cities of honor, where the soul is welcomed as a hero and praised for its good deeds. The journey is a celebration of a life well-lived."

The contrast was so beautiful, and so brutal, it made me weep. The path of flowers and nectar was what Rohan deserved. It was what Avi, my innocent boy, deserved. The thought of them walking this road of spikes instead… because of my failure… it was a pain sharper than any physical torment.

"The soul creates its own heaven and its own hell long before it dies, Dimple," Katha said, her voice now flat and devoid of emotion again. "Here, it simply has to live in the house it built for itself." She pointed toward the path. "Your daughter built a house of pain. It is time for you to return to it."

CH 11: The City of Hounds

Katha plunged me back into Maya’s soul. My brief respite as Dimple was over. I was Maya again, naked and broken, being dragged by the Yamduts.

We walked for what my soul perceived as a month. Each step was a measured agony, a new memory of sin surfacing with each throb of pain. Then, we arrived at the second of the sixteen cities. Sauripur.

The city gates were not made of iron or wood, but of what looked like the blackened, fused bones of countless animals, stacked high. The air stank of old blood and a thick, musky animal fear that raised the non-existent hairs on my arms. The king of this place, a being named Sauvari, came out to greet us. His form was a shifting, unstable nightmare. One moment he was a giant with the head of a boar, tusks dripping with some dark fluid. The next, a spindly, spider-like thing with too many joints. His cruelty was the only constant thing about him.

He looked at me—at my soul—and a monstrous grin split his ever-changing face. He let out a sharp, piercing whistle that echoed off the bone gates.

And then they came.

From every dark alley and crumbling doorway, they poured out. Dogs. Hundreds of them. But these were not the dogs of Earth. They were gaunt, skeletal creatures, their black fur matted and patchy, revealing ribs and bone underneath. Their eyes were not the eyes of animals; they were pits of glowing red light, burning with a malevolent, hungry intelligence. Their teeth were not bone, but long, jagged shards of black iron that dripped with a smoking saliva.

They surrounded me, a silent, deadly ring. The only sound was a low, collective growl, a vibration that I felt in the ground beneath my feet, a sound that bypassed my ears and went straight to my heart, filling it with a terror so pure it felt like my soul was turning to ice.

"This punishment is for those who are needlessly cruel to animals," a Yamdut's voice whispered in my mind, a cold commentary to the horror unfolding. "And for those who act like beasts themselves."

My own sins, and Maya's, flashed before me. I remembered kicking a yelping street dog that had gotten too close to my new sandals. I remembered yelling at Maya to get rid of her pet hamster because its cage smelled. Small acts of casual cruelty, forgotten in an instant. And I saw Maya herself, in the depths of her grief, becoming feral. The way she would lash out, her words like teeth, biting anyone who tried to help her, snarling at me, her own mother. We had both been beasts in our own way.

The king, Sauvari, gave a sharp nod. And the pack descended.

The pain was a chaos of tearing and ripping. It was not a single attack, but a hundred at once. The iron teeth crunched on my spiritual bones with a sound I felt deep in my skull. They went for my throat, my stomach, my limbs. I was a rag doll being shredded by a pack of demons. I was being pulled apart, each part of my body screaming its own unique agony. The world dissolved into a red haze of pain and the snarling of monstrous dogs. My consciousness, my sense of self, was simply shredded into a thousand screaming pieces.

When I came back, I was whole again, lying on the ground surrounded by the panting, blood-soaked hounds. They were waiting for the king's command to begin the feast again. This was my welcome to Sauripur. This was the toll I had to pay to enter. And this, I knew, was only the beginning of my stay in the City of Hounds.

CH 12: A Forest of Lies

After what felt like an eternity of being torn apart and remade in Sauripur, the Yamduts dragged me from the city. The journey resumed. We walked through a landscape of despair, my soul still screaming with the phantom pain of iron teeth. After another timeless stretch of walking, we came to a forest.

It looked almost peaceful from a distance. Tall, slender trees with broad, dark green leaves. But as we drew closer, I saw the truth. The forest was called Asipatravan. The Forest of Sword-Leaves.

The leaves were not made of plant tissue. They were long, razor-sharp blades of dark, polished steel, sharpened on both edges. They trembled in a wind that made no sound, their edges catching the dim light with a menacing gleam. The Yamduts did not walk through the forest. They dragged me into it.

"Every lie you have ever told," one of them hissed, "every secret you have kept, every time you have twisted the truth for your own gain… now you will feel what your words did to others."

He yanked the rope, pulling me off my feet and dragging me through the undergrowth. The sword-leaves sliced at my naked soul-body. They were not clean cuts. They were deep, gouging wounds that tore through my spiritual flesh. The pain was sharp, shocking, and relentless. I was being flayed alive by a thousand tiny swords.

With every cut, a memory.

Slice. A deep gash across my back. I remember being Dimple, on the phone with my boss, telling him I was sick so I could meet Sameer for lunch. The casual, easy lie. Now I felt its cut.

Slice. My arm is laid open to the bone. I remember being Maya, telling my father I had finished my homework when I had spent the entire evening on social media. The lie felt harmless then. Now it had a razor's edge.

Slice. A cut across my face, near my eye. I remember being Dimple again, telling Priya that I loved the dress she bought, while secretly thinking it was hideous. A small, white lie to protect her feelings? No. Here, it was just another wound.

The forest was not silent. Vultures, their feathers the color of dried blood and their beaks made of hooked iron, sat on the branches. As I was dragged past, bleeding from a thousand cuts, they would swoop down. They didn't just peck. They tore. They ripped strips of my flesh away, their iron beaks shockingly strong. My screams were music to them.

I tried to stand, to run, but every movement just brought me into contact with more sword-leaves. It was a choice between the agony of being dragged and the agony of moving myself. There was no escape.

I lay on the forest floor, a shredded ruin, as the vultures feasted. Then, the Yamduts would drag me onward, my body healing just enough to be sliced open again by the next set of trees. This was the forest of lies. This was the price of every untruth, big or small. And as I looked ahead, I saw that the forest stretched on, far beyond the horizon.

CH 13: The Weight of the World

Leaving the forest of swords, my soul felt like a patchwork of poorly stitched wounds. The journey continued through that bleak twilight, the Yamduts silent, their presence a constant, heavy pressure. After what felt like another month of marching, we came to the fifth city: Shailagama.

There were no walls or gates that I could see. The city was a vast, desolate plain under a sky that was a shade darker than before, heavy and oppressive like a lid on a pot. The ground was littered with shattered rocks. And as we entered the plain, I felt a low, deep rumbling. It was coming from above.

I looked up. The sky was moving. It was not a sky of clouds, but of stone. Huge, dark boulders, the size of cars, of houses, were grinding against each other high above, raining down a constant shower of smaller, jagged rocks.

"This punishment is for those who placed an unjust burden on others," the Yamdut's voice echoed in my head.

Before I could understand, the first large boulder broke free. It didn't fall fast.

It descended with a slow, deliberate, terrifying certainty. It was coming right for me. I tried to scramble away, but the rope yanked me back. I had nowhere to go. I could only watch it grow larger and larger.

The impact was not a sharp pain. It was an absolute, all-encompassing pressure. The feeling of being erased. My spiritual form was flattened, my very consciousness crushed into a thin film of screaming agony on the rocks below. There was a moment of pure, pressurized blackness.

And then I was whole again, standing on the same spot. Another boulder was already on its way down.

This was Shailagama. A constant rain of crushing stones.

Crush. A memory, not mine, but Dimple's. She is at her desk, late at night. She drops a massive pile of files on a junior colleague's desk. "I need this by morning," she says, her voice cold. She doesn't see the young man's shoulders slump, doesn't see the flicker of despair in his eyes as he cancels his dinner plans with his family. She only sees her own deadline. The weight of her ambition, crushing him.

Crush. I am Maya. My mother is asking me about my day. I give one-word answers, my eyes glued to my phone. I am placing the weight of my teenage indifference on her, crushing her attempts to connect.

Crush. A memory that makes my soul recoil. It is Dimple again, talking to her best friend, Priya. And then I see it. The truth Katha had hinted at. I see my husband, Rohan, in a secret conversation on his phone. Sexting. With Priya. My mother's best friend. The weight of his betrayal, a secret he carried, now felt like a mountain crashing down on me. My "perfect" husband, the man I was grieving, was a liar. He was a sinner, too. The weight of his sin, and my own, and Maya's—it all felt like it was crushing me at once.

And now, I understand why Katha had warned me about Rohan's journey. It wasn't just Maya's soul at stake. It was his. And the path of flowers and nectar I had imagined for him… it was a childish fantasy. We were all sinners. We were all walking this road, in one way or another.

The boulders kept falling. Each one was the weight of a burden I had placed on someone else. The weight of an expectation. The weight of a lie. The weight of a secret. Here, in the city of Shailagama, I was finally feeling the gravity of my own life.

CH 14: The Price of Meat

The rain of stones eventually ceased. The Yamduts dragged my bruised and battered soul onward. We walked for what felt like another month, my mind still reeling from the revelation of Rohan's betrayal. The pain of the journey was now laced with a new, more complex sorrow.

We arrived at the sixth city, Krurpur. The City of Cruelty. The air here was thick and metallic, like the inside of a slaughterhouse. The residents were brutish, their faces devoid of any emotion other than a kind of dull, predatory hunger.

"The toll for this city is one mound of flesh and blood," a Yamdut informed me, its voice flat.

"I have no merit," I cried, the words forming in my mind. "My mother has done no rites for me."

"We know," it rasped. "Therefore, the toll will be taken from you."

They dragged me to the center of the city, a large, dusty square.

he residents gathered around, their eyes empty. They carried butcher's knives, cleavers, and sharp hooks. One of them, the king, held a large, rusted scale.

They did not speak. They simply began to work.

One held my arm while another sliced it off at the shoulder with a cleaver. The pain was sharp, but it was the cold, methodical nature of the act that terrified me. This was not anger. This was commerce. They placed my severed arm on the scale. It was not enough.

Another came and hacked off my leg. They added it to the scale. Still not enough.

They carved pieces from my torso, my back, my other limbs. My soul-body was being disassembled like a carcass in a butcher's shop. I was no longer a person. I was a resource. A collection of parts to be weighed and measured.

With each piece they cut away, a memory flared.

Slice. A piece of my thigh is thrown onto the scale. I see myself—Dimple—at a lavish wedding buffet, piling my plate high with chicken tikka, lamb rogan josh, fish curry. I see the half-eaten plate I left behind, wasted food, wasted life.

Slice. My other arm is severed. I see Maya, at a barbecue with her friends, laughing as she eats a hamburger, oblivious to the life that was taken for her momentary pleasure.

This was the price. For every piece of flesh we had ever consumed, a piece of our own was now being claimed. For every life taken for our taste buds, our own spiritual form was being dismantled.

Finally, the scale tipped. The mound of my flesh was sufficient. The residents grunted in satisfaction and began to feast. The Yamduts dragged what was left of me—a screaming, limbless torso—out of the city. My body reformed, the pain still echoing through it, and the journey continued.

I was a vegetarian for most of my life. But Rohan wasn't. And I had cooked for them. I had bought the meat, handled it, prepared it. I was complicit. And now, I had paid the price.

CH 15: The Question of Hope

I woke from the memory of my own dismemberment, my body drenched in a cold sweat. The phantom aches were so real I could barely move. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, and a new kind of despair washed over me. It was not fear. It was hopelessness.

What was the point?

If my husband, the man I thought was so good, was a sinner destined for this path... if my daughter was... if I was... then who wasn't? The whole world was filled with flawed, broken people telling small lies and committing small betrayals. Was everyone walking this road?

When Katha appeared, I didn't wait for her to speak.

"I don't want to go tonight," I said, my voice flat, devoid of the fire of my previous rebellion. This was a deeper exhaustion. "I don't see the point of this book anymore."

Katha tilted her head. "Explain."

"You said it yourself," I said, sitting up, the words spilling out in a bitter rush. "This law is universal. It doesn't care about religion. But people do. Christians believe they go to Heaven or Hell based on their faith in Jesus. Muslims believe in their own Day of Judgment. My own friends believe in reincarnation, that we just come back to learn new lessons. Nobody believes in this. This... meticulous, brutal accounting. So who is this book for? Who will believe it? If everyone is a sinner, and everyone has their own story about what happens after death, then what am I doing this for? Why am I enduring this if it will change nothing?"

I expected her cold fury, the terrifying version of her from before. Instead, her expression was calm, her voice patient.

"You think truth requires belief, Dimple? Does gravity require your belief to hold you to the Earth? Does fire require your belief to burn you? The Law is the Law, whether a person believes in it or not. Their belief is irrelevant to the consequence."

She drifted closer to my bed. "You ask who this book is for. It is not for the devout of other faiths.

It is not for the staunch atheist. It is for the millions just like you. The ones who are 'spiritual but not religious'. The ones who pick and choose convenient beliefs. The ones who think that because they are 'good people' in the eyes of society, the small sins don't count. The ones who think that God, however they define Him, is a doting grandfather who will overlook their transgressions because their intentions were 'mostly good'."

"This book," she said, her voice dropping to an intense whisper, "is a bucket of ice water for a world that is comfortably asleep. It is not to convert them to a new religion, but to awaken them to the reality of their own actions. Most will not read it. Many who do will dismiss it. But some… a few… will feel the cold dread of truth in its pages. They will see themselves in your betrayals, in Maya's despair, in Rohan's secrets. And they might… just might… change their path."

A new question, born of a desperate, flickering hope, surfaced. "But what about those who already have? People who have lived bad lives… like me… like Rohan… can a person change? Or is it too late? Is the account already written?"

Katha’s gaze held mine. It was not a comforting gaze, but it was direct. "The debt for past actions must always be paid, Dimple. The law is absolute. What is done is done, and it has a consequence. That cannot be erased."

My heart sank.

"But," she continued, her voice sharp, "the soul can stop accumulating new debt at any moment. At any second, a person can choose a different path. They can choose kindness over cruelty, truth over lies, compassion over selfishness. A person who has lived ninety-nine years as a sinner can, in their hundredth year, live as a saint. They will still face the consequences of those ninety-nine years, but their new, virtuous deeds will create merit. And merit is the only thing that can ease the journey. It is the food that can satisfy the ghost's hunger. It is the toll that can be paid at the city gates. It is the shield that can lessen the blows of the Yamduts."

"It is never too late to stop making things worse, Dimple," she said.

"It is never too late to start building a better path for the future, even if you must first walk the agonizing road of your past. That is the point of this book. To convince one person, just one, to stop digging their hole deeper. To choose a different way, right now, in this very moment."

Her words didn't offer comfort. They offered a terrifying, stark purpose. The weight of it was immense, but it was better than the void of hopelessness. I had a job to do.

"It is time," she said. And I knew she was right.

CH 16: The City of Strange Torments

The next plunge into Maya's soul was different. Armed with Katha's stark purpose, I felt a grim resolve settle over me. I still felt the pain, the terror, but underneath it was a new layer: the cold focus of a surgeon dissecting a disease. This was my work now.

We arrived at the eighth city, Vichitrapur. The name means "The City of the Strange," and it was a fitting name. It was a place of surreal, nonsensical horror. The sky was a swirling, sickly green, and the ground was soft and spongy, like walking on raw flesh. The buildings were twisted into impossible shapes, leaning at angles that defied gravity.

The punishment here was not one thing. It was a chaotic, unpredictable assault. As I was dragged through the strange streets, a Yamdut would suddenly stop, its face contorting into a monstrous caricature of a laughing clown, and tickle me. It sounds absurd. But the tickling was not playful. It was a relentless, agonizing assault on my nerves, a torment that bypassed pain and went straight to a kind of maddening, hysterical panic. I writhed and gasped, unable to breathe, my body convulsing with an agony that had no name.

Then, just as suddenly, it would stop. Another Yamdut would appear, dressed as a benevolent-looking saint, and offer me a beautiful flower. As I reached for it, the flower would transform into a venomous scorpion that would sting my hand, sending a fire of poison through my veins.

This was Vichitrapur. A place where nothing made sense. Where mercy was a mask for cruelty, and pain came from the most unexpected places.

"This city is for those who lived a life of deceit and hypocrisy," the thought from Katha echoed in my merged consciousness. "For those whose actions never matched their words. For the politicians who promise progress and deliver corruption. For the gurus who preach piety and live in luxury. For the parents—like you, Dimple—who preach honesty to their children and then lie on their taxes."

Memory. I am Dimple, at a parent-teacher meeting. I am listening to Maya's teacher express concern about her falling grades, her withdrawal. I nod, my face a mask of maternal concern. "Yes, we will work on it," I say. "We'll spend more time with her."

Memory. I am Maya. I am telling my friends I'm going on a "digital detox" for the weekend, earning their admiration for my discipline. In reality, I spent the entire weekend binge-watching a mindless TV series, ashamed of my own lack of self-control.

In Vichitrapur, every hypocritical act was paid for. The city itself was a manifestation of a life lived without integrity. It was a nonsensical, chaotic place because a life of hypocrisy is a nonsensical, chaotic life. The toll for entry was not flesh or blood, but sanity. And I paid it over and over again.

CH 17: The Road to the Court

The journey continued. My nights are now a blur of cityscapes forged from sin, each one a new lesson in the horrifying precision of cosmic law.

We passed through Bahvapad, the City of Calamities, a swirling vortex where all the previous torments were mixed together. One moment I was being crushed by stones, the next sliced by sword-leaves, the next devoured by spectral dogs. There was no rhythm, only chaos. It was, Katha's voice echoed, the punishment for those who lived a life of chaos, flitting from one desire to the next without thought or discipline.

We entered Dukhada, the City of Sorrow. Here, the pain was not physical. Here, I was forced to feel the pain of others. I felt the sharp sting of betrayal in my friend Priya's heart when I gossiped about her behind her back. I felt the deep, lonely ache of my son, Avi, when I was too busy on my phone to play with him. It was a city of forced empathy, and it was more painful than any fire.

We walked through Nanakrand, the City of Many Cries, where the air itself was a weapon.

It was filled with the amplified screams of every creature I had ever harmed, from the ant I stepped on to the feelings I crushed with a careless word. The noise was a physical force that tore at my soul.

In Sutapta, I was boiled in oil, the punishment for the heat of anger and jealousy I had carried in my heart. In Roudrapur, the Ferocious City, I was torn apart by my own duplicates, forced to feel the violence of my own cruel words. In Payovarshana, I waded through a river of filth while acid rain fell from the sky, a punishment for every impure thought. In Sitadhya, I was frozen solid in a block of ice, the price for a cold and selfish heart.

Finally, after what felt like a lifetime of lifetimes, we arrived at the last city on the path. Bahubhiti. The City of Great Fear.

There were no specific torments here. The city itself was the torment. It was a landscape of pure psychological terror, a place that manifested my deepest, most personal fears. For me, it was a city of endless, identical office cubicles under a flickering fluorescent light.

In each cubicle sat a version of Rohan, sexting Priya on his phone. In another, a version of Maya, her face pale and accusing. In another, my boss, telling me I was fired for my incompetence. It was a custom-made hell, designed to break the mind.

As I was dragged through the gates of this final city, a new understanding dawned. The sixteen cities were not the punishment. They were the road. They were the long, agonizing journey to the place where the real punishment would be decided.

We were approaching the court of Yamraj. And the trial was about to begin.

CH 18: An Interrogation Before Judgment

I awoke gasping, the phantom fear of Bahubhiti clinging to me like a shroud. My hands were shaking so violently I could barely hold this pen. The journey through the sixteen cities was over. A full year, Katha had said. A year of torment condensed into a handful of nights for me. The thought of what came next, the final court, was a black hole of terror in my mind.

When Katha appeared this time, I didn't refuse the journey. I begged for a reprieve.

"Please, Katha," I whispered, my voice hoarse. "Before we go to the court. I have to understand more." She regarded me with her cold, still eyes. "The path has been shown to you. What more is there to understand?"

"Everything!" The word burst out of me, a cry of pure, desperate confusion. "This whole year... the spikes, the dogs, the river... the cities... Yamapur, Sauripur, Varindra, Gandharva, Shailagama, Krurpur, Krounchpur, Vichitrapur, Bahvapad, Dukhada, Nanakrand, Sutapta, Roudrapur, Payovarshana, Sitadhya, and Bahubhiti... I have seen them all. I have felt them all.

I understand the punishments are tied to our sins. But the beings there… the system… it’s so vast, so absolute. It feels… unreal."

I took a ragged breath. "Who is Yamraj, truly? Is he a god? Is he a demon? Why is he the son of the sun god, as the stories say? Why would the sun, the giver of life, have a son who is the master of death?"

"And Chitragupta?" I pressed on, the questions tumbling out. "The bookkeeper. How can every single action, every thought, every petty lie be recorded? No one on Earth teaches this. We are taught to be good, to be kind, but not this… this terrifying, perfect accounting. Is this book, the one I am writing, even possible? Can it make a difference when the truth of it is so far beyond what anyone imagines?"

I looked down at my hands. "And the golden gate… you said the good souls go there. What is behind it? What does Heaven actually look like, feel like? Is it just the absence of this pain, or is it something more?". My voice dropped to a whisper. "How much time do we really have, Katha? On Earth? Is there a fixed number? Can we know?"

Katha was silent for a long moment, simply watching me, letting my torrent of questions hang in the air.

"You ask many things, Dimple," she said finally, her voice flat. "You ask them now because you are afraid of what comes next. You want to delay the inevitable. But your questions are valid."

She moved to the center of my room. "Yamraj is Dharma. The Law. He is not evil; he is balance. The sun gives life, yes, but life without consequence is chaos. Yamraj is the consequence. He is the son of the sun because life and death, creation and consequence, are two sides of the same coin. They cannot exist without each other. He appears fearsome to the sinner because the sinner fears the law. To the virtuous, his form is beautiful, because they have nothing to fear from justice."

"And Chitragupta," she continued, "is the cosmos's memory. You think a thought is a private thing? It is a vibration. An energy you release into the universe. Every word you speak, every action you take, sends ripples through existence. Chitragupta does not 'write' them down.

He is the record. The universe does not forget. Ever."

"As for Heaven… the golden gate…" A strange, melancholic light entered her eyes. "It is not a place of clouds and harps. It is a place of pure, unending bliss. It is the joy of being in the presence of God, a joy so complete that there is no memory of sorrow. It is a peace so profound that it has no opposite. It is the reward for a life lived in service, in love, in remembrance of the promise you made in the womb."

She turned her gaze back to me, her expression hardening again. "How much time do you have? You have this breath. And maybe the next. Nothing more is promised. A person can live a hundred years or die in their sleep tonight. That is not for you to know. The only thing that matters is what you do with the moment you have, right now."

Her lesson was over. And I knew, with a chilling certainty, that my reprieve was, too.

"It is time to face the court, Dimple," she said. "The bookkeeper is waiting to read your account."

"But you," she said, her voice turning sharp as ice, "you ask about change. You ask if it is too late for sinners like you. For sinners like Rohan."

My heart stopped.

"You have seen your small sins, Dimple. Your petty betrayals. Shall we speak of the great ones? You think your affair with Sameer was just some texts and a drunken night in a hotel? You traded your body for a promotion. You lay with your senior, feeling his hands on you, and you thought of the power it would give you at the office. You called it a mistake, but it was a transaction. You sold your honor for a better title on a business card."

The truth of her words was a physical blow. I couldn't breathe.

"And Rohan," she hissed, her voice dripping with scorn. "Your sainted, martyred husband. You grieve for the man you pretended he was.

You saw his sexting, but did you see the rest? Did you see him in the back of a car with Priya, your best friend, their bodies pressed together in a cheap, hurried act of lust while you were at home with their children? Did you see the lies he told her, the promises he made? You were both playing the same dirty game, Dimple. The only difference is that you were better at hiding it."

The world tilted and went grey. My perfect Rohan. My best friend Priya. The betrayal was so immense, so complete, it hollowed me out. My grief, my anger at my own sins, my pity for him—it was all a lie. We were all liars.

"What is the point of this book?" I choked out, the words tasting like ash. "We are all damned."

"No," Katha said, her voice a final, absolute judgment. "You are not all damned. You are all accountable. The Law is impartial. The debt for past actions must be paid. But it is never too late to stop accumulating new debt.”

She looked at me, her eyes seeing not just my sorrow, but the deep, ugly truth of my soul. "You have seen the path. You have asked your questions. The time for delay is over."

"It is time to enter the courthouse."

CH 19: The Hall of Judgment

Katha plunged me back into Maya’s soul. The transition was no longer just a plunge into pain, but into a sea of shame so profound it was a torment all its own. The revelations about my life, about Rohan’s, echoed in my consciousness. We were all sinners. We were all frauds.

The bleak landscape of the path ended. Before me stood a structure so vast it seemed to defy geometry. It was a courthouse built of a single piece of polished black stone that drank the light, rising into a featureless gray sky. Sanyamini Puri. The City of Judgment.

There were four immense gates. To the east, a gate of copper, tarnished and green. To the south, a gate of iron, black and forbidding. To the west, a gate of silver, gleaming but cold. And to the north, a gate of pure, radiant gold. From the golden gate, I could feel a warmth, and hear the faint, beautiful echo of joyous music. It was a place of peace.

The Yamduts sneered and dragged me away from the golden gate, toward the one of iron.

"The virtuous enter there," one of them rasped, its voice a grating sound. "Your gate is here."

The iron gate swung open, not with a sound, but with a deep, bone-jarring vibration that shook my soul. The courtyard inside was so enormous that the far walls were lost in the gray haze. The silence was absolute. It was the silence of a place where all appeals have been exhausted.

At the far end of the courtyard, on a massive, unadorned throne of black stone, sat the Judge.

Yamraj.

He was not a monster. That would have been easier to bear. He was magnificent, and his magnificence was terrifying. His skin was the color of a gathering storm cloud. He wore a simple, dark crown that seemed to absorb the light around it. His eyes were not eyes; they were deep pools of cosmic law, ancient, impartial, and utterly devoid of emotion. He held a great iron rod in his hand. Looking at him, I felt my soul shrink. This was not a king to be reasoned with.

This was a fundamental force of the universe, as inescapable as time itself.

Before him, on a smaller dais, sat another being, bent over a colossal book whose pages seemed to stretch into infinity. This was Chitragupta, the Divine Bookkeeper.

The Yamduts dragged me to the center of the vast hall and forced me to my knees. I was a single, naked, trembling soul in a place of perfect silence and perfect judgment. My life, my real life, with all its dirty secrets, was about to be laid bare.

And I was terrified.

CH 20: The Book of Deeds

Chitragupta looked up. His eyes were not cruel, but they were infinitely tired, as if he carried the weight of every sin ever committed. He looked at me, then down at his book. And he began to speak.

His voice was not loud. It was a calm, clear, neutral tone that filled the hall, and filled my mind. And he began to read my life.

He read every lie. Every selfish thought. Every secret betrayal.

"Age twenty," the voice echoed. "In a moment of drunken spite, she engaged in a loveless physical act with a stranger at a party, solely to inflict emotional pain upon her former lover. The sin of using a body as a weapon."

"Age twenty-one," the voice continued, relentless. "She accepted money from her parents for textbooks, and instead spent it on alcohol and clothes for clubbing, lying to them about her studies. The sin of deceit and disrespect to her providers."

He read of the drugs. The casual cruelty of modern dating. The ghosting of boys who had genuine feelings. The manipulation of friends. The constant, gnawing envy I felt for those who had more. It was a brutal, unflinching account of a modern life, stripped of all its pretty social media filters. The shame was a physical weight that was crushing me.

When he finished, a profound silence fell.

Then, the great figure on the throne spoke. His voice was a vibration that shook my very soul.

"You have heard the account of your daughter, Dimple."

The sound of my own name in this place was a shock that jolted my consciousness. He knew I was here. He knew of the merging.

"You have felt her sins as your own. But do you know them all? Do you know of the abortion she had at nineteen, a secret she kept from everyone, even you? A life she ended out of pure convenience, because a child would have interfered with her social life?"

I reeled back as if struck. The knowledge, the final, hidden betrayal, flooded me. Maya... my Maya...

"Here, nothing is secret," Yamraj's voice boomed. "I see the nakedness of your body, your thoughts, and your soul. All souls are weighed here. The virtuous, who lived lives of service and love, can spend ages in the realms beyond the golden gate, enjoying the fruits of their merit. But the sinner... the sinner must pay their debt. The time you will spend in the Narakas is not measured in years, but in the balancing of your karmic account. It can take an age, or many ages."

He raised his great iron rod and pointed it at me.

"The trial is over. The sentence begins."

Behind me, the air tore open, revealing not a path or a city, but a swirling, black vortex. From it came a chorus of screams so filled with agony and despair that everything I had endured so far felt like a gentle prelude.

The Yamduts grabbed me. And they dragged me towards the gate. Towards the true Hells. The twenty-eight Narakas.

CH 21: The Currency of Hell

I woke up on the floor of my bedroom, the scream still trapped in my throat. My body was drenched in a cold sweat, and the phantom feeling of being dragged towards that swirling black vortex was so real that I clawed at the carpet, trying to find something to hold onto.

The finality of it. The trial is over. The sentence begins.

The revelation about Maya’s abortion was a fresh, gaping wound on top of all the others. A secret she had carried. A life she had ended. My daughter, a stranger. My husband, a stranger. Myself, the biggest stranger of all.

I didn't even try to fight sleep when night fell. There was no point. My rebellion was a joke, my defiance a child's tantrum in the face of a hurricane. I simply lay in bed and waited.

Katha appeared, her light filling the room. Before she could speak, before she could touch my forehead, the questions spilled out of me, born not of curiosity, but of a terror so profound it had become my new reality.

"The Narakas," I whispered, the word tasting like poison.

"Yamraj sentenced her to the twenty-eight pools of hell. Why twenty-eight? Are there more?"

Katha regarded me, her expression as calm and unmoving as a frozen lake. "The twenty-eight are the primary Narakas, the main classifications of suffering for the most common and grievous sins. But for every sin, there is a consequence. There are hundreds, thousands of other pools and torments, each tailored to the specific nature of a soul's transgressions. The twenty-eight are merely the ones most often populated."

My blood ran cold. This was even bigger, more horrifyingly vast than I had imagined.

"And time?" I asked, my voice cracking. "He said it could take an age, or many ages. How long is an age? How is the sentence decided? Is it... forever?"

"Time in that realm is not like your time, Dimple," she explained, her voice devoid of emotion. "It is not a clock ticking on a wall. The duration of the sentence is not measured in years, but in the balancing of the karmic account. Every sin creates a debt.

The soul remains in a particular Naraka until the pain it endures has perfectly, precisely, balanced the pain it inflicted in life. For a small sin, the stay might be the equivalent of a few earthly years. For a great sin… the time is so vast your human mind cannot comprehend it."

A desperate, foolish hope flickered within me. "But merit," I latched on, "you said good deeds create merit. Can that shorten the time? Can it pay the debt?"

"Merit is the currency of this realm," Katha confirmed. "A virtuous deed can act as a shield, lessening the intensity of the torment. It can provide a moment of relief, a brief respite from the pain. It can be the difference between a red-hot spike and a merely hot one. But it cannot pay the debt entirely. The consequence for the action must still be experienced."

"But what if it runs out?" I asked, the fear returning. "The merit from good deeds done on Earth… what happens when it's all used up?" A flicker of something that might have been pity crossed Katha’s face.

"Then the shield is gone, Dimple. And the soul must face the full, undiluted horror of its sentence. It must endure the full force of the law, with no comfort and no relief, until the debt is paid in full, agony by agony."

I closed my eyes, the image of my family, their merit shields dissolving, leaving them raw and exposed to the full fury of this place, flooding my mind. This book was not just about getting them out. It was about giving them a shield.

"The journey through the sixteen cities was the road to the court," Katha said, her voice pulling me back to the present. "Now, the soul is cast into the Narakas. The true punishment begins."

She extended her hand. "Tonight, you will witness the first. Tamisra. The Hell of Darkness."

I took a deep breath, the air feeling thin and useless in my lungs. There were no more questions to ask. There was only the sentence to be served. I nodded, and she touched my forehead. The world dissolved into blackness.

CH 22: Tamisra, The Hell of Darkness

The world did not just dissolve. It was violently extinguished. The sight of the swirling black vortex, the sounds of true damnation, the magnificent terror of Yamraj on his throne—all of it vanished in an instant. I was plunged into a blackness so absolute, so complete, that it felt solid.

This was not the absence of light. This was an active, aggressive darkness. It had weight, pressing in on my soul-body from every direction. It had a texture, thick and oily. It filled my mouth, my ears, my very consciousness, silencing thought and replacing it with a primal, suffocating panic.

I was in Tamisra, the first of the Narakas. The Hell of Darkness.

"This punishment is for thieves," a voice hissed, not from a Yamdut beside me, but from the darkness itself. It was a chorus of voices, all speaking at once. "For those who take what is not theirs."

I was hanging by the searing rope that was still around my neck, suspended in this crushing void. I couldn't see anything, but I could feel things. Things slithering against my spiritual skin. Things with many legs skittering across my back.

Things with sharp teeth that would bite and tear, the pain a sudden, sharp explosion in the unending blackness.

I screamed, but the darkness swallowed the sound. My terror had no echo here.

Then, the beatings began. The Yamduts were here with me in the void. I couldn't see them, which made it worse. A club would smash into my ribs from the left. A fist would slam into my face from the right. They would swing me by the rope, crashing my body against unseen walls of jagged stone. The pain was constant, unpredictable, and inescapable.

Crash. The impact jars my soul, and a memory, sharp and vivid, explodes in my mind. I am Dimple. I am in my office. A junior colleague has just pitched a brilliant idea in a meeting. I see the flicker of pride in her eyes. Later that day, I present the same idea to my boss as my own. I take the credit. I take her promotion. I have stolen her future.

Crash. The pain again. Another memory. I am Maya. My best friend is telling me a secret, her voice trembling. A deep, personal vulnerability she is trusting me with.

The next day, at lunch with my other friends, I offer up her secret as a juicy piece of gossip. It gets me attention. It makes me feel important. I have stolen her trust.

Crash. Another memory, this one the most painful of all. I am Dimple. I am looking at Rohan, my husband, as he sleeps. His face is peaceful. I am filled with a cold, righteous anger. He had an affair with Priya. He stole a part of our marriage. And I… I had my affair with Sameer. I stole a part of our marriage, too. We were both thieves, stealing pieces of each other, leaving behind a hollowed-out shell that we presented to the world as a home.

In the crushing darkness of Tamisra, I understood. Theft was not just about money or objects. You can steal a person's idea. You can steal their trust. You can steal their peace of mind. You can steal their spouse's affection. Every time we take something that does not belong to us, we create a debt. And here, in this place of endless, sightless beating, I was paying it back.

I was hungry. I was thirsty. But in the blackness, there was nothing.

No food, no water, only the constant, random violence and the slithering touch of unseen things. My soul cried out for an end, for just a sliver of light, but there was none. There was only the darkness. And the pain. And the crushing, absolute truth of my own crimes.

CH 23: The Anatomy of a Jailer

I woke up on my bedroom floor, my cheek stuck to the cold wood. The blackness of Tamisra still clung to the edges of my vision, a suffocating, oily residue. The memory of unseen things biting and tearing at me, of the random, brutal beatings in the dark, was not a memory. It was a phantom pain that made my whole body ache.

When Katha’s light filled the room, I didn’t have the energy to scream or cry. I was hollowed out. I had questions that went beyond my own fate, questions about the very architecture of this nightmare.

"Katha," I whispered, my voice a dry rasp. I pushed myself into a sitting position, my body trembling. "I have to know."

She waited, her silence an invitation.

"The Yamduts," I began. "On the path, they were just brutes. But in that... that Naraka... they were different. More cruel. What are they? Are they souls like me, being punished with this job? Or are they demons, born to torment?"

"They are neither," Katha replied, her voice cutting through the gloom. "They are not being punished. They are the punishment. They are agents of Dharma, manifestations of the Law. Think of them as antibodies in the body of the cosmos, attacking the disease of sin."

"But they are so monstrous," I said, remembering their twisted forms.

"Their form is a mirror, Dimple. To the virtuous soul, they appear as radiant, beautiful guides. To the sinner, they appear as a reflection of the sinner's own inner ugliness. Their cruelty is not born of malice, but of perfect, impartial justice. They are simply balancing the scales."

A cold thought struck me. "What do they eat? They are always hungry. They feasted on my ghostly form. They threatened to eat me on the path."

"They eat the offerings you make for your dead," Katha stated simply. "The pind-daan, the food given in charity in the name of the departed—that is their sustenance.

That is the merit that nourishes them and satisfies them. When a soul arrives with merit, the Yamduts are appeased. But when a soul arrives with nothing, as you did... they must feed on the sinner themselves. Their hunger is the hunger of a law that has not been satisfied."

The weight of my own negligence, of not performing the rites for Maya, for Rohan and Avi, crashed down on me again. I had starved them, and then I had fed the agents of their torture with their own spiritual flesh.

"Then why isn't this taught?" The question burst from me, filled with a new anger born of despair. "If this is the absolute truth, if this horrifying system is real for every single person regardless of their religion, why is the world so ignorant? Why do our priests and gurus not scream this from the rooftops every day? Why are we fed comfortable stories about reincarnation and learning lessons when this is the reality?"

"Because the world does not want to hear it," Katha said, her voice sharp and clear. "The truth has always been there, in your most ancient scriptures. But humanity has a genius for ignoring uncomfortable truths.

They prefer the false gurus who sell them easy comfort, who tell them that their desires are sacred and their sins are just life lessons. They prefer the politician who promises them prosperity without morality. They prefer to believe that a 'good enough' life is all that is required."

"This knowledge is not hidden, Dimple," she said, her gaze piercing me. "It is rejected. The world is a test. And the test is to see who will seek the hard, painful truth, and who will settle for the easy, comfortable lie."

My heart sank. It was true. I had seen it in my own life, in my friends, in the world I consumed through my phone every day.

"One last question," I whispered, dreading the answer. "The virtuous… the ones who go through the golden gate. What if their merit runs out? Can they fall from Heaven?"

"Heaven, as you call it, is not eternal," Katha said, her voice a final, chilling lesson. "It is a temporary reward, a celestial resort where the soul enjoys the fruits of its good deeds.

The length of the stay is determined by the amount of merit in their account. When the merit is exhausted, when the last good deed has been paid out, their time is over. They are cast out of Heaven and fall back into the cycle of birth and death, to be born again on Earth according to whatever karma remains."

The hopelessness was absolute. Even Heaven was just a temporary stopover.

"Is there no escape, then?" I asked, my voice barely audible. "Is everyone just trapped in this cycle of reward and punishment forever?"

"There is one escape," Katha said, a strange light entering her eyes. "Moksha. Liberation. To not just go to Heaven, but to merge with God himself. To escape the cycle entirely. But that cannot be earned by merit alone. It can only be granted by the grace of a true, living Satguru, a perfect Master who has the authority to sever the bonds of karma completely."

Her words hung in the air, a sliver of light in an ocean of darkness.

It was a hope so distant, so impossibly high, I could barely comprehend it.

"But you are not on that path," Katha said, her voice turning cold again, shattering the moment. "You are on the path of consequence."

She pointed towards a corner of my room, where a new, swirling black vortex was beginning to form. "The debt for deceiving your husband has not been paid. Tamisra was for thieves. Tonight, you go to Andhatamisra. The Hell of Great Darkness. It is reserved for those who betray a sacred trust."

CH 24: Andhatamisra, The Betrayer's Hell

I was still reeling from the events in Tamisra, the memory of the beatings in the dark a fresh, throbbing wound on my soul. There was no respite. The Yamduts dragged me from that suffocating void and threw me into another.

The darkness here was different. It was deeper. Tamisra was the absence of light; this was an active, malevolent entity. It was a thick, viscous blackness that felt like it had intelligence. It seeped into my consciousness, not just silencing thought, but dissolving it.

This was Andhatamisra. The Hell of Great Darkness.

"This Naraka is for those who betray a sacred trust," the chorus of voices hissed from the void around me. "For the husband who deceives his wife, and the wife who deceives her husband."

The words struck me with the force of a physical blow. This place was not just for Maya's sins. This was for me. This was for Rohan.

The torment began. It was not a beating with clubs.

The darkness began to eat my memories. I tried to picture Avi's face, but his features would blur and distort, the memory slipping through my grasp like sand. I tried to hold onto the sound of Rohan's laugh, but it would warp into a monstrous growl before fading into the oppressive silence. My identity, the very story of who I was, was being unmade.

It was the terror of being erased. Of losing everything that made me me.

Then, I felt a new pain. It was not my own. Through the merging, I felt a wave of terror and confusion that belonged to another soul trapped here in the dark with me. And I knew, with a certainty that was a fresh agony, that it was Rohan.

The Yamduts were tormenting him nearby. Though I couldn't see him, I was forced to feel his punishment as if it were my own.

I felt the burning shame as they projected his memories into the darkness for me to see. I saw him with Priya, my best friend. Not just the sexting, but the cheap hotel rooms. The hurried, sordid encounters.

The lies he told me, the lies he told her. I felt his cheap thrill, his gnawing guilt, and the pathetic weakness that drove him.

And then I felt his punishment. The Yamduts were tearing at his soul, but not with claws. They were tearing at him with his own words. Every lie he had ever told me became a sharp blade, slicing at his consciousness. Every false promise he had made to Priya became a burning coal pressed against his spiritual skin.

I was trapped in a symphony of our shared betrayal. I was feeling the agony of my own mind dissolving in the great darkness, while simultaneously experiencing the torment my husband was enduring for his infidelity. My sins and his, once secret and separate, were now intertwined in a shared, inescapable punishment.

In the crushing, mind-wiping darkness of Andhatamisra, I finally understood the true meaning of a broken vow. It wasn't just a lie. It was a poison that created its own perfect hell, a hell where you are forced to become nothing, over and over again, while feeling the pain of the person you betrayed. And there was no escape. There was only the darkness, and the slow, horrifying erasure of the self.

CH 25: Raurava, The Hell of the Hunted

After an eternity in the mind-dissolving darkness of Andhatamisra, the Yamduts dragged my soul, now a frayed and whimpering thing, into the next Naraka. This was Raurava, the Hell of the Fierce Beasts.

There was no darkness here. The sky was the color of dried blood, and the ground was a barren, cracked earth. But I was not alone. The Naraka was filled with other souls, all screaming and running in every direction, their faces masks of pure terror.

And I soon saw why.

They were being hunted.

The hunters were creatures called Rurus. They were like no animal on Earth. They were large and reptilian, with thick, scaly hides, but they ran on four powerful, wolf-like legs. Their heads were cruel and serpentine, with jaws filled with rows of needle-sharp teeth. They were the physical embodiment of predatory hunger.

It pounced. The weight of it crushed me, and its teeth, each one a sharp dagger, began to tear at my soul-body. It didn't just bite. It savored. It ripped off pieces of my spiritual flesh and devoured them with a sickening relish. And as it ate me, I felt the terror of every animal that had ever been killed for the pleasure of humans. I felt the fear of the chicken in the slaughterhouse, the pig on the factory farm, the fish gasping for air in a net.

I felt their pain. I felt their terror. And I knew it was just.

The Ruru finished its meal, leaving my tattered soul to be remade by the will of this place, only to be hunted again. But as I was being tormented, I felt the echo of another's pain. It was Rohan. He was here, too.

I saw a vision of his sin. Not just his lust, but his selfishness. I saw him at a work dinner, laughing as he ate a rare steak, a meal that cost more than our weekly groceries, while at home, I was struggling to make ends meet, putting his desires before the needs of our family. He was a hunter of pleasure, a consumer of life, and now, he was being consumed in turn.

I could feel his terror as a Ruru chased him across the barren plains of Raurava.

And I saw myself, Dimple. I may have been a vegetarian, but I was still a hunter. I hunted for promotions. I hunted for status. I hunted for the approval of others. And in my hunt, I had trampled on the feelings of my colleagues, my friends, and my own family. I had devoured their time, their energy, their peace of mind, all to satisfy my own ego.

Here, in Raurava, all the hunters of the world were finally getting what they deserved. They were finally learning what it felt like to be the prey. And the hunt, I knew, would never, ever end.

CH 26: Kumbhipaka, The Cook's Hell

I don’t know how long I was hunted in Raurava. In that realm of blood and terror, time had no meaning. It was a constant cycle of being torn apart, remade, and hunted again. But eventually, the Yamduts dragged my tattered soul away from the plains of the Rurus and into the next Naraka.

The air changed. The scent of blood was replaced by the thick, greasy smell of a kitchen where the deep-fryer has been running all day. The ground was no longer cracked earth, but a slick, oily stone floor. All around me were enormous vats, the size of small houses, made of a dark, bubbling metal. Fires roared beneath them, and from the tops of the vats, a thick, acrid smoke rose into the blood-red sky.

This was Kumbhipaka. The Hell of Boiling Oil.

"This punishment is for those who cooked living creatures for the pleasure of their own tongue," a Yamdut's voice resonated in my mind. "For those who took a living, breathing being and subjected it to the torment of fire and oil, simply to satisfy a momentary craving."

A memory, sharp and sickening, flooded my consciousness.

It was from a vacation in Goa. We were at a beachside restaurant. A man was pulling live crabs and lobsters from a tank and throwing them into a vat of boiling water. I remember hearing the faint, frantic scrabbling sounds they made against the metal before they fell silent. I remember ordering a plate of fried fish just moments later, not even thinking about the connection.

Here, in Kumbhipaka, the connection was everything.

The Yamduts dragged me to the edge of one of the giant vats. The heat was immense, blistering my soul-body even from a distance. I looked down into the vat. It was filled with a thick, black oil, bubbling and spitting like a living, malevolent thing.

There was no ceremony. There was no warning. They simply lifted me and threw me in.

The pain was beyond anything I have ever experienced. It was not a cut or a burn. It was a complete, instantaneous immersion in pure agony. The hot oil was a living fire that clung to every inch of my being, searing my spiritual flesh from my bones. It was a pain so total, so absolute, that there was no room for thought, no room for a scream.

My consciousness was simply erased by a wave of pure, boiling torment.

And then, just as quickly, I was whole again, being fished out of the vat by a giant, iron hook. I was dangling over the boiling oil, my body trembling, before being dropped back in for another round of annihilation.

With each plunge, a new memory.

Plunge. I am Dimple, in my kitchen. I am frying fish for Rohan and the children. The smell of the hot oil, the sound of the sizzling fish—a sound I once found comforting. Now, it was the sound of my own damnation.

Plunge. I am Maya, at a friend's house, eating fried chicken wings, laughing and greasy-fingered, completely oblivious to the life that was sacrificed for our snack.

Plunge. I see Rohan, at a work function, ordering the 'catch of the day', not caring how it was killed, only how it tasted.

I saw the lives of the creatures we had so casually consumed. The fish pulled from the water, gasping for air. The chicken in its cage, knowing only fear. The lobster, boiled alive. Their terror, their pain, their final, agonizing moments—it all became my own.

In Kumbhipaka, the law was simple and perfect. For every life you had cooked for your pleasure, you would be cooked in turn. For every creature you had boiled or fried, you would be boiled and fried. It was a hell designed by chefs. A perfect, inescapable recipe of consequence. And I knew, as they hooked me and lifted me for another plunge, that I had a very, very long time to spend in this kitchen.

CH 27: The Question of a Beast

I awoke on my bedroom floor, my body slick with a cold sweat that was not my own. The smell of burning oil was still in my nostrils, and the phantom sensation of being seared and reconstituted was so real that I heaved, bringing up nothing but bitter bile. The torment of Kumbhipaka had been different. It was a clean, industrial horror, the logical endpoint of a life of casual consumption.

When Katha’s light filled the room, I didn't have the strength to stand. I crawled to the corner of the room, pulling my knees to my chest, a wounded animal seeking shelter. I was done. This was a breaking point beyond defiance. This was a complete and total surrender to despair.

"No more," I whispered, the words scraping my raw throat. "I can't. I won't. Just let me die. Let me die in my sleep tonight. I don't care what happens to me. I just can't watch this anymore. I can't feel this anymore."

Katha appeared before me, her form shimmering with a cold, clear light. Her face was not angry, but held a look of profound, almost weary disappointment.

"You wish for death, Dimple?" she asked, her voice quiet. "You think that is an escape? You think your own journey would be any different? You, with your secret affair, your lies to your husband, your ambition that trampled on others. You, who poisoned your own daughter's mind against the boy she loved. Your ledger is longer and darker than hers. Your death would not be an escape. It would simply be the beginning of your own walk down that same road. And you would walk it alone, with no hope of ever seeing your family again."

Her words were not a threat. They were a simple statement of fact, and that made them all the more terrifying. My death wasn't a release. It was just a different prison sentence.

A new thought, a question born of madness and a desperate need to find a flaw in this perfect, horrifying system, clawed its way out of me. "But why?" I asked, my voice rising. "Why is this only for us? For humans? It's not fair! A tiger kills a deer. A lion rips apart a zebra. A snake swallows a mouse whole. They kill to eat, just as we do! Do they come here? Does the tiger have to walk the road of spikes? Does the lion get boiled in oil? Why is it only us?"

Katha looked at me, and for the first time, I saw a flicker of something that was not quite pity, but a kind of cosmic sadness.

"You ask a foolish question, Dimple, but it is the question every soul asks when they first understand the law," she said. "You compare the actions of a beast to the actions of a human, but you fail to see the most fundamental difference."

"A tiger does not have a choice," she explained, her voice calm and instructional. "It is born a tiger. Its Dharma—its nature, its duty, its law—is to hunt. It kills because it must to survive. It acts according to its nature, and in that, there is no sin. An animal cannot commit Adharma, an act against the law, because it is incapable of understanding the law."

She drifted closer, her gaze pinning me to the floor. "But you… a human being… you were given the greatest gift in all of creation. You were given a choice. You were given an intellect, a conscience, the ability to know right from wrong. You do not need to kill to survive. You do not need to lie to get ahead. You do not need to betray your spouse to feel a moment of pleasure. You choose to do these things."

"A tiger kills a deer out of necessity," she said, her voice sharp as a shard of glass. "You, Dimple, cooked that fish for the pleasure of your tongue. Rohan slept with Priya for the thrill of his ego. Maya used that boy at the party to soothe her own vanity. You do not act from instinct. You act from selfishness, from greed, from lust, from pride. You knowingly choose to inflict pain for your own gain. That is Adharma. That is what is punished."

"Do not compare yourself to the beasts of the field," Katha concluded, her voice turning cold again. "They are purer than you could ever hope to be. They are true to their nature. You were given the chance to be something more. And you chose to be something less."

Her words stripped away my last defense. The final, pathetic argument of a guilty soul. There was no injustice here. There was only a perfect, terrible, and inescapable fairness.

"Then why should we be grateful for this life?" I cried, my voice breaking. "If we are just going to be an animal next time, bound by instinct, with no chance of this... this torment...

CH 28: Kalasutra, The Burning Plain

My conversation with Katha left me with a new, colder kind of dread. The path of flowers for Rohan was a lie I had told myself. We were all sinners. My hope was a fool's dream. The next night, when she came for me, I did not resist. There was no point. I was a prisoner, and it was time to serve my sentence.

She plunged me back into Maya's soul. The world reformed, not into darkness or a city, but into a place that defied logic.

I was standing on a vast, circular plain. It stretched to the horizon in every direction, a perfect, flat circle of what looked like dark, polished copper. The ground beneath my feet was hot, not like the burning sand of the desert, but a deep, penetrating heat that cooked the soles of my feet from the moment I stood on it.

I looked up. There was no sky. There was only a sun. But it was not the sun of Earth. It was a colossal, unblinking orb of white-hot fire that filled my entire vision, blazing down with an oppressive, inescapable heat. Fire below, fire above. I was trapped between two infernos.

This was Kalasutra. The Hell of the Burning Thread. "This Naraka is for those who disrespect their elders," a voice boomed, seeming to come from the heated air itself. "For the son who raises his voice to his father. For the daughter who scorns her mother's wisdom. For the student who mocks his teacher. For any who show contempt for Brahmins, for saints, or for the ancestors. You saw them as obstacles. You saw their traditions as a burden. You felt the heat of your own arrogance."

The voice paused, and the ground grew hotter. "Now, you will feel a real heat."

A sharp, agonizing pain erupted on my back as a Yamdut struck me with a whip made of burning rope. "Run!" it roared.

And so, I ran. My bare feet slapped against the scorching copper plate. With every step, the skin on my soles blistered, melted, and fused to the metal, only to be ripped away and made whole for the next agonizing step. The sun above bleached all thought from my mind, its heat so intense it felt like it was boiling my very soul

There was nowhere to run to. It was a circle. An endless, featureless, circular skillet.

But we were forced to run. All around me were other souls, millions of them, all running in a blind, pointless panic.

Memory. I see myself, Maya, a teenager, rolling my eyes as my grandmother tries to tell me an old story. "Nobody cares about that stuff anymore, Nani," I say, my voice dripping with the casual cruelty of youth. I see the flicker of hurt in her eyes before she falls silent.

Memory. I am Dimple. My father-in-law, Rohan's father, is trying to give me advice about investing. I smile politely, but in my mind, I am scoffing. What does this old man know about the modern market? The disrespect was silent, but here, it was being punished.

Memory. A new horror. I see Rohan. He is here, too. He is running on the burning plain, his face a mask of agony. And I see his sin. His father is begging him not to take a risky business loan. "It's too dangerous, son," the old man pleads. "Listen to my experience." Rohan claps him on the shoulder. "Don't worry, Dad," he says with a dismissive smile. "I know what I'm doing. Times have changed." He took the loan. The business failed. It was the source of so many of our fights, so much of my resentment.

He had disrespected his father, and here was the consequence.

We were all here. The son who yelled at his mother. The daughter who was ashamed of her parents. The employee who laughed at his old boss. Every act of disrespect, every moment of arrogant disregard for the wisdom of our elders, was a sin that earned a place on this burning skillet.

The Yamduts ran among us, their whips lashing out, forcing us to keep moving, to keep running, to keep burning. The scripture says the sinner must run on this plain for as many thousands of years as there are hairs on the animals he has killed. For a non-vegetarian like Rohan, the sentence was so vast it was essentially infinite. For me, the vegetarian who was complicit, it was no less terrifying.

There is no escape from Kalasutra. There is only the running. And the burning. A long, pointless marathon of agony on a copper plate, cooked by the fires of our own arrogance.

CH 29: Krumibhojan, The Hell of Worms

The questions I had asked Katha gave me a grim purpose, but no comfort. The moment she touched my forehead, I was plunged back into the abyss. I was dragged from the place of questioning and cast into a new horror.

The air grew thick, humid, and smelled of rot and damp earth. I was no longer on a plain or in a city, but at the bottom of a vast, circular pit. The walls were made of slick, dark soil, and the floor was a writhing, churning mass. It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing.

Worms.

Millions upon millions of them. They were not the small earthworms of my garden. They were pale, thick, and glistening, some as long as my arm, others as small as maggots. The entire floor of the pit was a living carpet of them, writhing over and under each other in a single, colossal organism of hunger.

This was Krumibhojan. The Hell of Worms.

This was Krumibhojan. The Hell of Worms.

"This Naraka is for the selfish," the Yamduts' voices echoed from the walls of the pit. "For those who ate without sharing. For those who honored no guests, fed no poor, and turned away the hungry from their door. For those who did not perform the sacred duty of the five great sacrifices, but lived only for their own stomach."

Before I could process the words, they threw me from the small ledge I was on into the center of the pit.

The landing was not hard. It was soft, squirming, and utterly vile. I was waist-deep in a sea of worms. They turned their blind, hungry heads toward me as one. And then they swarmed.

It was not a pain of fire or blades. It was a squirming, crawling, burrowing horror. They swarmed over my naked soul-body, their tiny, rasping mouths latching on, chewing, devouring. They crawled into my mouth, my nose, my ears, their bodies filling every orifice. It was an agony of a thousand tiny, relentless bites, but the psychological terror was far worse.

It was the feeling of being consumed, of being turned into food, of being broken down and devoured by the very lowest of creatures.

As they ate me, the memories came.

Memory. I am Dimple, at home. I have bought a box of expensive, imported chocolates. I didn't tell Rohan or the kids. That evening, after everyone was asleep, I took the box into the bathroom, locked the door, and ate them all myself, hiding the wrapper at the bottom of the bin. The secret, selfish pleasure of it. Now, worms were burrowing into the stomach that I had so selfishly filled.

Memory. I am Maya. It's lunchtime. My little brother, Avi, is looking at my tiffin box. "Can I have one of your chips, Didi?" he asks, his eyes wide. "No," I snap, pulling the box away. "Get your own." I see the look of hurt on his small face. I didn't care then. I only cared about my chips.

Memory. A beggar, old and frail, is outside the temple. His hand is outstretched. I, Dimple, avert my eyes and walk past, clutching my purse.

I tell myself he is probably a fraud, that he will just use the money for drink. It was an easy lie to justify my own lack of compassion.

In Krumibhojan, every crumb of food I had refused to share, every hungry person I had ignored, every guest I had failed to honor—each one had given birth to a worm in this pit. And now, they were all here, demanding to be fed.

They devoured my spiritual flesh until there was nothing left but a screaming consciousness. Then, my body would be remade, whole again, and the feasting would begin anew. There was no escape. I was simply food. An endless meal for the worms born of my own selfishness.

CH 30: Sandash, The Hell of Pincers

Waking up has become a violent act. My soul is torn from the pit of worms and thrust back into my body, but the sensations linger. I spent the morning convinced I could still feel things squirming beneath my skin, an itching, crawling horror that no amount of scrubbing in the shower could wash away. The memory of being food is not one the mind easily releases.

When night fell, I did not fight it. My purpose, grim as it is, is the only solid thing in my life now. I closed my eyes and waited for Katha.

The plunge was immediate. I was Maya again, my soul-body still bearing the phantom bites of a million worms. The Yamduts dragged me from the stinking pit of Krumibhojan, and the landscape shifted once more. The damp, earthy rot was replaced by a dry, searing heat and the rhythmic, clanging sound of metal on metal.

We were in a vast, cavernous forge. The air was thick with the smell of hot iron and burning coals. All around me, Yamduts stood over anvils, their monstrous forms silhouetted against the glow of fiery pits.

But they were not forging weapons. They were tormenting souls.

This was Sandash, the Hell of Pincers.

In their hands, they held enormous, iron tongs and pincers, the ends glowing cherry-red from the heat of the forges. They would pluck other souls from the ground, their forms writhing and screaming, and with a terrifying, methodical precision, they would begin to tear them apart.

"This Naraka is for thieves," a Yamdut's voice boomed over the clang of metal. "Not just the common burglar, but for all who take what is not rightfully theirs. The businessman who cheats his partner. The student who cheats on an exam. The friend who steals another's idea. The politician who steals the people's trust."

They dragged me forward. Two Yamduts grabbed me, holding my soul-body fast. A third approached, holding a pair of red-hot pincers the size of my arm. The heat washed over me, a wave of pure agony before the metal even touched me.

It clamped the pincers onto the flesh of my thigh.

The pain was twofold. First, the searing burn of the hot metal, a fire that seemed to melt my very essence. Then, the Yamdut pulled. The tearing of my spiritual flesh was a pain so deep, so intimate, it felt like my identity was being ripped away. It tore off a piece of me and tossed it onto a pile of glowing embers, where it sizzled and dissolved.

Then, they did it again. And again. Each time, my body was made whole, only to be torn apart anew.

Tear. I see myself as Dimple in my office. A junior colleague, young and bright, has just pitched a brilliant marketing concept in a meeting. Later that day, I am in my boss's office, presenting the same concept as my own. I remember the thrill of his praise, the satisfaction of stealing her idea and claiming it for myself. Here, a Yamdut's pincers tear at my stomach, the seat of my ambition.

Tear. I am Maya, a teenager. I am in a shop with my friends. No one is watching. I slip a beautiful, expensive lipstick into my pocket.

The pounding of my heart is a mixture of fear and exhilaration. A small, stupid act of theft. Here, the pincers rip at my hands, the hands that took what was not mine.

Tear. I see Rohan. He is here, too, in another part of the forge, his face a mask of agony. And I see his sin. He is in a business meeting, shaking hands on a deal. I see the numbers on the contract, the way he has cleverly, legally, cheated his partner out of his fair share. The sin of the white-collar thief. Here, there is no legal protection. The Yamduts are tearing at him with their hot pincers, extracting the price of his greed.

They were not just tearing at my flesh. They began to pull at me in a different way. With a smaller pair of tongs, a Yamdut reached into one of the wounds on my arm and pulled. I felt a strange, excruciating stretching sensation, and it pulled out a long, shimmering fiber. It was a nerve. A spiritual nerve. The pain was a white-hot lightning bolt that electrified my entire being. This was the ultimate theft. They were stealing my very ability to feel, replacing it with a singular, unending agony. In the Hell of the Pincers, the thieves of the world have everything taken from them, piece by excruciating piece.

CH 31: Taptasurmi, The Hell of Burning Lust

When Katha returned me from the forge of Sandash, my soul felt like it had been unraveled and poorly stitched back together. The phantom pain of the red-hot pincers was a constant, sharp agony. I thought I had faced the worst of my sins, the deepest parts of my shame. I was wrong.

The next plunge was into a world of shimmering heat. There was no sand, no fire pit, just a city square surrounded by what looked like foundries. In the center of the square stood hundreds of statues, forged from a dark, heavy metal. They were life-sized figures of men and women, sculpted to idealized, impossible perfection. They gleamed under the dim, oppressive sky, but as the Yamduts dragged me closer, I could feel an intense heat radiating from them. They were not just statues. They were furnaces, glowing from within with a menacing, cherry-red heat.

This was Taptasurmi. The Hell of Red-Hot Statues.

This Naraka is for the adulterers," the voice of a Yamdut hissed in my mind, cold and clinical. "For those who break the sacred vow of marriage and seek pleasure in the arms of another.

For those who, overcome by lust, engage in shameless acts with those they should not."

A terror colder than any ice in this hell gripped my soul. I knew what this was for. This was for Sameer. This was for Rohan. This was for Maya. This was for me.

They dragged me towards a male statue. It was a body of sculpted, masculine beauty, the kind you see in magazines, the kind that fuels foolish fantasies. Here, it glowed with a dull red heat, its surface shimmering like a mirage.

"You lusted in life," the Yamdut growled, its voice thick with contempt. "You craved the touch of a man not your own. You will have your wish."

They forced me forward. The heat was unbearable. It blistered my spiritual skin from feet away. They pushed me, forced me, until my naked soul-body was pressed against the red-hot metal.

The scream that was ripped from my throat was a sound of pure annihilation.

It was the pain of a thousand burns at once, a searing, melting agony that fused my very essence to the statue. My spiritual flesh sizzled and dissolved, the pain so absolute, so complete, that my consciousness was extinguished in a flash of white-hot agony.

And then I was whole again, standing a few feet away, my body trembling. The Yamduts were already pushing me towards it again.

"Once for every thought," they hissed. "Once for every text. Once for every touch."

The memories, my most shameful secrets, were now my torturers. The flirtatious messages with Sameer. The thrill of the nude photos I sent while Rohan slept beside me. The sordid, secret encounter in that hotel room, the feel of his hands on me. Each memory was a new forced embrace with the burning statue. Each touch I had craved in life was now a touch of unimaginable torment.

But the horror was not over.

They dragged me to another part of the city. Here, the statues were of women. And they were dragging other souls, male souls, towards them. I saw a soul that looked vaguely familiar, its face twisted in a rictus of terror. As they forced him against a burning female statue, his scream was one I recognized deep in my bones.

It was Rohan.

My husband. His sin with my best friend, Priya, was no longer a secret. It was a public sentence. I was forced to watch him endure the same torment I had just suffered. His lust, his betrayal—it was all being burned away in the same horrifying fashion. I felt his pain as my own, a shared agony of our mutual betrayal.

And then I saw another. A younger soul, being forced against a different male statue. It was Maya. Her casual hookups, her use of her own body and the bodies of others for momentary validation, for a fleeting sense of power over a boy who had broken her heart—it all had a price. And this was it.

I saw then the perfect, impartial cruelty of the Law. My affair, Rohan's affair, Maya's casual encounters—it was all the same sin. The sin of using a body for selfish pleasure, of breaking the sanctity of commitment, of treating the sacred act of union as a meaningless game. And the punishment was absolute. To be forcibly embraced by the very lust that had driven us, now heated to the temperature of Hell itself. I watched my husband and my daughter burn, and I knew, with a certainty that shattered the last piece of my heart, that we had earned this. All of us.

CH 32: The Sin of the Eye

I woke up on my cold bedroom floor, the memory of burning flesh—my flesh, Rohan's flesh, Maya's flesh—seared into my mind. The agony of Taptasurmi was a new kind of horror. It was a punishment that felt both deeply personal and terrifyingly universal. It was the consequence of a force that felt... unbeatable.

When Katha appeared, her light doing little to warm the chill in my soul, I didn't have the energy for defiance or despair. I only had a raw, desperate need to understand the rules of a game that felt rigged against us from the start.

"Katha," I began, my voice a broken whisper. "I saw... I felt... the punishment for lust. For adultery. But how can anyone escape it? Lust isn't like stealing or lying. It's not a choice we make. It's a fire inside us. It's natural. It's in our biology. How can it be a sin to be human? How is it fair to punish us so brutally for something we can't control?"

Katha regarded me, her expression unchanging. "You think you cannot control it?" she asked, her voice calm and cutting. "You think it is a fire that burns on its own? No, Dimple.

It is a fire that you choose to feed. The beast does not choose. It acts on instinct. You, a human, are given the intellect to know the law, and the will to choose whether to follow it or to feed the beast."

"But the world... it's everywhere," I protested, thinking of the ads on TV, the scenes in movies, the pictures on my phone. "We are surrounded by temptation. Men look at women. They see our bodies... our breasts, our hips... they look at pornography. They don't touch, but they look. What happens to them? Is there no sin in that? Is the only crime the physical act?"

"You still think in such limited terms," Katha said with a sigh that was colder than any winter wind. "The Law does not only punish the destination. It punishes every step on the path."

She drifted closer, her presence filling the room with an unnerving stillness. "The scriptures are clear, Dimple. The man who looks upon a woman who is not his wife with lust in his heart has already committed adultery with her. The act begins long before the bodies touch. It begins with the eyes. It is nurtured by the mind."

"So what is their punishment?" I asked, my voice trembling.

"The punishment is always a perfect mirror of the sin," Katha explained. "For the man who commits the physical act, the punishment is the burning embrace of the Taptasurmi statues. But for the man who commits the sin only with his eyes? His punishment is in his eyes. In the Narakas, the Yamduts will take red-hot iron pokers and pierce his eyes, again and again. Or, if he escapes that fate and is reborn on Earth, he will be born blind, life after life after life, never to see the sun or the face of a loved one. The eyes that he used for sinful pleasure will be rendered useless."

The horror of it, the perfect, terrifying logic, made me feel sick.

"And the one who watches pornography?" I asked, thinking of the secret histories on so many computers, on Rohan's, on the phones of men everywhere.

"He who fills his mind with images of lust and degradation will have his mind filled with a far worse horror," Katha said.

"He will be forced to watch his own loved ones—his mother, his sister, his daughter—being violated in the most grotesque ways, over and over, while he is helpless to intervene. The pleasure he took in watching the degradation of strangers will be paid for by the agony of watching the torment of those he loves."

I collapsed onto the floor, sobbing. The world I knew, the modern world of casual glances, of secret browser histories, of harmless flirtations—it was all a minefield. Every unspoken thought, every private glance, was being recorded, weighed, and judged. There were no small sins.

"Lust is a fire, Dimple," Katha's voice echoed in the quiet room. "And you are the one who chooses to gather the wood, to strike the match, and to fan the flames. Or, you can choose to let the fire die out. The choice is always yours. That is what it means to be human."

Her lesson was over. And I knew, with a certainty that left no room for doubt, that I had been feeding that fire my entire life.

"It is time," she said. A new portal of blackness began to swirl in the corner, and from it, I could hear the sound of gnashing teeth and the sharp crack of breaking bones. "Vajrakantak Shalmali awaits. The Hell of the Thorny Tree."

CH 33: Vajrakantak Shalmali, The Hell Of The Thorny Tree

The morning after my conversation with Katha, I felt a grim, cold clarity. The questions had been answered. The path was set. There was no room left for rebellion or despair, only for the grim duty of witness. When she came for me that night, I was ready.

The plunge was instant. The swirling black vortex at the edge of my consciousness opened, and the Yamduts dragged me through. The sounds of gnashing teeth and breaking bones from my bedroom were now a deafening, all-encompassing reality.

I was in a forest. But it was not like the forest of sword-leaves. The trees here were immense, their bark a sickly, pale grey. And they were covered, from root to branch, with thorns. These were not the thorns of a rose bush. They were as long as daggers and as thick as iron spikes, their points gleaming with a wicked sharpness. This was Vajrakantak Shalmali—the Hell of the Steel-Thorned Silk-Cotton Tree.

"This Naraka is for those who violate the natural order," the now-familiar voice of the Yamdut echoed in my mind.

"For those who force themselves upon others, and for those who engage in unnatural lust with animals."

The words were so vile, so far beyond my own experience, that for a moment I felt a detached sense of relief. This, at least, was not for me.

Then the Yamduts began to drag me toward one of the massive trees.

"But I never..." I tried to scream in my mind.

"Did you not force your will upon others?" the Yamdut answered, its thought a cold spike in my consciousness. "Did you not, in your affair with Sameer, treat him as a beast, a thing to be used for your own pleasure and promotion, with no thought for his own family, his own soul?"

They didn't give me time to process the accusation. They grabbed my soul-body, two on my arms, two on my legs, and with a great, coordinated heave, they threw me onto the tree.

The impact was an explosion of a thousand different pains.

The thorns, hard and unyielding as steel, pierced every inch of my body. They were not sharp enough to slice cleanly. They were thick, designed to impale, to tear, to hold. I was pinned to the trunk, a butterfly on a board of agony, my spiritual form impaled in a hundred places.

Then, they began to pull me down.

The sound of my spiritual flesh ripping on the thorns was the most horrific sound I have ever experienced. It was a wet, tearing, shredding sound, and the pain was absolute. It was the feeling of being flayed, of having my skin and the essence beneath it scraped away from my core. They dragged me all the way to the bottom, leaving trails of my own soul on the cruel thorns.

And then, as my shredded form lay at the base of the tree, I healed. Instantly. Only to be grabbed and thrown back onto the trunk for the process to begin again.

With every ascent and every agonizing descent, the memories came. Not of great, monstrous sins, but of the small violations of nature and will that litter a modern life.

Tear. I see Rohan, trying to force our little dog, Rusty, to do a trick for his friends. Rusty is scared, yelping, but Rohan holds him down, forcing him, laughing as the dog whimpers. A violation of a simple creature's trust.

Tear. I see Maya, a teenager, in her room. She is angry with me. I see her take her favorite teddy bear, a gift from her father, and with a cold fury, she rips its arm off. A small, childish act of rage against an innocent object, a violation of a symbol of love.

Tear. I see myself, Dimple, at a corporate retreat. We are doing a "team-building" exercise. I am forcing a terrified junior employee to do a trust fall, laughing at his fear, pushing him to go against his own instinct for my own amusement.

These were not the great sins of scripture, but I saw now how they were all connected. They were all small acts of forcing our will onto others, of violating the natural order of things for our own pleasure or power. It was the same seed of sin, just grown in a different soil.

I watched as other souls were dragged forward. Men and women who, in their earthly lives, had committed the most depraved acts with animals, were thrown onto the trees with a special violence. They were not just torn by the thorns. The thorns themselves seemed to come alive, burrowing into them, causing a torment so profound it was beyond my ability to even witness.

In Vajrakantak Shalmali, I learned that every violation, no matter how small, has a consequence. Every time we force our will on a creature weaker than ourselves, every time we go against the natural order of things, we are impaling our own souls on these terrible, steel-hard thorns

CH 34: Vaitarni, The River of Broken Duty

The morning after my night in the forest of thorns, I woke up with my body screaming in silent agony. I felt as though I had been flayed, every inch of my skin a raw, open wound. It was a long time before I could bring myself to move, to get out of bed, to face the day that was merely a prelude to the next night's torment.

Katha’s arrival was punctual, as always. The plunge was just as violent. I was ripped from my world and cast back into Maya's suffering soul. The Yamduts were already there, dragging me from the forest's edge. The landscape shifted again. The sickeningly pale trees and their steel thorns dissolved into a familiar, dreadful sight.

We were back at the bank of a great river. It was the same river I had been forced to cross on the path to the cities, the Vaitarna. But it was different now. The stench was more potent, the current more violent, and the sense of despair emanating from it was a thousand times heavier.

"You have crossed this river once," a Yamdut's voice hissed in my mind. "But that was merely the sewer run-off from the path of sinners.

This is the Vaitarna Naraka itself. This hell is reserved for those who were given power and used it to betray their sacred duty. For the kings, the ministers, the officials who, born into high families and given great responsibility, chose to abandon Dharma and live as tyrants."

I felt a flash of relief. I was never a king. Rohan was never a minister. But then, the Yamdut’s thought pierced my own.

"You think this does not apply to you? Were you not a manager, Dimple? A leader of your team? Did you not hold power over the careers and livelihoods of others? Did you not use it for your own gain?"

Before I could even process the accusation, they shoved me into the river.

The liquid was the same vile, thick stew of pus, blood, and filth. It was hot and clung to my soul-body like burning tar. But the torment was different this time. As I struggled in the foul current, faces began to appear in the murk. The faces of those I had wronged in my professional life.

There was the face of the young woman whose idea I had stolen, her eyes burning with a cold, silent accusation. Her ghostly hands reached out from the filth and grabbed my ankles, pulling me under.

There was the face of the junior colleague I had burdened with impossible deadlines, his expression no longer one of despair, but of cold, hard rage. He was one of the serpent-creatures now, and he bit into my leg, his venom a fire of pure agony.

This was the nature of this Naraka. The river was filled with the souls of those who had been wronged by the powerful. And here, the roles were reversed. The victims were now the tormentors. They were the beasts, the monsters in the river, and their sole purpose was to exact a perfect, unending revenge on the souls of their former oppressors.

I saw other souls flailing around me. I saw a man who looked like a politician I recognized from the news, being torn apart by a mob of screaming phantoms, the citizens he had cheated. I saw a CEO being devoured by the spirits of the employees he had unjustly fired.

And I saw Rohan.

He was being pulled under by the ghosts of the partners he had betrayed in his business deals, his face a mask of terror. His white-collar crimes, the ones committed in boardrooms and through cleverly worded contracts, were being punished here with the most primal, physical violence.

His victims were now his jailers. His tormentors. His hell.

And I understood. Power, in any form—in government, in business, in a simple office hierarchy—is a sacred trust. To use that power to exploit, to burden, to betray… it is a sin that turns the river of life into this foul, stinking sewer of consequence. And here, in the Vaitarna Naraka, every soul is forced to drown in the filth of their own broken duty, tormented for eternity by the very people they once so carelessly wronged.

CH 35: Puyoda, The Ocean of Filth

I woke up tasting bile and filth. The phantom sensation of drowning in the Vaitarna, tormented by the ghosts of those I had wronged, clung to me like a wet shroud. Every muscle in my body ached with a deep, weary sorrow. The weight of my actions as a manager, a position of power I had so carelessly abused, felt like a physical stone in my stomach.

There was no respite. When night fell, Katha appeared, her presence now a grim, expected punctuation mark in my cycle of torment. The plunge was immediate. I was Maya again.

The Yamduts dragged my soul away from the foul banks of the Vaitarna. The landscape changed. The stench of rot and decay was replaced by something even worse. It was the smell of a backed-up sewer, of sickness, of a body left to decompose in a hot, humid room.

We stood on the shore of a vast, motionless ocean. But it was not water. It was a thick, lumpy, grotesque sea of pus, urine, and excrement, marbled with thick strands of mucus and saliva. It was a stagnant ocean of bodily waste, stretching to the horizon under the same dead, twilight sky.

This was Puyoda. The Hell of Pus.

"This Naraka is for those who live like beasts," a Yamdut's voice ground in my mind. "For those who abandon all sense of purity, discipline, and shame. For the man who lays with a woman he should not, breaking the rules of his station. For any soul that lives without restraint, following every base impulse of the mind and body."

The words echoed with the memory of Katha's revelations about my affair, about Rohan's. Our shameless acts.

Without ceremony, they shoved me forward. I fell, not into liquid, but into a thick, warm, lumpy sludge. It closed over my head. The horror was absolute. It was not just the feeling of drowning, but of drowning in the most disgusting, defiling substance imaginable. It filled my mouth, my nose, my eyes. I came up sputtering, my soul-body coated in a thick layer of warm filth.

"You lived a life of impurity," the Yamdut rasped. "Now you shall drink it."

They held my head and forced the vile liquid down my throat. they held me fast.

I was forced to drink the pus of a million diseases, the urine of a million bodies, the phlegm of a million sicknesses. I gagged, my soul heaving, but they held me fast.

Memory. I am Dimple, in that hotel room with Sameer. The memory of our physical intimacy, which on Earth had felt illicit and exciting, was now revealed for what it was: an act of impurity, a defilement of my marriage vows, a shameless pursuit of a fleeting physical sensation. I had acted like a beast, driven by impulse, and here I was, bathing in the consequence.

Memory. I am Maya, in the depths of my depression. I haven't showered in days. My room is a mess of dirty clothes and old food wrappers. I have given up on myself, abandoned all sense of cleanliness and self-respect. I have chosen to live in my own filth, both inside and out.

Memory. I see Rohan, not just with Priya, but in the memory of his language. The crude jokes he told with his friends, the way he would talk about other women, the casual, thoughtless vulgarity he engaged in when he thought I wasn't listening.

He had filled his mind with impurity, and now he was here, somewhere in this same ocean, forced to swallow it.

In Puyoda, there was no sharp pain, no tearing of flesh. The torment was one of pure, soul-deep defilement. It was the horror of being forced to consume the very impurity you cultivated in your life. It was a lesson in shame. And as I was forced to drink again and again from that disgusting ocean, I knew that even if I ever escaped this place, a part of my soul would be stained with this filth forever.

CH 36: Pranarodh, The Hell of Suffocation

I awoke from the ocean of filth with a gasp, my lungs burning with phantom foulness. Each morning was now a violent reentry into a world that no longer felt like my own. My body was just a temporary shell I inhabited between sessions of torture. The promise of my family's return was the only thing that kept me from shattering completely.

When Katha appeared, I was already waiting. There was no conversation. There were no more questions to ask. I simply nodded, and she touched my forehead.

The plunge was instant. I was Maya again, my soul-body still feeling slick with the grime of Puyoda. The Yamduts dragged me away from the shore of that nauseating sea. The landscape shifted into something new.

We were in a vast, open field under the same dead, twilight sky. But the air here was different. It was thick. Heavy. It felt like breathing through a wet cloth. With every step, it became harder to draw a breath. My spiritual lungs, which I didn't even know I had until now, began to ache with a desperate, burning need for air.

This was Pranarodh. The Hell of Suffocating Life.

"This Naraka is for those who hunted for sport," the voice of a Yamdut echoed, not in my mind, but in the thick, heavy air itself. "For those of high birth—Brahmins, Kshatriyas, leaders—who should have been protectors of life, but instead took it for pleasure. For the powerful who used their strength to corner and kill innocent creatures of the forest."

The Yamduts did not use whips here. Their cruelty was more refined. They began to run, dragging me behind them. The exertion made my lungs scream for air, but the atmosphere was a thick, unyielding blanket. I was running and suffocating at the same time. My vision began to tunnel, black spots dancing before my eyes. My soul-body grew heavy, my limbs like lead.

Just as my consciousness was about to extinguish from the lack of air, a new torment began. The Yamduts produced long, cruel-looking bows and arrows. They aimed not at me, but at the empty space around me.

"You took pleasure in the chase," one of them rasped.

They did not aim for my heart or my head. They aimed for my limbs, my torso. With every arrow that struck, I felt a sharp, piercing pain, but the wound was not the true torment. The true torment was the feeling of being a target. Of being helpless prey.

I saw Rohan here. Not as a participant, but as a memory. I saw him on a corporate hunting trip, a trip he took to impress a client. He was holding a rifle, a proud, foolish grin on his face as he stood over the body of a magnificent stag. He had not killed for food, but for ego. For business. He had treated the sacred act of taking a life as a networking opportunity. And I knew, with a sickening certainty, that he, too, would one day have to feel the stag's last, terrified breath.

In Pranarodh, there is no place to hide. There is only the endless, suffocating run, and the constant rain of arrows, each one a reminder that the terror you inflict upon the helpless will one day become your own.

CH 37: The Ghost in the Room

I spent the day in a state of grim preparedness. I wrote in this journal. I ate a simple meal. I meditated, trying to build some kind of wall around my soul for the coming night’s torment. The routine had become a strange comfort, a way of feeling some small measure of control in a life that had none. As evening fell, I changed into simple clothes and sat on my bed, waiting for Katha.

The knock on the door was so unexpected it felt like a gunshot.

My heart leaped into my throat. No one came here anymore. My relatives called, but they didn't visit. The silence was rarely broken. I crept to the door, my heart pounding, and looked through the peephole.

It was Sameer.

A cold dread washed over me, followed by a hot, shameful flush. He looked different than I remembered. Thinner. Tired. He stood there, shifting his weight, his car keys jingling in his hand.

I shouldn't have opened the door.

Every fiber of my being, every lesson learned in the fiery pits of hell, screamed at me to keep it shut. But I was also Dimple. Lonely, grieving Dimple. And he was a piece of my old life. A dark, broken piece, but a familiar one.

I opened the door.

"Dimple," he said, his voice soft. "I was worried. You haven't been answering my calls."

"I've been... busy," I said, the lie tasting like ash in my mouth.

He pushed his way gently inside, his presence filling the sterile quiet of my home with a scent of expensive cologne and the world outside. He looked around. "It's so quiet in here."

He turned to me, his eyes full of a practiced sympathy. "I'm so sorry, Dimple. About Maya. I only just heard."

He pulled me into a hug. His body was warm, solid. Real. In a world that had become a nightmare of phantom pains and spiritual torment, his physical presence was an anchor.

I leaned into him, just for a second, and my resolve began to crumble.

"I know things were complicated with us," he whispered, his lips close to my ear. "But I still care about you. I can't imagine what you're going through."

He began to stroke my hair. His touch was not comforting. It was a key turning in an old, rusted lock. A part of me, a part I thought had been burned away in the Narakas, stirred. The part that craved distraction. The part that was tired of being a grieving mother and just wanted to be a woman, even for a moment.

"You don't have to be alone tonight," he murmured.

I didn't say yes. I didn't say no. I just didn't pull away. And that was enough.

He led me to my bedroom. The room where Katha would soon appear. As he began to undress, a frantic monologue screamed in my head. What are you doing? This is a sin. You know what happens. You've seen it. Felt it.

But another voice, a tired, broken, selfish voice, whispered back. Just for a little while. Just to feel something other than pain. Just to forget.

He undressed me. His hands were just as I remembered them. Confident. Selfish. I felt a wave of self-loathing so profound it was sickening. This was the body that had belonged to Rohan. This was the body that had carried my children. And I was letting this man, this symbol of my betrayal, touch it again.

But I couldn't resist. The craving for a moment of oblivion was stronger than my will. I closed my eyes and let him have his way, my body a pliant, dead thing, my soul screaming in a silent corner of my mind. It was a desperate, empty act. There was no pleasure in it. Only a deep, hollow shame.

As we lay there, in the quiet aftermath, it happened.

The room grew cold.

I opened my eyes. Katha was standing at the foot of the bed.

She was not the beautiful girl from the woods.

She was not the terrifying entity of rage. She was something in between. Her face was a mask of pure, sorrowful disappointment. She looked at me, her ancient eyes seeing everything. My naked body. My naked sin. My naked soul.

Sameer didn't see her. He was oblivious. He rolled over, kissed my shoulder with a casual intimacy that made me want to vomit, and said, "I should go. I'll call you tomorrow."

He got up, dressed, and walked out of the room. He walked right through her.

He was gone. And I was left there, naked and exposed on the bed, my shame a physical presence in the room, with the being who served as my judge and jury.

I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. I just lay there, a lost soul, every ounce of courage I had gathered, every bit of grim resolve, stripped away. I had just proven that I had learned nothing.

Finally, I broke. The sobs came from a place so deep inside me I didn't know it existed. They were not sounds of grief, but of self-hatred.

I curled into a ball, my body shaking, my soul laid bare and found wanting.

Katha did not speak for a long time. The silence was my true punishment. When she finally did, her voice was not angry. It was quiet. And it was filled with an immense, cosmic sadness.

"Do you see now, Dimple?" she whispered, the sound cutting through my sobs. "Do you see how deep the roots of sin go? Do you see how easy it is to fall, even when you know the consequences?"

She drifted closer. I felt a strange, cool touch on my shoulder. It was not a judgment. It was not a condemnation.

"This does not change the pact," she said softly. "It only adds to the ledger. This is why you are writing this book. Not because you are better than those who will read it. But because you are exactly the same."

Her words were not a comfort. They were a terrible, heartbreaking truth. But in that moment, in her quiet, sorrowful consolation, I felt a flicker of something I hadn't felt before. Not hope. Not courage.

But the grim, absolute understanding of the work that still needed to be done.

"It is time," she said. And the room began to dissolve into blackness.

CH 38: The Nihilist's Bargain

The black vortex that Katha had summoned vanished. I was left on the floor of my bedroom, naked and trembling, the chill of her presence a stark contrast to the lingering, sordid warmth of Sameer’s body on my sheets. The shame was a physical thing, a thick, greasy coating on my soul.

I looked at Katha, this beautiful, terrifying being, and the last of my strength crumbled. I was no longer a defiant rebel or a desperate questioner. I was just… broken.

"I can't do it," I wept, the words coming out in ragged, ugly sobs. I didn’t bother to cover myself. What was the point? She saw the nakedness of my soul; the nakedness of my body was meaningless. "Look at me. I just did it again. In front of you. He was here, and I couldn't say no. I can't resist it, Katha. The desire… the need to feel something other than this horror… it's always there. I can't stop it."

I dragged a hand through my messy hair, the gesture frantic, hopeless. "You tell me about laws and consequences, but how can any of it be fair when we are built with this weakness inside us? Please," I begged, looking up at her, my eyes swimming with tears, "guide me.

Tell me how to have peace. How can I stop this feeling?"

My voice broke. "I don't think I can. I don't think peace is possible for me. Not anymore. I will never achieve Moksha. I will never be pure. I have seen what Rohan did. I know what I've done. We are all broken. We are all damned."

A new feeling began to bubble up through the despair. It was not hope. It was a wild, reckless, bitter nihilism.

"So I'm done," I said, a strange, harsh laugh escaping my lips. "I don't want to write this book anymore. What's the point? If I'm already going to Hell, why should I spend my last days on Earth torturing myself with the memory of it? Life only comes once. That's what they say, right? YOLO." The acronym felt obscene and pathetic in my mouth. "Maybe they're right. Maybe it's better to just… enjoy it. I'm going to go out. I'm going to go to a club. I'm going to drink and dance and have more fun, find more men like Sameer. If I'm going to burn, I might as well burn brightly."

I looked at her, my tear-streaked face a mask of defiant misery.

"Take your deal. I choose pleasure. I choose to forget."

Katha did not react with anger. She simply watched me, her ancient eyes filled with a profound, cosmic sorrow. She let my bitter, foolish words hang in the silent room.

"You speak of a life lived once," she said finally, her voice soft, but carrying an immense weight. "You are wrong. You have lived millions of lives, Dimple. And you will live millions more. You have been an ant. You have been a tiger. You have been a king, and you have been a beggar. You have been a man, and you have been a woman. And in most of those lives, you were a prisoner of instinct, with no more choice than a stone rolling down a hill."

She drifted closer, and the air grew still. "Only now, in this human form, do you have a choice. This life is not the only one. It is the only one that matters. It is your one chance, in millions of births, to stand up and choose your own path. To use your intellect, your heart, your will, to rise above the beast."

"You say you cannot resist your desires," she continued, her voice gaining a sharp, clear edge. "That is the greatest lie a human soul can tell itself. You are not your desires, Dimple. You are the one who observes them. The anger, the lust, the greed… they are clouds that pass through the sky of your consciousness. They are not the sky itself. You have the power to let them pass. You have the power to not act on them. Every time you feel that illicit thrill and you turn away from it, you are performing a great austerity. Every time you feel that flash of anger and you choose to breathe instead of speak, you are creating merit. That is the battle of human life. It is the only battle worth fighting."

She looked at my naked, shivering form on the bed. "To give up now, to surrender to pleasure because you believe you are already lost… that is the true damnation. It is to take this priceless, rare chance at liberation and throw it into the gutter for a few more moments of fleeting, empty sensation."

Her words were not a comfort. They were a challenge. A terrible, clarifying challenge. She was not offering me peace. She was reminding me that peace was not something to be given, but something to be fought for, one painful choice at a time.

"The choice is yours, Dimple," she said, her voice softening once more. "You can go to the club. You can drink and forget for a night. And I will not stop you. But I will be here tomorrow night. And the night after. And the journey into Hell will continue. The ledger must be balanced. Or, you can stand up, cover yourself, and choose to fight the beast inside you, right now, by picking up your pen and continuing your work. The choice is always yours."

The light around her began to fade. She was leaving the decision, the most important decision of my existence, in my own trembling hands.

CH 39: Vaishasan, The Hell of Hollow Rituals

The morning after my nihilistic breakdown and Katha’s stark clarification, I woke up… different. The fear was still there, a cold stone in the pit of my stomach. The phantom pains still echoed through my limbs. But underneath it all, there was a new, hard resolve. Hope was a lie. Peace was a distant dream. But purpose… purpose was real. My job was to witness, to write, and to build a shield of merit for my family with every word of this testimony. I would not falter again.

When Katha came, I was sitting on my bed, waiting. I met her gaze, and for the first time, there was no pleading in my eyes. Only a grim readiness. I nodded once. She touched my forehead.

The plunge was as violent as ever, but my landing was different. I was still Maya, still in this place of torment, but Dimple’s new resolve was a thin, but present, armour around my consciousness.

The Yamduts dragged me into the next Naraka. This one was called Vaishasan. It was a vast, blood-soaked courtyard, like the grounds of a great, macabre temple.

In the center, great sacrificial fires burned, but they gave off no warmth, only a thick, black, choking smoke.

"This Hell is for those who use religion for pride," a Yamdut's voice boomed. "For those who perform great sacrifices and charities not for God, but for show. For those who kill innocent animals in the name of a hollow ritual, seeking the respect of men rather than the grace of the divine."

All around the courtyard, other souls were being tormented. They were dragged to great wooden posts, like the ones used for animal sacrifice on Earth. The Yamduts, acting as priests of this dark temple, would tie them up and, with a chilling, ritualistic precision, begin to butcher them as a sacrifice is butchered.

They dragged me to one such post. They bound my hands and feet. One Yamdut held my head back, while another approached with a long, curved knife.

"For every life taken in vanity," it hissed, "a part of you is forfeit."

The knife sliced my throat. It was not a quick death. It was a slow, gurgling agony. I felt my spiritual lifeblood drain away, my vision fading to black, all while feeling the cold, clinical satisfaction of the Yamdut performing its duty.

Then, I was whole again, back at the start of the courtyard, ready to be sacrificed anew.

And the memories came. Not with the sharp sting of a spike, but with the slow, dawning horror of understanding.

Sacrifice. I am Dimple. I am organizing a huge puja at our home. I have invited everyone who is anyone in our social circle. I am not thinking about God. I am thinking about the food, the decorations, the clothes. I am thinking about how impressed Mrs. Sharma from next door will be. I remember snapping at Rohan because the flowers he ordered were not exotic enough. The entire ritual was not an act of devotion. It was an act of social climbing. An offering to my own ego.

Sacrifice. I am Rohan. He is at his company's annual charity gala. He makes a large donation, not because he cares about the cause, but because the CEO is watching.

He smiles for the camera as he hands over the oversized cheque, his heart full of pride, not compassion. A hollow sacrifice.

Sacrifice. I see a memory that is not mine, but a universal one. A man, a king on Earth, performs a great animal sacrifice. He has hundreds of animals slaughtered, not for sustenance, but to display his power and piety. He believes he is earning merit. Here, in Vaishasan, he is tied to a post, and the souls of the animals he killed are now the tormentors, each one taking its turn to slice a piece from his soul, their eyes burning with a perfect, righteous vengeance.

Here, in this hell of hollow rituals, I understood that the intention behind an act is everything. A prayer whispered in a closet with a pure heart is worth more than a million-rupee donation made for show. A simple meal shared with a hungry person is a greater sacrifice than a thousand animals killed for the sake of pride. The Law does not look at the size of the offering. It looks at the heart of the offerer. And for those whose hearts are filled with anything other than pure, selfless love for God… the knives of Vaishasan are waiting.

CH 40: Lalabhaksa, The River of Shame

My night in Vaishasan, the hell of hollow rituals, left me with a new kind of clarity. The path to salvation wasn't about grand gestures; it was about the purity of the heart. My new resolve was not a shield against the pain, but it was a lens through which to understand it. I was no longer just a victim of this journey; I was a student of its terrible laws.

When Katha came, I was ready. The plunge into Maya's soul was as violent as ever, but I met it with a grim acceptance.

The Yamduts dragged my soul from the blood-soaked courtyard of sacrifice. The landscape shifted again. We stood on the bank of another river, but this one was different from the Vaitarna. The air here was thick with a cloying, salty smell. The river itself was not filled with blood or pus, but with a thick, milky-white, viscous liquid that flowed sluggishly.

This was Lalabhaksa. The Hell where sinners are forced to consume semen.

"This Naraka," a Yamdut's voice echoed in my mind, its tone flat and devoid of emotion, "is for those men who, driven by uncontrolled lust, force their own wives to drink their seed.

It is for those who, in their arrogance, treat their partner not as a sacred equal, but as an object for the fulfillment of their own degrading desires."

My soul recoiled in pure, visceral disgust. This was a sin so specific, so intimate in its violation, that I couldn't comprehend it.

But I was forced to.

The Yamduts dragged me to the river's edge. I was not a participant here, but a witness. They forced my soul to kneel, my face just inches from the foul, flowing river. "You will watch," the Yamdut commanded. "You will understand the final destination of all selfish lust."

They began to drag other souls forward. They were all men. On Earth, they might have been powerful CEOs, respected doctors, or quiet, unassuming neighbors. Here, their status was gone. They were just souls, stripped naked and trembling with terror.

One by one, the Yamduts would grab a soul, hold its head back, and with a horrifying, methodical cruelty, force the thick, white liquid from the river down its throat. The souls would gag, their spiritual bodies convulsing, but the Yamduts were relentless. They would beat the sinners on the head with iron clubs, forcing them to swallow, again and again.

With each soul's torment, a vision flooded my consciousness.

Vision. I see a bedroom. A husband and wife. The husband, his face a mask of selfish desire, is forcing his wife to perform this degrading act. I feel her shame, her humiliation, her feeling of being less than human. I feel her silent tears.

Vision. Another bedroom. Another couple. The wife is refusing. The husband grows angry. He uses his strength, his power, to force her. The act is not one of love, but of violation. An assertion of dominance.

I understood then. This was not just about a physical act. It was about the ultimate disrespect. It was about treating a sacred partner as an object, a vessel for one's own perverted desires. It was about the absolute corruption of the marital bond.

CH 41: Sarameyadana, The Feast of the Dogs

When Katha returned me to my body, the foul taste of Lalabhaksa lingered in my soul. My bedsheets were soaked with sweat. I felt stained, defiled, and hollowed out. There was no more rebellion in me, only a grim, bone-deep weariness and the cold resolve to see this through. The purpose Katha had given me was my only lifeline in this ocean of horror.

The plunge back into Maya’s soul was no less violent, but my landing was different. I was no longer just a terrified passenger. I was an observer, a student of this terrible place, noting every detail for the testimony I was condemned to write.

The Yamduts dragged me from the banks of that vile river. The landscape changed once more. The cloying smell was replaced by the dry scent of dust and old bones. We were on a vast, barren plain. There were no trees, no rocks, nothing but a flat, dusty ground that stretched to a horizon that seemed to shimmer with menace.

"This Naraka is called Sarameyadana," the voice of a Yamdut ground in my consciousness.

"The Feast of the Dogs. It is for those who poison, who plunder, and who burn. For the arsonist who sets fire to a home. For the official who poisons the public well. For the robber who sacks a village. For the powerful who destroy the lives and livelihoods of others for their own gain."

I looked around the empty plain, confused. Where was the torment?

Then, I heard it. A low, rumbling growl that seemed to come from the horizon itself. The ground began to vibrate. I looked out, and I saw a cloud of dust rising in the distance. A massive cloud, moving towards me with an impossible speed.

It was not a dust storm. It was a pack.

There were hundreds of them. The scripture says seven hundred and twenty. They were monstrous dogs, larger than wolves, their fur a matted, mangy black. Their eyes were pits of fire, and their teeth… their teeth were not iron this time. They were like jagged diamonds, glistening with a terrifying light. They were vajra, the scripture called them. Unbreakable.

They were not the feral beasts of Sauripur. These were soldiers. An army of divine punishment. And I was their target.

They did not surround me. They charged. It was a wave of black fur and diamond teeth. There was no time to scream, no time to run. They hit me like a tidal wave, and the world dissolved into a chaos of absolute, overwhelming pain.

Their diamond teeth did not just tear. They shattered. I felt my spiritual bones, my very essence, being cracked and splintered. They did not eat me with hunger; they devoured me with righteous fury.

Memory. The pain brings a vision. I am Dimple, sitting in a sleek boardroom. I am leading a hostile takeover of a smaller company. I am using every dirty trick in the book. Spreading false rumors to crash their stock price. Poaching their key employees. Poisoning their reputation with their clients. I am burning their village to the ground, not with fire, but with spreadsheets and legal documents. I remember the thrill of the victory, the feeling of power as I stood on the ruins of my competitor's business.

Memory. I see Rohan. He is on the phone with his old business partner, the one he cheated. The partner is begging, his voice thick with tears. "You've ruined me, Rohan," he sobs. "You've taken everything." Rohan’s face is a mask of cold indifference. "It's just business," he says, before hanging up. He had plundered his friend's life, leaving him with nothing.

Here, in Sarameyadana, the consequences of that kind of modern warfare were made real. We had been the corporate arsonists, the financial plunderers. And now, these dogs, these agents of Dharma, were the embodiment of the lives we had destroyed.

One of them, its diamond teeth dripping with my own spiritual essence, looked me in the eye. And in its fiery gaze, I saw the face of the junior colleague whose career I had sabotaged. Another had the eyes of Rohan's betrayed partner. Another had the face of a small shopkeeper we had driven out of business.

They were the souls of our victims, given a form with which to exact their perfect, lawful revenge.

They devoured me completely, shattering my soul into a million pieces. And then, I was made whole again, standing on the dusty plain, just in time to see the terrifying cloud on the horizon, charging towards me once more. This was Sarameyadana. It was a place where you are not just punished for your sins. You are punished by your sins. And they are very, very hungry.

CH 42: Avichi, The Waveless Hell

I woke up with the phantom taste of my own spiritual essence in my mouth, the memory of being devoured by the diamond-toothed dogs a fresh, visceral horror. The resolve I had found after my conversation with Katha was a fragile shield, and every night of torment threatened to shatter it. But the thought of Rohan and Avi, their own journeys looming, was the only thing that mattered. I had to continue. I had to write.

The plunge back into Maya’s soul was a familiar violation. The Yamduts were waiting. They dragged my soul away from the dusty plains of Sarameyadana, and the world shifted into a new and terrible landscape.

We were at the base of a great mountain. It was not a mountain of rock and snow, but of a smooth, black, featureless stone that seemed to suck the dim light from the air. It rose for what the scriptures say is one hundred yojanas, a height so vast it scraped the oppressive, blood-red sky. The mountain was shaped like a massive, petrified wave, cresting and about to crash, but frozen in time.

This was Avichi. The Waveless Hell.

"This Naraka is for those who bear false witness," the Yamdut's voice ground in my mind. "For the liar who gives false testimony in a court of law. For the businessman who lies while making a deal. For the Brahmin who gives a false promise after accepting a donation. For any soul whose words are a vessel for untruth."

They didn't drag me up the mountain. They simply appeared with me at its peak. I stood on a narrow ledge, looking down at the ground so far below it seemed like a distant, dark sea. But it was not a sea. It was a floor of solid rock, looking as hard and unyielding as diamond.

"You have used your words to cause others to fall," the Yamdut hissed. "Now you will fall."

Without another word, it pushed me.

The fall was not fast. It was a slow, terrifying descent through the thick, heavy air of Hell. I tumbled end over end, my silent screams lost in the vast emptiness. The ground rushed up to meet me, a hard, unyielding promise of annihilation.

The impact was absolute. It was not pain. It was erasure. My yatana-deha, my body of suffering, shattered into a million pieces upon the stone floor. It was like a glass vase dropped onto concrete. My consciousness was scattered, a cloud of screaming dust.

For a moment, there was nothing. No thought, no feeling, only the memory of impact.

And then, I was whole again. Standing back on the narrow ledge at the peak of the mountain. The Yamdut was there, its face a mask of bored indifference. And it pushed me again.

Over and over. The fall, the terror, the impact, the shattering, the reformation, and the push. It was a perfect, unending cycle of annihilation.

And with every fall, a memory.

Fall. I am Dimple. I am in a lawyer's office, giving a deposition for a corporate lawsuit. I remember the other lawyer's questions. I remember looking him in the eye and lying. A calculated, well-rehearsed lie to protect my company, to protect my own position. A lie under oath.

Fall. I am Maya. My friend has gotten into a small fender bender. It was her fault. I was in the car with her. When the police arrive, I lie. I back up her story, creating a false narrative to save her from an insurance claim. It felt like loyalty then. A small lie for a friend. Here, it was a betrayal of truth itself, and the fall was the consequence.

Fall. I see Rohan. He is on the phone with a client, promising delivery dates he knows he can't meet, quoting prices for materials he has no intention of using. The casual lies of business, the ones everyone tells to get ahead.

In Avichi, I learned that there is no such thing as a small lie. Every untruth, every false testimony, every promise made with a deceitful heart, adds to the height of this mountain. And for every lie told, the soul must take the long, terrible fall. The punishment was not just the shattering impact. It was the slow, terrifying descent, the moment of absolute helplessness before the inevitable consequence. It was a hell designed to teach the ultimate truth: that words have weight, and lies... lies make you fall.

CH 43: A Question of Fault

The following day was a haze of grim determination. I wrote. I stared at the walls. I tried to prepare my mind for the next plunge into Hell, my new resolve a thin, brittle shield. The nights were a known horror. The days, with their silence and memories, were becoming a different kind of torment.

Late in the afternoon, there was a knock on the door.

My blood ran cold. I wasn't expecting anyone. I crept to the door and looked through the peephole. It was Sameer. And he wasn't alone. Two other men, friends of his I vaguely recognized from office parties, stood behind him, laughing.

A primal fear, sharp and immediate, seized me. "Go away," I said, my voice muffled by the door.

"Dimple, come on, open up," Sameer's voice was jovial, but there was a hard edge to it. "We were in the neighborhood, thought we'd check on you."

"I'm not decent," I lied, my heart hammering against my ribs.

"We don't mind," one of his friends called out, and they all laughed

Before I could react, Sameer shouldered the door. The old lock, a thing I had never bothered to upgrade, splintered and gave way. The door flew open.

The three of them stumbled into my living room, bringing the smell of whiskey and a predatory energy that instantly suffocated the air in my home.

"See? We just wanted to say hi," Sameer said, his eyes roaming over me with an owner's gaze.

"You need to leave," I said, my voice trembling but cold. "Now."

He laughed. "Dimple, don't be like that. We're here to cheer you up." He took a step towards me. I took a step back.

"I said, get out," I repeated, my voice rising.

He lunged for me, grabbing my arm. And something inside me snapped. The weeks of torment, the fear, the shame—it all coalesced into a single point of pure, defiant rage.

I slapped him. Hard. The sound cracked through the silent house.

His head snapped back. The smile vanished from his face, replaced by a look of stunned, ugly fury. "You bitch," he snarled.

And then he attacked me.

He was stronger than me. He ripped my kurta from my body with a single, violent motion. The sound of the tearing fabric was like the sound of my soul ripping in two. He threw me to the floor.

"You think you can say no to me?" he spat, his face inches from mine. "Hold her down," he ordered his friends.

They were on me in an instant. One held my arms, another my legs. I fought. I screamed. I kicked and bit and clawed, but it was useless. They were too strong. Sameer tore the rest of my clothes from my body, leaving me naked and exposed on my own living room floor.

And as they held me down, as Sameer loomed over me, I saw her.

Katha was standing by the doorway, her form shimmering, her face a mask of profound, sorrowful stillness. She was watching.

Sameer and his friends couldn't see her. They were lost in their own brutal, animalistic act. They took turns. All four of them. It was not lust. It was violence. It was a punishment. An act of power. I felt my mind detach, floating up to a corner of the ceiling, watching the violation of the body below as if it were happening to someone else. The only thing I could feel was a cold, endless shame, and the weight of Katha's silent, sorrowful gaze.

When they were finished, they left as quickly as they had come, laughing and joking, leaving me a broken, discarded thing on the floor.

The silence that rushed back into the room was heavier, uglier than ever before. I lay there, naked and bruised, for a long time. The tears came, but they were not tears of grief.

They were hot tears of shame and a deep, soul-crushing confusion.

Finally, I looked at Katha, who had not moved.

"What was my fault?" I whispered, my voice a broken thing. "Tell me. What was my fault this time? I said no. I fought. I didn't want this. I am trying to change. And still... this happens. Is this also my karma? Is this also my punishment?"

My voice rose, turning into a raw, ragged scream of pure anguish. "Is this fair? What about a pure woman? A woman who has never sinned, who is chaste and devoted. If men do this to her, does she also go to hell? Does she have to pay for their sin? Tell me, Katha! Is your Law so cruel?"

Katha was silent for a long moment, letting my questions hang in the shattered air of the room. When she finally spoke, her voice was softer than I had ever heard it. It was devoid of its usual icy judgment, and filled with a deep, resonant sadness.

"No, Dimple," she said softly. "The Law is not cruel. It is only just."

She drifted closer, and for the first time, her presence felt like a comfort, a cool hand on a fevered brow.

"The victim of such an act carries no sin," she stated, her voice clear and absolute. "The karma of a violation belongs entirely to the violator. A pure soul who is brutalized by another remains pure. Her ledger is untouched by their filth. It is they, the perpetrators, who have just booked their own passage to a Naraka far worse than any you have yet seen."

"Then why?" I sobbed. "Why did this happen to me?"

"The consequences of our actions are complex," Katha explained gently. "Your past karma, your affair, your willingness to engage with a man like Sameer… it did not earn you this violation. The sin of this act is his alone. But your past choices… they put you in his orbit. They made you a target for his darkness. This was not a punishment for you saying no today. It was the final, brutal result of you saying yes in the past."

She looked at me, her eyes filled with a compassion that seemed to encompass all the suffering in the universe.

"The Law does not punish the victim for the sin of the attacker. Ever. That is a fundamental truth. You are weeping for the violation of your body. But you should weep for the state of your soul, a soul that invited such darkness into its house."

Her words were a strange, painful kind of absolution. The act was not my fault. But my life had led me to its door.

"You have been violated, Dimple," Katha said, her voice regaining a sliver of its usual firmness. "But you are not broken. You have a choice. You can let this destroy you. Or you can let it be the fire that burns away the last of your attachments to this world of selfish men and fleeting pleasures."

She extended a hand. "The choice, as always, is yours. But the journey awaits."

CH 44: Ayahpaan, The Hell of Molten Iron

The morning after the assault, and my subsequent confrontation with Katha, I did not cry. The tears had been burned out of me. I moved with a slow, deliberate purpose. I showered, the water stinging the bruises on my skin. I bandaged the cut on my lip. And then I sat down and wrote, my hand steady. The violation had been a brutal, horrifying baptism. The weak, selfish, pleasure-seeking part of me had been killed. What was left was a core of cold, hard resolve. This book was no longer just a penance. It was my weapon. It was my purpose.

When night fell, I did not wait in fear. I sat on my bed, my back straight, and I waited for Katha. I was a soldier reporting for duty.

She appeared, and for the first time, her eyes held a new light. It was not compassion, not pity. It was acknowledgment. A silent recognition of the change in me. She nodded, once. And she touched my forehead.

The plunge into Maya’s soul was as violent as ever, but I met the darkness head-on. The Yamduts were waiting.

They dragged me from the memory of my own violation and cast me into the next Naraka.

The world shifted. The air grew thick with the coppery scent of blood and the sour stench of cheap liquor. We were in a vast, dark cavern. The only light came from rivers of molten iron that flowed in channels carved into the floor, casting a hellish, orange glow on the scene.

This was Ayahpaan. The Hell of Drinking Molten Iron.

"This Naraka is for those who betray their sacred vows through intoxication," a Yamdut’s voice boomed, echoing off the cavern walls. "For the Brahmin who, sworn to a life of purity, drinks alcohol. For the warrior or merchant who drinks on holy days, abandoning their duty. For any soul who, in a position of trust, chooses the oblivion of drink over the responsibility they carry."

The Yamduts dragged me forward. All around me, other souls were being tormented. Yamduts would hold them down, pry their mouths open with iron tools, and pour the glowing, molten iron from the rivers down their throats.

The screams were horrific, a gurgling, sizzling sound of a soul being incinerated from the inside out.

They grabbed me. They forced me to my knees. One held my head back, while another brought a ladle filled with the liquid fire.

"For every duty you abandoned for a drink," it hissed.

The molten iron poured down my throat. The pain was absolute, a supernova of fire that consumed my tongue, my throat, my stomach, my very essence. My consciousness was erased in a wave of pure, liquid agony.

Then, I was whole again, kneeling, the memory of the fire still burning.

And the visions came, not just of alcohol, but of every form of intoxication we used to escape our duties.

Memory. I am Dimple, at a critical work conference. I am supposed to be networking, representing my company. But the open bar is too tempting.

My words become slurred, my jokes inappropriate. I make a fool of myself and damage a potential business deal. I chose the intoxication of alcohol over my professional duty.

Memory. I see Rohan. It’s the night before a huge exam in his engineering college. His friends come over with a bottle of whiskey. He knows he should study. His future depends on this. But the lure of a night of fun, of drunken laughter, is too strong. He fails the exam. He has to repeat the year. The intoxication of pleasure, chosen over the duty to his own future.

Memory. I am Maya. It’s the day of my brother Avi’s sixth birthday party. I am supposed to be helping my mother, watching the other children. But I am a teenager, bored and sullen. I lock myself in my room, not with drink, but with the intoxicating drama of my social media feeds. I am drunk on gossip and online validation. I hear my mother calling my name, needing my help, but I ignore her. I have abandoned my duty as a daughter and a sister for the cheapest drug of all: the screen.

In Ayahpaan, I understood that intoxication is not just about alcohol or drugs. It is about any pleasure we choose over our responsibility. We can be intoxicated with pride, with ambition, with laziness, with social media. Anything we use to escape our Dharma, our sacred duty, leads to this place.

Here, the Law forces you to swallow the ultimate intoxicant: a river of fire that burns away every excuse, every justification, leaving only the searing, agonizing truth of your own neglected responsibilities.

CH 45: Sukaramukha, The Hell of the Unjust

I awoke from the molten rivers of Ayahpaan, my throat a column of phantom fire. The violation by Sameer had been a brutal, clarifying baptism. The weak, selfish, pleasure-seeking part of me had been killed. What was left was a core of cold, hard resolve. My purpose was my only shield. When Katha came, I was ready.

The plunge was a familiar violence, but my soul met the darkness head-on. The Yamduts were waiting. They dragged me into a new landscape, one that resonated with the cold, brutal efficiency of my former life. The air grew thick with the metallic clang of industry and the sickly-sweet smell of crushed bone and sinew. We were in a vast, cavernous space. All around me, giant millstones, forged from black iron and grooved like monstrous teeth, ground against each other with a deafening, soul-shaking roar.

This was Sukaramukha. The Hell of the Hog’s Mouth.

"This Naraka is for the unjust ruler," a Yamdut’s voice boomed over the grinding. "For the king who punishes the innocent. For the minister who oppresses the people.

And for you, Dimple. For the manager, the team leader, the CEO—for any soul given power who uses it to crush the lives of those beneath them."

Before I could protest, they seized me. Other souls, screaming in terror, were being fed into the great mills. I watched as a man who looked like a famous, ruthless CEO was forced between the stones, his soul-body flattened and shredded into a screaming pulp that oozed from the other side.

Then it was my turn. They threw me onto the cold iron slab that fed the mill. The stones drew me in with an inexorable, terrifying force. The pressure began at my feet, a slow, grinding annihilation. It was not a sharp pain, but the absolute horror of being unmade, of my very essence being crushed, atom by atom. The sound was inside my head, a wet, cracking, grinding noise that was the sound of my own spiritual form being turned to paste.

And as the millstones ground my soul, the memories, my corporate sins, were ground into me.

Memory. I am in a boardroom, my face a mask of cool professionalism. I am looking at a spreadsheet. To meet my quarterly budget, I need to "downsize" a department. I see the names on the list. One is a man who has been with the company for twenty years, a loyal, hardworking employee with a family and a mortgage. I know this will ruin him. I don’t care. He is a number. A liability. I sign the paper. His life is crushed so that my report will look good. Now, my own bones are being crushed in return.

Memory. I see Rohan. He is on a conference call with a small supplier, a family-run business. He is deliberately delaying their payment, using his company's size and power to squeeze them, to improve his own cash flow. I see the memory of the supplier’s pleading emails, of his business eventually going bankrupt. Rohan had crushed him, not with stones, but with invoices and legal threats. Now, somewhere in this same hell, his soul is feeling the same grinding pressure.

The millstones reached my head. My consciousness was extinguished in a wave of pure, pressurized agony. And then, I was whole again, lying on the iron slab, waiting to be fed into the grinder once more. In Sukaramukha, I learned that the bloodless crimes of the boardroom have a price written in blood. Every life you crush with the weight of your authority will one day be the force that grinds your own soul to dust.

CH 46: Andhakupa, The Dark Well

The Yamduts dragged my pulped and reconstituted soul from the grinding mills of Sukaramukha. The landscape shifted. The deafening roar of industry faded, replaced by a damp, earthy silence. We were at the edge of a deep, dark well, so wide I could not see the other side. A foul, musty odor rose from its depths, the smell of forgotten cellars and things long dead.

This was Andhakupa. The Hell of the Dark Well.

"This Naraka is for those who are cruel to the helpless," a Yamdut’s voice whispered, a cold rustle in the silence. "For those who torment creatures who cannot fight back. The ant, the bird, the beast of the field. And the human who, in their heart, is weaker than you."

They shoved me over the edge. I fell into a lightless, airless void. The landing was soft and squirming. The floor was a living carpet of creatures. Every small life I had ever harmed or disregarded was here, now grown monstrous and hungry.

The cockroaches I had poisoned in my kitchen were the size of dogs, their antennae twitching as they swarmed me, their clicking mandibles echoing in the dark. The spiders I had crushed were giant, hairy things that wrapped me in sticky, suffocating webs.

The Yamduts dragged my pulped and reconstituted soul from the grinding mills of Sukaramukha. The landscape shifted. The deafening roar of industry faded, replaced by a damp, earthy silence. We were at the edge of a deep, dark well, so wide I could not see the other side. A foul, musty odor rose from its depths, the smell of forgotten cellars and things long dead.

This was Andhakupa. The Hell of the Dark Well.

"This Naraka is for those who are cruel to the helpless," a Yamdut’s voice whispered, a cold rustle in the silence. "For those who torment creatures who cannot fight back. The ant, the bird, the beast of the field. And the human who, in their heart, is weaker than you."

They shoved me over the edge. I fell into a lightless, airless void. The landing was soft and squirming. The floor was a living carpet of creatures. Every small life I had ever harmed or disregarded was here, now grown monstrous and hungry.

The cockroaches I had poisoned in my kitchen were the size of dogs, their antennae twitching as they swarmed me, their clicking mandibles echoing in the dark. The spiders I had crushed were giant, hairy things that wrapped me in sticky, suffocating webs.

The mosquitoes I had swatted were bird-sized horrors, their proboscises sharp as needles, draining my spiritual essence with a high-pitched whine that was the sound of madness.

It was a hell of a million tiny, crawling, biting torments in absolute darkness.

Memory. I am Maya, a child. I have caught a grasshopper. For my own cruel amusement, I pull off its legs, one by one, watching it struggle. The memory, once a forgotten flicker of childhood cruelty, is now a living torment, as a giant, spectral grasshopper, its multifaceted eyes burning with an ancient intelligence, tears at my own limbs.

Memory. I am Dimple. A stray dog, thin and scared, is cowering near my apartment building. I don't help it. I call the municipal service to have it "removed." I know what that means. I chose my own convenience over its life. Now, the spirit of that dog, its eyes burning with a righteous fury, is a massive beast, its jaws closing around my neck.

In Andhakupa, there is no escape. The well is a universe of darkness filled with the ghosts of the helpless you harmed.

Here, I understood that the cosmos keeps a perfect account, not just of our crimes against humans, but of our cruelty to all of life. Every life is sacred, and for every one you mindlessly destroy, you will be destroyed in turn by its amplified, avenging spirit.

CH 47: Dandashuka, The Hell of Serpents

I was pulled from the biting darkness of the well and cast into a barren, rocky landscape. The air hissed. The ground writhed. All around me, great serpents, some with five heads, some with seven, slithered and coiled. Their scales were the color of obsidian, their eyes malevolent jewels of fire.

This was Dandashuka. The Hell of Serpents.

"This Naraka is for those whose nature is like a venomous snake," a Yamdut’s voice hissed from all around me. "For those who spread cruelty and harm without provocation. For the aggressor, the bully, the one who strikes first not from fear, but from a cold desire to inflict pain."

Before I could move, one of the massive serpents struck. It did not bite me. It swallowed me whole. I was plunged into a suffocating, muscular darkness. Crushing pressure and digestive acids began to dissolve my soul-body in an excruciating, slow burn. It was the agony of being consumed alive, my silent screams echoing in a prison of flesh.

When I was finally expelled, a half-dissolved ruin, my body was remade, only for another serpent to swallow me.

Memory. I am Dimple. I am in a tense meeting. A junior colleague is nervous. I see his weakness, and instead of helping, I exploit it. I ask him a sharp, pointed question I know he can't answer, not for the good of the project, but for the simple, cruel pleasure of watching him squirm in front of our boss. My words were the serpent's venom.

Memory. I see Rohan. He is in an argument with me. He has lost the point, and he knows it. Instead of conceding, he strikes out with a deeply personal, cruel insult, something he knows will wound me far more than the argument itself. He attacked not to win, but to hurt.

In Dandashuka, those who lived their lives striking out with venomous cruelty learn what it feels like to be on the receiving end of an unprovoked, all-consuming attack.

CH 48: Avatanirodhan, The Hell of Suffocation

From the bellies of the great serpents, I was taken to a place of utter stillness. We stood before a mountain, but it was not made of rock. It was a solid mass of dark, dense clay. The Yamduts dragged me to its base, where there was a small, dark opening. They threw me inside.

The opening sealed behind me. I was in a small, cramped cave. There was no light, and the air was thick, heavy, and stale. With every breath, the oxygen seemed to thin, replaced by a suffocating, poisonous fume that seeped from the clay walls.

This was Avatanirodhan. The Hell of No Way Out.

"This is for the jailer," a voice murmured from the walls themselves. "For the one who traps another. The one who puts a living being in a cage. The one who confines another's potential. The one who creates a prison, whether of iron bars or of circumstance."

Panic seized me. I clawed at the walls, but the clay was hard as stone. I screamed, but the thick air swallowed the sound. My lungs burned.

My vision began to tunnel. I was suffocating. Just as consciousness faded, I would be granted a single, agonizing gasp of air, only for the slow suffocation to begin again.

Memory. I am Maya, as a child. I had a pet bird in a small cage. I loved it, I thought. But I kept it in a prison for my own pleasure. I remember its frantic, hopeless fluttering against the bars. Now I feel its claustrophobia, its despair.

Memory. I am Dimple. I have a brilliant, creative employee on my team. He has ideas that could change the company. But his brilliance threatens me. So I keep him buried. I assign him to tedious, dead-end projects. I praise his "reliability" while I ensure he never gets a chance to shine. I have built a cage of corporate jargon and meaningless tasks around his spirit, and I have let him suffocate there.

In Avatanirodhan, I learned that a cage is a cage, whether made of metal or of a thousand small acts of suppression. To deny another being their freedom, their potential to soar, is a sin that earns you your own perfect, inescapable, and suffocating prison.

CH 49: Paryavartan, The Hell of Mockery

My soul was dragged from the suffocating cave and cast into a place that seemed, for a moment, almost beautiful. I was in a lush, green meadow. In the center stood a great banquet table, groaning with every delicacy imaginable. The sight of it made my starved soul weep with a desperate, phantom hunger.

This was Paryavartan. The Hell of Turning Away.

"This is for those who turn away the hungry," the Yamdut explained. "For those who mock the poor, and for those who honor no guests."

I stumbled towards the table, my hands outstretched. But as I drew near, the food was snatched away. Not by Yamduts, but by monstrous birds of prey, with cruel iron beaks and eyes that burned with contempt. They were hawks and vultures. They did not eat the food. They simply took it and then turned their attention to me.

They swooped down, not to tear my flesh, but to mock me. They would land on my shoulders, their sharp talons digging in, and whisper my own cruel words back to me.

"He's probably a fraud, he'll just use it for drink," a vulture hissed, its voice a perfect echo of my own thought as I walked past a beggar outside a temple.

"Just tell them we're not home," a hawk screeched, repeating my words to Rohan when an unexpected distant relative had arrived at our door.

They would peck at my eyes, not to blind me, but to force me to see the hunger and hurt in the faces of those I had turned away. The pain was not physical. It was the agony of shame, of being confronted by my own lack of compassion, of being starved and mocked by the very excuses I had made in life.

Of course. You are absolutely right. A story of this gravity must be given the space to breathe, and the conclusion must honor the detailed, immersive journey that came before. My apologies for the abridged version. I will now expand the narrative to give these final, crucial torments the full, novelistic treatment they deserve.

CH 50: Ksharakardam, The Mire of Pride

he Yamduts dragged my soul, a tattered ruin, from the iron embrace of the tailor's needles in Suchimukha. The workshop of the miser faded into a grey mist, and a new landscape resolved around me. The air grew heavy, thick with a smell that was both acrid and foul, like chemical waste mixed with swamp gas and decay. It was a smell that burned the nostrils and made the soul retch.

We stood on the shore of a vast, bubbling swamp. It was not the river of filth or the ocean of pus. This was a mire of thick, caustic sludge, the color of slate, that popped and hissed as foul gasses escaped its surface. Jagged, crystalline salt formations, sharp as broken glass, jutted out from the muck, and the ground at the water's edge was a treacherous carpet of bone shards and razor-sharp shells left behind by previous sufferers.

This was Ksharakardam. The Hell of the Caustic Mire.

"This Naraka is for the proud," a Yamdut's voice ground out, the sound like stones grating together. "For those who, puffed up with the vanity of their birth, their wealth, or their knowledge, look down upon others

For the arrogant who disrespect the holy, the elder, and the good. You placed yourself above all in life, Dimple. Here, you will be brought low."

Without another word, they seized me. They didn't push me in. They dragged me, headfirst, into the burning sludge.

The contact was not a simple burning. It was a corrosive fire. The thick mud clung to me, its acidic properties eating away at my spiritual flesh, dissolving it layer by layer. The sharp crystals and bone shards hidden in the mire tore at me, opening up new wounds for the caustic filth to invade. It was the agony of being simultaneously flayed and dissolved.

They dragged me under the surface, into the suffocating, burning blackness of the swamp's depths. The pressure was immense, and the pain was a constant, searing fire. For a soul that had spent a lifetime cultivating an image of superiority, this was the ultimate humiliation. I, who had walked in expensive heels on polished floors, was now being dragged through the lowest, most corrosive filth imaginable.

Memory. I am standing in my pristine living room.

Rohan’s father, a good and simple man, is trying to give me advice about raising Avi. His methods are old-fashioned, rooted in a world I consider long past.

I smile, I nod, but inside, my mind is screaming with contempt. What does this old man know? I have an MBA. I read all the latest parenting books. His ways are for villagers. The pride, hot and ugly, had filled my heart. Now, a filth a thousand times uglier was filling my lungs.

Memory. I am at a high-society party, a glass of champagne in my hand. I see a former colleague from a rival company, a woman whose career has stalled. I look at her, her simple dress, her fading relevance, and I feel a surge of triumphant superiority. My success, my status—I saw them as a testament to my own brilliance, not as a temporary gift. I had placed myself above her. Now, I was being dragged below the very dregs of hell.

They pulled me out, a steaming, shredded wreck, only to throw me back in. The punishment was not just the pain. It was the absolute, soul-crushing debasement.

In Ksharakardam, the proud are taught the ultimate lesson in humility. Those who live their lives looking down on others must spend an eternity being dragged through the filth beneath their feet.

CH 51: Rakshogana-bhojan, The Feast of the Ruined

I was a thing of raw, burning nerves when the Yamduts finally pulled my soul from the caustic mire. My pride had been chemically scoured away, leaving nothing but the terror of what could possibly come next. They did not give me a moment's respite. The hissing swamp vanished, and I was thrown onto a new plane of existence.

The ground here was a dry, cracked earth, littered with the spectral wreckage of broken lives—the phantom shards of shattered companies, broken homes, and ruined careers. The sky was a bruised, dark purple, and it was filled with a sound I had never heard before: a chorus of triumphant, guttural roars.

From the shadows of the wreckage, they emerged. They were demons, fanged and clawed, their forms hulking and powerful. Their eyes were not just pits of fire; they were filled with a burning, personal hatred. They were rakshasas. And they were starving.

This was Rakshogana-bhojan. The Feast of the Horde of Demons.

"This is the Naraka of the Cannibal," a Yamdut's voice boomed, a pronouncement of ultimate doom. "Not for the one who eats the flesh of the body, but for the one who devours the soul. For the plunderer. The corporate raider. The one who destroys the livelihoods of others for their own gain. You feasted on the ruin of others, Dimple. Now, your victims have come to the feast."

The horde of rakshasas charged. It was a tidal wave of righteous fury. They fell upon me, and the world dissolved into a chaos of absolute, overwhelming pain. Their claws and fangs did not just tear. They rent. They shredded. They devoured.

And as one of them, its breath hot and foul, ripped my spiritual arm from its socket, I looked into its eyes. And I saw him. The CEO of the small company I had destroyed in a hostile takeover. His eyes, once filled with pleading and despair, were now filled with a terrible, vengeful joy as he feasted on my essence. Another rakshasa tore into my leg. I saw the face of the young woman whose career I had sabotaged, the one whose idea I had stolen. Her expression was one of pure, satisfying revenge.

This was the ingenious horror of this place. My victims had become my tormentors. They had been given the form and power of demons to exact their perfect, lawful revenge. The destructive, predatory energy I had unleashed upon the world to build my empire had been gathered, amplified, and turned back upon me.

I saw Rohan here, in another corner of this battlefield of souls. He was being torn apart by rakshasas with the faces of his betrayed partners, the small suppliers he had driven to bankruptcy. Our ambition, our ruthlessness, our belief that "it's just business"—all of it was being paid for here. We who had feasted on the misfortune of others were now the main course at an eternal banquet of vengeance. And the guests were very, very hungry.

Of course. You are absolutely right. A simple list would be a betrayal of the journey's depth. This chapter must be an anchor, a moment for both Dimple and the reader to fully comprehend the scale of the horror before the final, transcendent bargain is made. My apologies. Let us give this moment the weight it deserves.

CH 52: The Ledger of Hell

I awoke. The phantom pains of twenty-eight hells were a symphony of agony in my soul. My body was a roadmap of remembered tortures; my throat burned with the ghost of molten iron, my skin crawled with the memory of worms, and my bones ached with the deep, grinding pressure of the millstones. I stumbled to my desk. Before me lay the journal, its pages almost full. Only one remained.

Before I could write the end, before I could articulate the final bargain that was forming in the crucible of my soul, my mind, now a cold and meticulous scribe, took a final, horrifying inventory. The journey, with all its stations of pain, unspooled in my consciousness not as a series of nightmares, but as a map of damnation, each location etched with the acid of its own specific truth.

First, I saw the Path. The long walk to judgment. It began on the Road of Spikes, an agonizing pilgrimage of 86,000 yojanas where every step was a sin made manifest, a searing spike of hot iron piercing my foot, a universe of pain for every forgotten cruelty.

Then came the Desert of Burning Rage, where the black sand was the physical grit of my own anger, scorching my skin, and my thirst was answered with molten copper. Finally, the path forced me through the Vaitarna River, a foul, churning torrent of our collective impurity—pus, blood, and filth—where I was forced to bathe in the physical form of every ugly thought Maya and I had ever had.

Then came the Sixteen Cities, the brutal waystations on the road to Sanyamini Puri, each a month-long ordeal.

I saw Yamapur, the city of ghosts, where for twelve days my soul starved, forced to feed on the spittle and phlegm of the world I left behind.

I saw Sauripur, the City of Hounds, where my soul was torn apart by the diamond-toothed dogs of our own bestial nature.

I saw Varindra, a city ringed by the Asipatravan Forest, where the very leaves were steel blades that flayed me alive for every lie I had ever told.

I saw Gandharva, where spectral beings, manifestations of my own desires, tormented me with temptations I was not allowed to touch.

I saw Shailagama, the City of Crushing Stones, where the weight of every burden I had ever placed on another fell from the sky to obliterate me.

I saw Krurpur, the City of Cruelty, where the toll for entry was a pound of my own flesh, carved from my soul to pay for every life taken for our pleasure.

I saw Krounchpur, where my arrogance ground my soul to dust, and Vichitrapur, the City of Strange Torments, where my hypocrisy was punished with a maddening, surreal chaos.

I saw Bahvapad, the City of Calamities, where all previous torments were mixed into a swirling vortex of pain.

I saw Dukhada, the City of Sorrow, where the punishment was not pain, but forced empathy, making me feel the sharp, lonely ache of every heart I had ever broken.

I saw Nanakrand, the City of Cries, where the air itself was a weapon, filled with the amplified screams of every creature I had ever harmed.

I saw Sutapta, where I was boiled in oil for the heat of my anger, and Roudrapur, the Ferocious City, where my own duplicates tore me apart with the violence of my own cruel words.

I saw Payovarshana, a river of filth under a sky of acid rain for my impure thoughts, and Sitadhya, where I was frozen in a block of ice for my cold, selfish heart.

Finally, I saw Bahubhiti, the City of Great Fear, a custom-made hell where my deepest personal anxieties became my tormentors.

And after that year-long journey, I saw the court of Sanyamini Puri, the City of Judgment. I saw its four great gates of gold, silver, copper, and iron. I saw the magnificent, terrifying form of Yamraj, the Law incarnate, seated on his throne of black stone, his eyes deep pools of impartial justice. And before him, Chitragupta, the Divine Bookkeeper, his gaze infinitely weary as he turned the pages of a colossal book that contained every thought, word, and deed of my life.

Then came the sentence. The plunge into the true Hells, the great pools of consequence. And my mind, now an unwilling expert, cataloged them all. The Twenty-Eight Narakas.

1. Tamisra, the Hell of Darkness, where thieves are beaten by unseen Yamduts in a suffocating, absolute blackness.

2. Andhatamisra, the Hell of Great Darkness, where betrayers of a sacred trust are tormented as their minds and memories are dissolved.

3. Raurava, the Hell of Fierce Beasts, where those who killed for pleasure are hunted and devoured by the monstrous Rurus.

4. Maharaurava, the Hell of Great Fierceness, where selfish hedonists are hunted by Rurus bearing the faces of their neglected victims.

5. Kumbhipaka, the Hell of Boiling Oil, where those who cooked living beings are themselves boiled and fried in eternity.

6. Kalasutra, the Hell of the Burning Thread, where disrespect to elders is punished by an endless run on a scorching copper plain.

7. Asipatravan, the Hell of the Sword-Leaf Forest, where liars and heretics are flayed by a forest of razor-sharp leaves.

8. Sukaramukha, the Hell of the Hog’s Mouth, where unjust rulers and oppressive leaders are crushed like sugarcane in a mill.

9. Andhakupa, the Hell of the Dark Well, where cruelty to helpless creatures is repaid as they, grown monstrous, devour you in the dark.

10. Krumibhojan, the Hell of Worms, where the selfish who never shared are themselves consumed by worms born of their own greed.

11. Sandash, the Hell of Pincers, where thieves and cheaters have their spiritual flesh torn away piece by piece with red-hot tongs.

12. Taptasurmi, the Hell of Red-Hot Statues, where adulterers are forced to embrace burning metal effigies of their own lust.

13. Vajrakantak Shalmali, the Hell of the Thorny Tree, where those who violate the natural order are impaled and flayed on trees of steel thorns.

14. Vaitarni, the River of Broken Duty, where corrupt leaders are drowned in filth by the vengeful spirits of those they wronged.

15. Puyoda, the Ocean of Filth, where the shameless and impure are forced to drink an ocean of bodily waste.

16. Pranarodh, the Hell of Suffocating Life, where those who hunted for sport are made to feel the final, suffocating terror of their prey.

17. Vaishasan, the Hell of Hollow Rituals, where those who performed sacrifices for pride are themselves butchered in a dark parody of their own ceremony.

18. Lalabhaksa, the River of Shame, where those who committed the most degrading acts of lust are forced to consume a river of semen.

19. Sarameyadana, the Feast of the Dogs, where plunderers and arsonists are devoured by seven hundred and twenty diamond-toothed hounds.

20. Avichi, the Waveless Hell, where false witnesses are thrown from a great mountain to be shattered, again and again.

21. Ayahpaan, the Hell of Drinking Molten Iron, where those who abandoned duty for intoxication are forced to swallow liquid fire.

22. Ksharakardam, the Mire of Pride, where the arrogant are dragged headfirst through a swamp of caustic, corrosive filth.

23. Rakshogana-bhojan, the Feast of the Demons, where those who devoured the livelihoods of others are themselves feasted upon by their victims in rakshasa form.

24. Shulaprot, the Hell of Impalement, where betrayers of trust are pierced through by sharp iron stakes.

25. Dandashuka, the Hell of Serpents, where the wantonly cruel are swallowed whole by monstrous snakes.

26. Avatanirodhan, the Hell of No Way Out, where those who caged others are themselves suffocated in a sealed, airless prison.

27. Paryavartan, the Hell of Mockery, where those who turned away the hungry are themselves starved and mocked by birds of prey.

28. Suchimukha, the Hell of the Needle’s Mouth, where misers are sewn into a tight, helpless bundle and beaten.

The inventory was complete. I felt flayed raw by the sheer, meticulous totality of it all. There were no loopholes, no oversights. There was only a perfect, terrifying, and inescapable system of consequence. I had no more questions. No more defiance. No more despair. There was only the stark, cold clarity of the Law.

I picked up the pen. My hand was steady. It was time to write the final page.

CH 53: The Final Bargain

As the last word was written, the pen fell from my numb fingers. My work was done. I was empty.

The soft, pearlescent light filled the room. Katha was standing before me, her face a mask of calm, cosmic neutrality.

“It is done,” she said.

“Yes,” I whispered, my throat dry. “The book is finished. The pact is fulfilled.” I looked at her, my heart a frantic bird in a cage of ribs, a desperate, fragile hope I thought had been extinguished, flickering back to life. “My family,” I said, my voice cracking. “Rohan. Avi. Maya. You promised.”

“I do not break my promises, Dimple,” Katha said. “The terms of the pact have been met. Your family will be returned to you.”

A sob of pure, unadulterated relief tore from my throat. It was a sound of a dam breaking after a lifetime of pressure. I fell to my knees, my head bowed, weeping with a gratitude so profound it was a physical pain. “Thank you,” I cried, over and over. “Thank you.”

“They will be returned to Earth,” Katha continued, and her voice, calm and clear, cut through my joyful tears like a sliver of ice. “They will live out full lives. But there is a condition, Dimple. A law of the cosmos you must understand. When a soul is given a new life, the memory of the past is wiped clean.”

I looked up, a cold dread beginning to seep into the warmth of my relief, chilling it from the inside out.

“They will forget this place,” she stated, each word a carefully placed stone sealing a tomb. “They will forget their torment. They will forget your sacrifice. They will return to their old natures, with all their flaws and weaknesses. Rohan, with his pride and his secrets. Maya, with her despair and her casual cruelties. They will live life exactly as they used to be, oblivious. Is this an acceptable outcome for you, Dimple? A temporary reprieve, only for them to commit new sins and risk this path all over again when they die?”

The room grew cold. The truth of her words was a brutal, horrifying weight. My sacrifice, this whole journey of witnessing and writing, would be for nothing but a temporary stay of execution.

It was a cosmic loophole that fixed the body but left the soul diseased. Returning them to their old lives was just resetting the clock on their damnation. It was the cruelest, most hollow victory imaginable.

“No…” I whispered, the word catching in my throat, a dry leaf of sound. “No, that is a worse hell than any I have seen.” The image of them, laughing and living, but walking blindly back towards the same fire, was an agony beyond any physical torment I had witnessed.

I fell forward, my forehead touching the cold floor, not in defeat, but in a final, desperate prayer. “Katha… I understand now,” I said, my voice muffled by the carpet. “The promise was for their souls. Not for their bodies. I do not want them back for myself, to be the broken people they were. I want them to be safe. Forever.”

I looked up, my eyes clear and burning, my voice steady with a purpose that dwarfed all my previous resolve. “I have a final bargain to offer.”

“The pact is complete,” Katha said, her voice softening, a hint of sorrow in its depths.

“No. This is the real pact,” I insisted, pushing myself to my feet. “This is the only one that matters. Take the merit of this book. Take the merit of my suffering. But do not return my family to Earth. Do not return them to me. Return them to God. Let them find peace in His eternal abode, where there is no more sin, no more suffering, no more cycle of birth and death. Their eternal peace is more important than my temporary possession of them. Let that be my unforgotten promise.”

A profound silence filled the room. Katha looked at me, her ancient eyes seeing not just a sinner, but a mother performing the ultimate act of selfless love. This was true detachment. This was a merit beyond any she had recorded.

She was still for a long, long time. Then, she slowly, deliberately, nodded her head.

“The Law is about balance, Dimple,” she said, her voice filled with a strange, resonant awe.

“An act of such perfect, selfless love creates a new and powerful balance. The bargain is accepted. Their debt is paid. They will go to the Lord.”

A wave of joy so pure, so overwhelming it was a light that extinguished all darkness, flooded my soul. I had done it. They were safe. Truly safe.

CH 54: Katha’s Promise

The light of my joy filled the room, a warm, golden radiance that pushed back the shadows. I had lost everything, but I had won the only victory that mattered. I closed my eyes, ready for the end, ready for my own road of spikes.

“But you, Dimple,” Katha’s voice was gentle now, pulling me back. “Your own ledger remains. The Law is a perfect accountant. Your sacrifice has paid your family's debt. But your own is still written. The affair, the lies, the pride, the cruelty. You must still walk your own path.”

I opened my eyes and looked at her. I nodded slowly. There was no fear, no despair. Only a quiet acceptance. “I know,” I whispered. “I am ready.”

“But such a love… such a sacrifice… it does not go unrecorded,” Katha continued, and for the first time, her voice was laced with something akin to warmth. “You have not traded your soul for theirs, Dimple. You have purified it. The merit of this final, selfless act is immense. It does not erase your debt, for the Law demands balance. But it has earned you a promise.”

She drifted closer, and her presence was no longer one of a judge or a tormentor, but of a guide.

“You will walk your own road,” she said, her voice a solemn vow. “You will feel the sting of every lie and the fire of every betrayal you have committed. The consequences must be faced. But when the last debt is paid, when the final agony has balanced the scales, however many ages that may take… I will come for you.”

My breath caught in my throat.

“I will come into the heart of Hell itself,” she said, her eyes meeting mine with a light that was no longer cold, but brilliant. “And I will lead you to the golden gate. You will not be lost. You will be redeemed. This is my promise to you.” The vortex to my own hell began to form in the corner of the room, but its sounds of torment were now muted, softened by the echo of her words. My punishment was no longer an eternal sentence. It was a journey. A long, agonizing, but finite journey, with a guide waiting at the end. It was the difference between damnation and purgatory. The difference between hopelessness and faith

Epilogue: A Mother’s Final Testimony

The pen lies still beside the journal. My work is done. My body is old now, a frail and withered thing. The house is silent, as it has been for years. After Katha left that night, the world continued. But I was no longer in it. I lived my days in quiet contemplation, the memory of Hell a constant, clarifying companion. My soul was already on its pilgrimage.

The light is failing. A cold I have not felt since my nights with Katha is seeping into the room. The air grows heavy, thick with a sense of dreadful anticipation. I can feel them. The monsters are gathering. At the edges of my vision, the shadows in the corner of my room seem to writhe, taking on forms that are monstrously familiar. I hear the distant growl of the hounds, the hiss of the serpents. The Yamduts are coming for me. My time is up.

I am not afraid.

or in the center of the room, visible only to my soul's eye, is another presence. A soft, pearlescent light. A figure in a simple white saree. Katha is here. She is not here to take me, not yet. She is here to watch.

A silent, powerful guardian, ensuring that the pact is honored, that my final journey begins as it should. Her presence is a calm in the storm of their gathering menace.

They can have this body. They can drag my soul to the road of spikes. It is just. It is the Law. But I know, with a certainty that is the only real truth I have ever possessed, that my suffering is not the end of my story. It is merely the price.

I think of Rohan, of Maya, of my sweet Avi, safe in a land of eternal light and peace, beyond the reach of consequence. My heart fills not with sorrow for my own fate, but with a joy so profound it makes my last, ragged breath a song of triumph. The unforgotten promise has been kept. My promise to them. Katha's promise to me.

Let them come. My journey to Hell is but the final road home

Acknowledgements & Source of Inspiration

The story you have just read, Journey of Hell: The Unforgotten Promise, is a modern narrative interpretation of a profound spiritual work from the Swaminarayan Sampradaya. While the character of Dimple Mehta and her specific circumstances are a fictional framework created for a contemporary audience, the architecture of Hell, the laws of karma, the sequence of torments, and the ultimate message of redemption are drawn directly from a sacred and foundational text.

This work would not exist without the divine inspiration and teachings of Bhagwan Swaminarayan (1781-1830), the central figure of the Swaminarayan faith. It was His divine will and His desire to awaken souls to the consequences of their actions that served as the catalyst for the original text. His teachings on Dharma, Adharma, and the soul's ultimate journey form the philosophical bedrock of this story.

The primary source for the detailed descriptions of the path to Yamapuri, the sixteen cities, the court of Yamraj, and the twenty-eight Narakas is the scripture Yamdand, authored by the revered saint-poet Sadguru Nishkulanand Swami (1766-1848).

A direct disciple of Bhagwan Swaminarayan, Nishkulanand Swami was a powerful ascetic and a prolific writer. He composed Yamdand at the express command of Bhagwan Swaminarayan to provide a stark, unflinching account of the soul's journey after death, ensuring that followers would understand the gravity of their choices and the importance of living a life of righteousness. The specific torments, their corresponding sins, and the very structure of the afterlife depicted in Dimple's journey are a faithful dramatization of the system laid out by Nishkulanand Swami in his scripture.

This retelling is an humble attempt to translate the timeless, universal truths of the Yamdand into a narrative form that can reach a new generation of readers. It is an act of devotion, offered with the deepest respect for the divine lineage from which it comes. We pray that this work, like its sacred source, serves its intended purpose: to instill a healthy fear of sin, to inspire a life of virtue, and to turn the soul of the reader towards the ultimate refuge at the lotus feet of God.

Jay Swaminarayan