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.
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