The first step is a choice you are not allowed to make. My new mind, Maya’s mind, screamed at my feet to stay put, to fuse themselves to the barren, rocky ground. But the rope around my neck was an absolute master. One of the Yamduts gave a casual, brutal tug, a motion as thoughtless as a man pulling a stubborn weed, and my body lurched forward. My right foot lifted. For a suspended moment of pure terror, it hung in the dim, twilight air. Then it came down.
The spike was not sharp like a nail. It was a thick, cruel point of iron, heated to a deep, menacing red. It didn’t pierce my foot so much as it swallowed it. The pain was not one thing. It was a universe of agony. First, the searing heat, a fire that flashed up my leg and exploded behind my eyes. Then came the tearing of my spiritual flesh, a wet, intimate ripping sound that I felt more than heard. Then came the grinding pressure as the spike pushed up, splitting the delicate bones of my foot, forcing them apart with a soundless crack that resonated in my jaw.
I screamed. It wasn’t a human sound. It was the raw shriek of a soul being unmade. I collapsed, my weight driving the spike deeper, the fire now a white-hot nova of pure torment.
“Get up,” one of the Yamduts growled. The voice was like gravel and glass. It held no anger, no pity. It was the voice of a factory worker telling a machine to do its job.
He yanked the rope again. The spike was ripped from my foot with a fresh, tearing agony, leaving a gaping, smoking hole. But before I could even register the relief of its absence, the flesh was whole again. My foot was perfect, untouched, ready for the next spike.
That was the moment I understood. That was the moment the true, ingenious cruelty of this place revealed itself. The pain was not meant to destroy me. It was meant to be felt. My body here, this yatana-deha, was not a vessel for life; it was an instrument for suffering, designed to be played forever without ever breaking.
They dragged me on. Step after agonizing step. Spike after agonizing spike. The physical pain was a constant, but it was the visions that came with it that began to break my mind. With each step, a memory. A sin made real.
Spike. The searing pain, and with it, a memory: I am seventeen. I am screaming at my mother—at Dimple—that I hate her, that she is ruining my life. The words are sharp, meant to wound, meant to punish her for some forgotten teenage slight. Now I knew what those wounds felt like.
Spike. A new memory, unbidden. I am twenty. At a college party. A boy I barely know, drunk and clumsy, is pushing himself against me. I am not enjoying it, but I am not stopping it. I remember the feeling of his hands, the stale beer on his breath, and the small, dark thought in my mind: this will make my ex-boyfriend jealous. I used another person’s body as a weapon. Now my own body was being pierced.
Spike. I am fifteen. I see my little brother, Avi, holding up a drawing for me to see. It’s a picture of our family. I am staring at my phone, texting a friend. “Just a sec,” I say, without looking up. He waits, his face full of hope. I never look up. The spike of my indifference is now a spike of red-hot iron through my foot.
This wasn’t random pain. This was an accounting. A library of my own cruelty, and I was being forced to read it one agonizing step at a time. The road of spikes stretched on, endless, under a sky the color of an old bruise. And I knew, with a certainty that was colder than any ice, that I had to walk every inch of it. I had to feel every sin. And there were so many more to go.
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