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Journey Of Hell | 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.”

Index of: Journey Of Hell: The Unforgotten Promise

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