Before they dragged me to the first of the sixteen cities, they stopped. The hellish landscape around me flickered, and one of them spoke, its voice a dry hiss in my mind.
“The law decrees a period of observation,” it rasped. “You have been granted the form of a pret. A ghost. For twelve days of Earth time, you will witness the world you left behind. You will see the true value of the life you threw away.”
The world dissolved and then reformed. In an instant, I was back in Maya’s bedroom. I was a phantom, an invisible wisp of memory floating in the corner. I saw my own discarded body on the floor, a broken doll. And I saw my mother—the other me, the one still living—frozen in the doorway, her face a mask of shattered disbelief.
I was being forced to watch what I had done, and it was a torment far more profound than any physical pain.
I watched the paramedics arrive. They were young, tired. They spoke in clipped, professional tones. They saw a scene, a job, a tragedy to be documented and then forgotten before their lunch break.
When they wrapped my body in a white sheet, they did it with a practiced, impersonal efficiency that made me feel like I had never been a person at all, just an object to be removed.
Then I watched my mother collapse. The sound she made wasn’t human. It was the raw, guttural cry of an animal whose young has been ripped from it. It was a sound of pure, soul-deep agony, and I knew, with a certainty that was a poison seeping into my own ghostly form, that I had created that sound. I wanted to comfort her, to scream “I’m sorry, Mom!” but I was just air. A helpless, guilty witness to the devastation I had authored.
My relatives came over the next few days. I heard their hushed whispers in the hallway. “So sad.” “Always such a troubled child.” “Dimple is not handling this well.” They offered my mother tea and empty words. I saw the impatience flicker in my aunt’s eyes when my mother’s grief became too loud, too raw for their polite comfort. My great tragedy was an awkward social situation for them to manage.
I drifted from my home and went to my college. I saw my friends gathered by my usual spot.
They were crying. They were hugging. They were sharing memories. And then the bell rang. I watched them walk to class, already talking about a boy, a party, a future that I was no longer a part of. My absence was a brief, sad story, a ripple in the pond of their lives that was already growing still.
On the fourth day, from a distance, I watched them burn my body. I saw the smoke curl against the gray sky, and a profound sense of nothingness washed over me. The last physical proof that I had ever existed was now just ash and air.
The worst part was the hunger. It was a gnawing, spiritual starvation. As a ghost, I learned, a soul is fed by the prayers and rituals performed by their living family. And there were none for me. My family, lost in their modern, secular grief, didn’t know the old ways. There were no offerings of rice and water. There were no mantras chanted for my peace.
So I starved. And in that starvation, I was forced to feed on the only thing available to a neglected spirit: the filth of the world.
The spittle on the pavement that I had once walked on with disdain. The phlegm coughed up by a sick old man on the street. The foul essence of rotting food in a garbage bin. I, who had been a picky eater, who had demanded brand names and organic produce, now lapped at the essence of decay like a starving animal. The humiliation was absolute.
On the twelfth day, the Yamduts reappeared beside me. “You have seen,” they growled. “You have seen that a life lived for the self leaves nothing behind but pain and fading memories. The world forgets you. But the Law does not.”
They dragged me from my home for the last time. As we left, I didn’t even look back. There was nothing there for me anymore. Nothing left but the journey ahead.
Index of: Journey Of Hell: The Unforgotten Promise
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