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.

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
• Chapter 28 Kalasutra, The Burning Plain
• Chapter 29 Krumibhojan, The Hell of Worms
• Chapter 30 Sandash, The Hell of Pincers