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.”

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
• Chapter 31 Taptasurmi, The Hell of Burning Lust
• Chapter 32 The Sin of the Eye
• Chapter 33 Vajrakantak Shalmali, The Hell of the Thorny Tree
• Chapter 34 Vaitarni, The River of Broken Duty
• Chapter 35 Puyoda, The Ocean of Filth
• Chapter 36 Pranarodh, The Hell of Suffocation
• Chapter 37 The Ghost in the Room
• Chapter 38 The Nihilist’s Bargain
• Chapter 39 Vaishasan, The Hell of Hollow Rituals
• Chapter 40 Lalabhaksa, The River of Shame
• Chapter 41 Sarameyadana, The Feast of the Dogs
• Chapter 42 Avichi, The Waveless Hell