I awoke in my bed, my throat burning with the ghost of molten copper. The sickness and trembling are my new morning routine. Before I could even stumble to the bathroom, Katha was there. Her form was soft and luminous today, but her eyes held a clinical detachment.
“Tonight, we do not return to the path,” she said. “Tonight, you must understand the first crime, the first betrayal. The sin that makes all other sins possible.”
She touched my forehead. The plunge was different this time. It was not into Maya’s current torment, but back in time. Into the dark.
I was in the womb. Not as myself, Dimple, but as the tiny, unformed soul of my daughter. It was a prison of flesh. A suffocating, wet, darkness. The constant, thundering beat of my own mother’s heart was a drum of doom. The heat from her body, her digestion, was a relentless fever that cooked my delicate spirit-skin.
And the food… oh, God, the food. I felt the burn of every spicy dish my mother ate, a fire on my skin.
I felt the jolt of every stumble, an earthquake that threw me against the walls of my prison. I was forced to live in a sea of her blood and waste, to breathe it, to drink it. It was a torment beyond words. Tiny, biting creatures, germs and parasites, were my only companions, feasting on me in the dark.
This was the first suffering. And from that suffering, a prayer was born. It was not a thought; it was a raw, primal cry from the core of my being, a vow forged in the furnace of suffering.
‘Save me,’ my soul screamed to a God I didn’t know existed. ‘Whoever you are, whatever you are, get me out of this hell! I will be yours. I will serve you forever. I will sing your praises. I will never forget you. I promise, I promise, I promise, just get me out!’
And the universe heard. A force began to move me. The passage of birth. It was not a gentle journey. It was a crushing, squeezing, mangling expulsion from my prison. I was being ground through a passage too small for me, my soft bones twisting, my head compressing. The pain was absolute.
Then… light. Cold air. The shocking sensation of a world outside my prison. I took my first breath, and with it, I let out a cry.
And in that moment, as the cry left my lips, the memory was wiped clean. The agony of the nine months vanished. The terror, the heat, the biting creatures, all gone. And with them, the most important memory of all: the sacred, desperate promise I had just made.
When Katha pulled my soul back into my own body, I lay on my bedroom floor and sobbed. I wept for the child I had carried, for the torment I had unknowingly inflicted upon her. My cravings, my anger, my stress—they were her first taste of Hell.
“Every soul makes this promise, Dimple,” Katha’s voice echoed in the quiet room. “And almost every soul forgets it. That is the first sin. The original betrayal. A life lived in forgetfulness of that promise is a life that walks away from God. Your daughter’s suicide was just the final step on a long road of forgetting. A road that you, her mother, never taught her to remember.”
Her words were a cold, hard truth in the pit of my stomach. The guilt was suffocating. I was not just a witness. I was an accomplice.
Index of: Journey Of Hell: The Unforgotten Promise
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