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.

Index of: Journey Of Hell: The Unforgotten Promise

• A Warning to the Reader
• A Mother’s Testimony
• Chapter 1 The God of Small Betrayals
• Chapter 2 The Sins of a Mother
• Chapter 3 The Soul and The Body
• Chapter 4 the Road of a Thousand Regrets
• Chapter 5 A Desert of Burning Rage
• Chapter 6 The Prison Before Birth
• Chapter 7 A River of Self
• Chapter 8 The Twelve-Day Ghost
• Chapter 9 The Refusal
• Chapter 10 The Universal Law
• Chapter 11 The City of Hounds
• Chapter 12 A Forest of Lies
• Chapter 13 The Weight of the World
• Chapter 14 The Price of Meat
• Chapter 15 The Question of Hope
• Chapter 16 The City of Strange Torments
• Chapter 17 The Road to the Court
• Chapter 18 An Interrogation Before Judgment
• Chapter 19 The Hall of Judgment
• Chapter 20 The Book of Deeds
• Chapter 21 The Currency of Hell
• Chapter 22 Tamisra, The Hell of Darkness
• Chapter 23 The Anatomy of a Jailer
• Chapter 24 Andhatamisra, The Betrayer’s Hell
• Chapter 25 Raurava, The Hell of the Hunted
• Chapter 26 Kumbhipaka, The Cook’s Hell
• Chapter 27 The Question of a Beast