What is Tantra…
Episode 3: The Price of Power
I did not sleep again.
The four remaining teeth sat on the Formica table like guilty little soldiers. Every few minutes they clicked together, softly, as if whispering to one another. I wrapped them in the corpse-cloth and stuffed them into the room safe. The combination I chose was my mother’s birthday. The lock refused to close. The dial spun backwards on its own and settled on 0000.
I left the hotel at dawn and walked the streets until my legs gave out. I told myself I was gathering material. I interviewed sadhvis who claimed to have seen Maa Tara drink blood from a human skull. I photographed a tantrik who was trying to sell me a “genuine” embryo preserved in honey. I recorded everything with the cold precision of a man trying to prove he is still sane.
By afternoon I was back at the smashan.
Baba was waiting exactly where I had left him. A fresh corpse lay at his feet—a young man, maybe twenty-five, skin still warm. The throat had been opened ear to ear with something jagged. Blood pooled thick and black.
“You feel it,” Baba said without greeting. “The hunger.”
I wanted to deny it, but my mouth filled with saliva the moment I smelled the blood.
He dipped his fingers and painted a vertical line down my sternum, over the shirt. The cotton smoked where the blood touched it.
“Today,” he said, “you learn the second truth. Power is never free. Someone always pays.”
He dragged the corpse into a freshly dug pit. The body was naked except for a sacred thread. A Brahmin. Baba arranged the limbs in the parvatasana position—legs crossed, palms up, head tilted back so the slit throat gaped at the sky.
“This is shava sadhana,” he said. “The highest tantric practice. You will sit on the corpse. You will become the bridge between life and death. And the Goddess will speak through you.”
I laughed. It came out cracked.
“You want me to sit on a dead body.”
“I want you to become the throne of Kali,” he corrected. “Refuse if you are afraid. The boy already paid. His life for your knowledge.”
I stared at the corpse. Flies were already settling on the eyes.
Something inside me—curiosity, arrogance, the same poison that made me come here in the first place—whispered yes.
I climbed into the pit.
The skin was still soft. The blood soaked through my jeans instantly. I sat on the dead boy’s chest. His ribs creaked under my weight. Baba tied my ankles and wrists with strips of red cloth taken from menstruating women—he told me this proudly—and forced me into padmasana on the corpse.
Then he began the invocation.
The mantra was longer this time—forty-nine syllables that tasted like rust and honey. Each time he spoke it the sky darkened, though it was only four in the afternoon. Crows gathered in a perfect circle above us, silent.
On the seventh repetition the corpse moved.
I felt it first in the chest beneath me—a slow, deliberate inhale. The lungs had been cut, there was no air, yet the ribcage rose and pressed against my buttocks like a lover arching.
I tried to stand. The red cloths held me like iron.
The corpse opened its eyes.
They were milky white. Exactly like Baba’s.
It smiled with lips that had already begun to turn blue.
“Arjun,” it whispered, using the dead boy’s voice. “You owe me.”
I screamed. The sound came out as a croak.
Baba’s chanting never faltered.
The corpse sat up. My bound legs slid down its torso until I was straddling its waist like a child on a parent’s lap. Cold hands—impossibly strong—gripped my shoulders.
“Listen carefully,” the corpse said. Its breath smelled of the river at low tide. “There are five gates. You have opened one. Each gate demands a price. The first was paid by your enemy. This second is paid by me. The third will be paid by someone you love.”
I found my voice. “Let me go.”
“You begged for power,” the corpse said. “Now you learn its currency.”
Its mouth opened wider than anatomy allowed. Something long and black slithered out—tongue or snake, I couldn’t tell—and forced its way between my teeth. I gagged, choked, swallowed.
It tasted of my own blood.
The world exploded into white fire.
When I could see again, the sun had set. The corpse lay beneath me again, inert, throat gaping. Baba was untying the red cloths.
I was shaking uncontrollably.
“What was that?” I managed.
“The Goddess tasting you,” he said calmly. “She approves. But She is greedy. She wants more.”
He helped me stand. My legs were numb. The seat of my jeans was soaked crimson.
He gave me a small clay diya filled with ghee and a wick made of human hair.
“Take this to your room. Light it at midnight. Do not let it go out until dawn. If it does, the boy’s soul will come looking for the rest of his body.”
I wanted to throw the diya in his face. Instead I clutched it like a lifeline.
That night I sat on the hotel bed with the diya burning between my feet. The flame was blue and never flickered, no matter how the fan whirred.
At 2:03 a.m. my phone lit up.
A video call from “Maa.”
I almost dropped the phone. My mother never used video. She believed cameras stole the soul.
I accepted.
Her face filled the screen. She was crying.
“Arjun beta, come home. Something is wrong with your father’s photograph. It’s bleeding from the eyes.”
Behind her I saw the large framed wedding photo of my parents that hung in our drawing room. Black liquid was indeed dripping from my dead father’s printed eyes, staining the white sherwani.
“Ma, it’s just… some chemical reaction in the ink,” I said, but my voice sounded far away.
She didn’t hear me.
“And the diyas,” she whispered. “I lit 108 like always. But they all went out at once. Even though there was no wind. Beta, the pandit says someone has done kala jadu on our family.”
I wanted to tell her everything. Instead I said, “I’ll come home soon, Ma. Two more weeks.”
After I hung up, the blue flame of the diya lengthened until it touched the ceiling. In its light I saw the corpse-boy standing at the foot of my bed, throat smiling open.
He raised one hand and pointed at the four remaining teeth on the table.
“One for your mother,” he said gently. “One for your sister. One for the girl who left you. And the last… for you.”
Then he dissolved into smoke that smelled of marigolds and formaldehyde.
The flame shrank back to normal size.
I opened my laptop with fingers that would not stop trembling and began typing Episode 3.
I wrote about grief hallucinations, about how guilt can manifest physically, about how prolonged exposure to violent imagery rewires the brain.
Episode 4: The Woman in Red
I stopped pretending I was in control.
The next morning I tried to leave Tarapith. I reached Rampurhat station, bought a ticket to Kolkata, even boarded the train.
The train never moved.
They announced a technical fault. Then another. Then a dead body on the tracks—someone had thrown themselves in front of the previous train. By evening all trains were cancelled “until further notice.”
I took it as a sign.
I went back.
Baba was not at the smashan. Instead there was a woman.
She sat on the same pile of skulls, wearing a red sari that clung to her like wet blood. Her back was to me. Long black hair reached the ground and moved though there was no wind.
I knew I should run.
Instead I walked closer.
When she turned, I forgot how to breathe.
She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen—and the most terrible. Her skin was moonlight on bone. Her eyes were completely black, no whites at all. A vertical third eye, crimson and wet, blinked slowly on her forehead.
She smiled with too many teeth.
“You kept the boy’s soul waiting,” she said. Her voice was inside my chest. “Rude.”
I found my tongue. “Who are you?”
“You know who I am,” she said. “You have been calling me since the night you let Baba mark you.”
She stood. The red sari fell away. Underneath she was naked except for a necklace of severed hands. Each hand still wore a wedding ring.
She walked toward me. The ground burned where her feet touched.
I backed away until I hit the banyan tree.
She pressed against me. Her skin was furnace-hot.
“You want to know what Tantra is?” she whispered. “Tantra is the moment desire becomes destiny.”
Her tongue—long, black, forked—touched the black mark on my forehead.
Pleasure and pain detonated simultaneously. I came in my pants like a teenager and screamed until my throat bled.
She laughed and stepped back.
“Tonight,” she said, “you will bring me a lover. Willing or unwilling does not matter. Only that the act happens inside the circle while I watch.”
She pointed to a yantra freshly painted on the ground in blood and semen. In its centre lay a single human heart still beating.
I ran.
I ran until I reached the main temple road. I collapsed in front of a tea stall, gasping. The stall owner poured water on my face.
“Arre babu, what happened? You saw bhoot?”
I couldn’t speak.
That evening I did something unforgivable.
There was a girl who sold flowers outside the temple. Seventeen maybe. Large eyes, shy smile. She always gave me extra marigolds when I bought offerings.
Her name was Laxmi.
I found her closing her stall.
I told her I needed help carrying something heavy to the smashan for a special puja. I promised her two thousand rupees—more than she earned in a month.
She hesitated, then agreed.
I led her past the banyan tree at twilight.
She began to sense something wrong when the crows went silent.
“Bhaiya,” she whispered, “this is not the way to any temple.”
I didn’t answer.
The woman in red was waiting inside the yantra, now clothed again, smiling like a bride.
Laxmi screamed when she saw her.
I grabbed the girl’s wrist. My grip was stronger than it had any right to be.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
The woman in red opened her arms.
Laxmi was lifted off the ground. Her dupatta tore away. The red sari wrapped around her like living fabric, binding her arms and legs.
I was forced to watch.
The woman rode the girl the way a storm rides the sea. Laxmi’s screams turned to moans turned to something worse—ecstatic surrender. Her eyes rolled white. Blood ran from her nose, her ears, between her legs.
When it was over she lay broken in the centre of the yantra, chest heaving.
The woman in red turned to me.
“Now you,” she said.
I was already hard. I hated myself for it.
She pushed me down onto Laxmi’s body. The girl was burning with fever. She looked up at me with eyes that were no longer hers.
“Please,” she whispered. “Finish it.”
I did.
When I came, the heart in the yantra gave one final beat and burst.
Power flooded me like heroin. For one endless second I saw everything—past lives, future deaths, the threads connecting every soul in Tarapith. I saw my mother lighting diyas that would never protect her. I saw my sister in London boarding a plane that would never land.
I saw myself hanging from the banyan tree with my tongue black and my eyes popped out.
Then it was gone.
I was sobbing on top of Laxmi’s limp body.
The woman in red kissed my forehead with lips that tasted of ashes.
“Third gate,” she said softly, “paid in full.”
She vanished.
Laxmi stirred. She sat up slowly, like a puppet whose strings had been cut and re-tied.
She looked at me with eyes that were completely black now.
“Thank you, Arjun bhaiya,” she said in a voice that was not hers. “I was so hungry.”
Then she stood, adjusted her torn clothes as if nothing had happened, and walked away into the night.
I stayed in the yantra until morning, covered in blood and semen and shame.
When Baba found me he was almost tender.
“You did well,” he said. “Most men break at the third gate. You only bent.”
He gave me a small iron ring to wear on my left thumb.
“It will keep her out of your dreams,” he said. “For now.”
I asked the question I had been avoiding.
“How many gates are there?”
He smiled with sharpened teeth.
“Ten,” he said. “Always ten.”
I went back to the hotel.
Laxmi was sitting in the lobby, selling flowers again. She smiled at me exactly the way she had the first day—shy, sweet, untouched.
No one in the town seemed to notice anything wrong.
I locked myself in my room and opened my laptop.