Word Count: 3707 | Reading Time: 13 min
‘A curse is not your friend.
A curse will lead to your untimely end.
A curse will betray.
A curse will lead you astray.
The Chudail’s Shop, Kala Sagar
There is steam coming off Shael’s wound; he can feel the searing heat and the ugly sting as the Chudail of Kala Sagar pricks his body with deadly scorpion claws. Shael coughs and hurls out the remains of a killing curse.
“Drink this,” the Chudail says while handing him a bowl with a dark brown liquid. She takes a magenta-coloured mop and starts sweeping the spot where he has retched not a moment too long ago.
“Is it a concoction of herbs?”
“Hardly. It is chicken nihari. It will settle your appetite.” She pours lavender water over the now dry, vomit-etched spot and continues to hum and clean as if the danger of death doesn’t bother her in the slightest. Shael is puzzled, but he is not sure he can trust the Chudail. He doesn’t even know her name though he has heard stories about her. She is a minor sorceress of sorts; she transforms lies into toads, steals despair to provide candlelight for a whole town, and turns chicken feathers into anger potions. For a steep charge, of course.
Still, not many people know how to smother a killing curse.
“Am I dying?” Shael asks, concerned.
The Chudail sneers. “Everyone dies, one little life at a time. There’s poetic justice to life, after all. Try to heal your wound by yourself next time.”
She subsequently lets out a snort and disappears behind a gauzy curtain, leaving behind a bewildered Shael. He stays supine on the cot, feeling the last bits of the killing curse bubbling in his body. He tries to distract his mind by surveying the Chudail’s shop—shimmering lamps everywhere and needlessly cheerful confetti carelessly thrown about. The Chudail’s persona is another puzzle, with pink hair and oddly dyed clothes. Not befitting for a serious sorceress, he surmises. As far as Shael can see, there are no books about magic and curses. All she needs is a crystal ball, and the kooky effect of her shop will soon bring in customers of a different kind. Perhaps she can catch the happiness of fireflies, bottle love and sell it by the dozen.
Shael leaves.
He is a Destroyer—of cursed worlds and objects, small, big, minuscule, microscopic, and infinite. He may look mighty and impressive with his shiny chain mail, but he is actually in charge of upending the smaller world of tiny, unseen curses and destroying old, cursed buildings. And whatever remains in between. He sees what everyone else misses.
And Kala Sagar is like a magnet that attracts curses from all over the world. They are born out of dark emotions within people—anger, misery, malice, and rage. Ill wishes whispered maliciously in other parts of the world appear randomly in Kala Sagar as curses. No one knows why. Every curse has a twin, one born in the world outside and the other abandoned in Kala Sagar.
There’s a swamp on the other side where blood thirsty but beautiful creatures called the live. If the curses by themselves are not enough, the Yakshinis try to swallow the town year by year, claiming its many citizens.
*
A month later, Shael is getting tired of pulling the Yakshinis out of abandoned houses. His body has almost healed, and apart from a slight limp, no one can tell that he was attacked with a killing curse. He was trying to recover a cursed object from an outsider who wished him misery and death and plunged a rusted, cursed knife through his back. Shael’s chainmail saved him, but a little portion broke off, and he ended up with a gash on his back. He is surprised at his quick recovery and decides that it is probably a false alarm.
“There’s an increase in Yakshinis hanging about empty houses and broken windowpanes at night,” Shael cautions the citizens.
As if paying heed to the rumors about themselves, the Yakshinis emerge in droves from the swamps one day and bargain for a night out about Kala Sagar with the Sarpanch, the head of the town. All the townspeople know that Yakshinis are alluring beings with glowing hair; they sing, dance, and devour humans out of playfulness. They leave lotus flowers laced with curses to entrap unsuspecting patrons. Shael is angry, but the townspeople fear being eaten alive by the Yakshinis.
A curse can still be healed, but once eaten, you cannot be brought to life, they reason in unison. Hence, a deal is struck, which comes to fruition every Friday. It has been decided that Yakshinis shall be allowed to mingle with the townspeople of Kala Sagar on Fridays.
It is a Friday again and the citizens of Kala Sagar have gathered for the local Kavi Sammelan, the Festival of Bards. The townspeople chime in with their own stories, lore passed by time that has been picked up by the wind. Curses are everywhere, they proclaim loudly: in cotton-eyed flowers that lull kids into drowning, and in shoes that can swallow someone’s whole being. The Yakshinis, for their part, behave nicely; they sing soft melodies and shower uncursed lotus flowers on the unsuspecting townspeople. People are caught up with their revelries and enjoy their many enticing charms.
But not Shael.
Shael is ubiquitous; his eyes dart to the slightest changes in the mist. He is a Destroyer, after all. He pays close attention to the tinkling of objects around him, the air as it stretches and collapses, and the fragrance of the lotuses, which carry warnings of disquiet.
“Insipid little creatures. All flash, no substance,” the Chudail tells him, suddenly appearing out of nowhere. She crushes a lotus petal with her fingers. It turns to dust.
“Don’t the Yakshinis play with curses the same way you do? Do you sense something malicious?” Shael’s ears perk up. He feels on the edge lately, but he isn’t quite sure why.
His hands move to the hilt of Asi, his beloved magical sword, laced with the destruction of a thousand curses. Shael can destroy a thousand more; he just needs to pinpoint the curse. It is proving a little tricky ever since he was hit by a killing curse; his senses seem to be getting duller. But he is recovering; he is sure of it.
“Hardly. They come for a night about town dancing and wasting their curses. Curses are precious,” the Chudail says.
“Damn that Chudail, always talking in riddles!” Shael mutters to himself. “Is there a harmful curse nearby?” he prods again. Perhaps she can sense something he is missing.
“A curse is always nearby… in a cursed town… with charming Yakshinis. Some say Yakshinis bring about curses. Some say they are attracted to curses and pick them up unknowingly.”
“And Chudails like you?” he asks her.
“We bottle curses and twist them into reality. We take sorrow and turn it into misery,” she adds.
“Right,” he replies curtly.
“But that’s not why I came here,” the Chudail rummages around her bag and hands him a glass bottle.
“What is this?” Shael sniffs the bottle.
“A sarson salve … mustard… picked at the crack of dawn under a neem tree. For your wound. Apply it every night if you don’t want to die a painful and heart-breaking death.”
“Why mustard?”
“Why not sarson? Just do what you are told!”
The Chudail disappears into the crowd.
He hides the bottle somewhere in his pajamas. He hasn’t been in the mood for his chain mail lately. Plus, he feels fine. Almost. Apart from the slight headache he gets now and then. Perhaps he should have mentioned that to the Chudail.
When the town clock chimes at midnight, the Yakshinis beg to stay. They let out eerie screams and show their pointed teeth to scare Shael, but he doesn’t budge. He makes them gather their fallen lotuses and throws saltwater on roads. There is silence afterward. Shael prowls about the corners of the town, sniffing for curses. He makes sure he closes the windows of old, abandoned houses.
*
The dreams begin after midnight.
Shael sees a sky with two suns, one the color of the sky and the other the color of the earth, but there is an uneasy darkness in this world. He tries to reach out for his Asi but cannot find it. Instead, there are heavy silver bangles that weigh down his wrists. When he walks, his body curves and fumbles in ways he didn’t know was possible.
“Evti,” Shael hears.
The word means goddess in the common tongue of Kala Sagar. He looks around.
“Evti, we want to escape this world,” a voice tells him. In the darkness, Shael can barely make out the silhouette of a small girl.
She introduces herself as Zora and clutches his fingers in earnest. They both walk through a field in a cave, a faint smell of mustard trailing behind him. They stop by a pond and stare at their reflections in the water. When a beam of light shines through, Shael is stunned. He sees a beautiful woman with flowing dark hair staring back at him; he feels wonder and amazement at the litheness of his body in this world; his feet skip the earth easily. He wonders if he is in the swamps around Kala Sagar. Such magic would not be unheard of there.
Except there are no mustard fields in the swamps. There is only one sun in his world.
“Where are we?” he asks Zora.
“Dur,” Zora whispers.
“Dur?”
“Dur is our world. Our world was in the sky; it was snatched and hidden under the earth. We are trying to break forth from the body of the earth.”
Zora climbs up the rocks in a cavern with swift elegance. She traces her hands across the walls and points to the skylights from where the twin suns peak. Shael wonders if he really is inside a dream. From what his acute senses tell him, this world is as real as it can be.
Shael has heard stories of heroes who crossed dreams and saved worlds. This world of Dur is underground and hidden, but he is unsure where. He wonders if this is a trick of the Yakshinis to lure him into the swamp; he has been relentless in throwing them out of Kala Sagar lately. But the Yakshinis could never survive this dark world; they love sunlight and warmth, not this dingy realm.
Shael walks through the cavernous world full of secrets and silences. He touches all the surfaces and realizes they are not solid but fluid. The walls appear and disappear. Zora is too young to face this cruel world alone.
The other dwellers of Dur are unfriendly; they huddle in corners and barely acknowledge Shael. Zora tells him that they were all cursed once and have since accepted their cruel fate. They are a dying race and if they don’t break out of this world, they will perish within a year. It is destiny Zora thinks that Shael was sent here to save them all. But Shael is no Evti. He is a Destroyer of curses through and through. He has no power in this world, physical or otherwise.
Only if he could carry Asi into this world as well.
*
When they find him, Shael is slumped by the last gate that divides Kala Sagar and the swamp. He is feverish, mumbling to himself. The townspeople carry him to the Chudail’s shop. She takes him in immediately, laying him down on the table and examining his body. There are scrapes and cuts from fights and skirmishes, the crackling of his skin from weathering, and a fever is just breaking out. He seems delirious and keeps muttering about a world called Dur.
The Chudail turns him over and swears to herself. There is a long gash that starts from the base of his neck and travels all along his spine. She knows it is a remnant of a killing curse and has gone by the book to treat Shael. The curse had been removed. But the gash remains. It refuses to dissolve so easily. She had given Shael the mustard salve to heal the gash as soon as possible, but he didn’t follow through. There are places where the skin has healed and others where the gash screams in blistering, inflammatory proportions. He could have hired a child from the town to smear the salve evenly on his back. It would have cost him only one silver coin and saved him a few days of misery and nightmares.
“Perhaps, he is a little dim-witted,” the Chudail tells herself. She doesn’t understand the motivations of humans all that well, they are far too different from her.
She enters the other room and returns with a needle and a spool of thread. She boils the needle in water and then drops petals of festered black roses across Shael’s spine. With methodical ease, the Chudail stitches the wound. When she is done, she kneels and sniffs his spine. She spits and the flower petals dissolve into his spine. She hopes that in a few weeks, he will heal completely. She has encountered curses like these a dime a dozen, but something doesn’t quite add up here. Shael seemed to be healing and suddenly his health has taken a turn for the worse. The Chudail decides she will have a stern talk with him when he wakes up. He is also the Destroyer of curses, so he should know better. He cannot take things so lightly.
The Chudail lets Shael sleep the afternoon off. She sits on the porch outside and drinks a hot bowl of chicken nihari. It always calms her nerves.
She is glad that she lives in Kala Sagar. She was on the run for many years in neighboring towns and villages where she was a frequent victim of arson. She hasn’t met many Chudails before coming here; she knows they all get killed unscrupulously. But the rules in this town are clear: as long as she doesn’t create mischief, she can stay.
All Chudails have a gift apart from their skill and fascination with curses—they can take emotions and turn them into something useful or lethal, a salve for headaches, a broth to calm nerves, a trinket that keeps heartbreak at bay. She cares intuitively for everyone but masks her kindness. A Chudail with knowledge is powerful. A Chudail with curiosity and reason is dangerous. She is curt and rude on purpose to keep wagging tongues at bay. She sticks to her work, adopting curses, stealing sorrow and laughter, and slowly eating despair. Despair is a particularly difficult emotion for her to work with; it takes a long time to create anything out of it, and she has to be slow and methodical.
She likes toying with curses; they whisper and call out to her to play with them. Perhaps a curse will swallow her whole and spit out her bones one day. She won’t mind it one bit.
The Chudail hears Shael groaning in the other room. She puts aside her bowl and returns to check on him. He is lying prostrate on the mattress, whimpering in pain.
“Why didn’t you apply the salve?” she reprimands.
“There are far more important things; there are so many curses abound. I dreamt I was in another world where people wanted to escape.” Shael tells her all about the world of Dur.
“Dreams are the land of the forsaken. Be on your guard, Destroyer.”
The Chudail makes sure that Shael drinks a bowl of nihari again, and he seems to be better. She applies the mustard salve on his back again. She tells him to return when it finishes. She will hand him another salve next time—one made of rotting memories and haldi roots. She hopes that it will drive out the killing curse from his body completely.
He does not return.
*
Shael is thankful for Chudail’s quick response; perhaps he can invite her over for tea sometime and learn from her, he could do with a new friend. For the next few days and nights, Shael sleeps soundlessly. When he wakes up, he tries not to think of Zora. He may be a Destroyer, but he doesn’t want to be sucked into a world that he knows nothing about. Shael pours over books of history and lore to learn more about Dur. Where is this world? How far is it from Kala Sagar? Not that he wants to complain, even though it is a welcome respite to inhabit another body and experience a world different from his. But why is he able to access it only from his dreams? He keeps trying to find answers but doesn’t find any.
Shael hires a child with a toothy grin who applies the mustard salve nightly. It stings at first, but he gets used to it. He keeps Asi nearby lest curses bleed through Kala Sagar in his absence and he needs to be ready at a moment’s notice.
But the town remains quiet and Yakshinis still come on Fridays, mingle and dance as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary is reported. He finds his stance against the Yakshinis mellowing gradually. Perhaps they aren’t all bad. His wound seems to be healing. The child he hired for massage grows fascinated with the gash on his spine.
“Brother, it is like a painting. I want to show it to my friends,” the child declares one Monday.
By the fourth Thursday, Shael feels trapped inside a cage like a Yakshini who eats her feet. He sits outside his house, sharpening Asi, and kids come from all over Kala Sagar to gawk at his wound. He shoos them away and locks himself inside his home. He decides he will sleep the rest of the evening away.
Shael looks at his back in a mirror and lets out a slew of expletives. The edges of the gash have blurred, melding the skin together, except there are tiny criss-cross patterns that have formed over his skin—all in different shades following the design of a rainbow, splashing brilliant colors all over his back. It is an odd curse, none that he has seen before and certainly not in a killing curse. Exhausted with the weight of his wound upon him, Shael falls into a deep sleep, clutching a sheathed Asi.
He forgets to apply the sarson salve.
When Shael wakes up, his form curves in the ways of a woman again. He is back in Dur and the light above seems to be ebbing away from the skylights. Zora finds him and the inhabitants are wailing.
“We were waiting for you, Evti. Why did you disappear?” Zora pleads.
They walk the length of Dur and he sees the rot and decay befalling the realm. The yellow fields have turned brown, and everything else is dying all at once.
The same dream repeats every night.
*
One night, Shael wakes up in the middle of such a dream. Zora is nearby; she does not pay heed to him. She simply takes out a sickle and cuts through dead, brassy vegetation. When Shael unconsciously tries to mirror the child, he is surprised to find Asi shining brightly in his hands. He traces the tip of his beloved sword with a finger.
“Please help us escape, Evti. This world is dying. We want to return to the sky.”
Somehow, Shael knows what to do. He climbs the highest cliff in Dur. He stands and throws Asi towards the sky. His sword hits the dark canopy right in the spot, and the skyline breaks and opens.
A fleeting thought crosses Shael’s mind as he feels himself falling down the cliff—he can no longer smell the mustard.
The townspeople call on Shael the following day and the day after. When they break open the door, his body lies in the center, split from the base of his neck all the way down to his spine. Strange and pretty flowers bloom all around him.
The Chudail rushes in when she hears about the Destroyer’s death. She cradles his head, wraps his body in a muslin shroud, carries it in her arms and buries it deep within the swamp. The townspeople marvel at her strength and kindness and at the vishpaha flowers, which slither out of the town of their own accord and follow her to the swamp.
The Yakshinis stay away from the town for a few weeks. When they come to Kala Sagar the following Friday, they complain about a new realm forming within swamps and new beings emerging from it. They call themselves the denizens of Dur.
Meanwhile, the town of Kala Sagar waits for the Autumn Kavi Sammelan to mourn for the loss of their conscientious Destroyer in lyrical elegies.
*
The Chudail tells the new Destroyer she is training, “A thousand worlds are born in curses. Curses lie and steal your being.” The new Destroyer is barely twenty but has successfully managed to scare away half a dozen Yakshinis and also received the highest number of votes. The townspeople have also unanimously decided that all new Destroyers will undergo a final training under the Chudail.
The Chudail has been overcome with grief ever since Shael passed away; perhaps she could have prevented his death. She teaches the new Destroyer many things—weapons that murder, cursed objects that appear at random, dreams that betray and a new curse that tricks and grows in living bodies. She tells him about curses repeatedly. But she waits for the final lesson a day before his training finishes. She takes him by the hand, opens her cupboard, and shows him a blooming flower she smuggled from the swamp and kept hidden in a bottle. It rests soundly wrapped around a glowing strand of Yakshini’s hair, for now.