What is Tantra…
Episode 1: The Question
My name is Arjun Vikram Singh.
Twenty-eight years old, born and raised in South Delhi, educated in St. Stephen’s and Columbia Journalism School on my father’s black money and my mother’s silent tears. I have spent the last six years writing click-bait listicles about “10 Ancient Indian Secrets Modern Science Can’t Explain” while privately believing every single one of them is horse shit.
I hate superstition the way a recovered alcoholic hates the smell of whiskey.
It destroyed my family. My mother still lights 108 diyas every Tuesday because a pandit in Haridwar told her it would bring my father back from the dead. He died in a car crash when I was twelve. The diyas never worked. The pandit got a new Toyota.
So when my editor offered me twenty lakh rupees to write a book debunking Tantra, I took it without blinking. The working title was going to be Tantra: The Greatest Con Since Religion. I was going to Tarapith, the holiest and most unholy tantric peeth in India, to prove once and for all that everything—siddhis, black magic, shava sadhana—was either stage magic or mental illness.
I arrived on 3rd November 2025.
The train from Kolkata was six hours late. When I finally stepped onto the platform at Rampurhat, the air was thick with coal smoke and the smell of wet earth. A rickshaw wallah with no front teeth told me Tarapith was another forty minutes. He charged me triple because I was “Dilli ka babu.”
The temple town hit me like a slap. Loudspeakers screamed bhajans at 120 decibels. Goats bleated, waiting for their throats to be cut in front of Maa Tara. Sadhus with matted hair begged for bhang money. Women in red saris carried brass pots of Gangajal on their heads. And everywhere—every single wall, every paan shop shutter—was painted with the same symbol: a downward-pointing triangle inside a circle, bleeding red.
I checked into Hotel Tara Palace, a concrete box that smelled of smelled damp and incense. My room overlooked the cremation ground. Perfect. I wanted to be close to the source material.
That night I opened my MacBook and began typing the introduction.
“What is Tantra?” I wrote. “Officially it is an esoteric tradition that promises liberation through the body instead of against it. Unofficially it is the last refuge of con-men who need an excuse to drink liquor, eat meat, and have sex in cremation grounds while calling it ‘spiritual practice.’ This book will be the autopsy report.”
I felt good. Sharp. Righteous.
The next morning I hired a guide named Pintu. Nineteen years old, gold chain, fake Ray-Ban, and the survival instincts of a jackal. He promised to show me “real tantrik baba, very powerful, very dangerous.”
We walked past the main temple toward the smashan. The path narrowed between bamboo clumps and stunted palms. The air grew heavier, sweet with marigolds and rotting flesh. Crows fought over pieces of bone.
Pintu stopped at a banyan tree whose roots hung like nooses.
“Beyond this,” he whispered, “is Baba’s place. I don’t go further. Last year my friend Raju came here at night. Next morning they found him hanging from this same tree. Tongue black, eyes popped out. Police said suicide. Everyone knows Baba called him.”
I laughed. “How much did the family pay you to spread that story?”
Pintu looked wounded. “No pay, sir. Truth. You want to meet Baba or not?”
I gave him five hundred rupees extra. He pocketed it and vanished.
I walked alone.
The cremation ground opened up like a wound. Half-burnt pyres smoked lazily. Dogs gnawed on femurs. A little girl in a frock was collecting ash in a plastic bag—probably to sell to tantriks for rituals. She smiled at me with black teeth and said, “Baba is waiting.”
I followed her gaze.
There, under a crumbling chhatri, sat a naked man covered head to toe in ash. Human ash. His hair was a wild explosion of jata that reached the wind into living snakes. Around his neck hung a garland of tiny bones—finger bones, I realized with a lurch. In his right hand he held a human skull. He was drinking from it.
The girl giggled and ran away.
I stood ten feet from him. My heart was hammering, but I told myself it was adrenaline, nothing more.
The man raised his head.
His eyes were completely white—no iris, no pupil, just milky emptiness. Yet I felt them pierce straight through my skull.
“You came to write a book,” he said. His voice was dry leaves scraping over stone.
I swallowed. “Yes.”
“Title?”
“What is Tantra.”
He smiled. The teeth were sharpened to points.
“Good title,” he said. “But incomplete. The real question is—what is Tantra… to you?”
He dipped two fingers into the skull-cap and drew a line of liquid across my forehead before I could step back. It was warm. It smelled of iron and alcohol.
“Name?” I asked, trying to sound professional.
“Names are for the dead,” he said. “The living don’t need them. But you may call me Baba if it comforts you.”
He stood. He was enormous—six and a half feet at least—and thin as a skeleton. His skin clung to his bones like wet paper. Between his legs swung a black iron trident the size of a baseball bat.
“You want to know what Tantra is,” he said. “I will show you. But there is a price.”
“Everything has a price,” I said. “How much?”
He laughed. The sound made the crows take flight.
“Not money, writer-boy. Something far more precious.”
He turned and walked deeper into the smashan, between the pyres. Against every rational instinct, I followed.
That was the first evening.
He made me sit on a freshly burnt spot where a body had been cremated hours earlier. The ground was still hot. He drew a circle around me with human bone powder and told me to stay inside it until sunrise.
“Nothing will harm you inside the circle,” he said. “Outside… everything will want to.”
Then he left.
I sat there for nine hours.
At first it was just insects. Then dogs came and stared at me with red eyes. Then shapes moved between the pyres—tall, thin, stretching. I heard a woman crying somewhere, calling a child’s name. I heard laughter that wasn’t human.
At 3:17 a.m. the temperature dropped twenty degrees in seconds. My breath came out white. Something walked around the circle, dragging its feet. Each footstep left a burning print that smelled of rotting marigolds.
I closed my eyes and repeated to myself: Mass hysteria. Group hypnosis. Infrasound. Carbon monoxide from the pyres. Anything but real.
When the sun finally rose, Baba was sitting in front of me again.
“You stayed,” he said, almost surprised.
“Of course I did,” I snapped. My voice was hoarse. “It’s just mind tricks.”
He reached out and touched the line he had drawn on my forehead the evening before. It had turned black and sunk into my skin like a tattoo.
“Mind tricks,” he repeated, smiling. “Yes. That is exactly what Tantra is.”
He stood.
“Lesson one tomorrow night. Bring hunger. Leave fear at home—it won’t help where we are going.”
I went back to the hotel, showered for forty minutes, and still couldn’t wash off the smell of death. That night I typed 2,000 words about how tantric “power” is nothing but prolonged sensory deprivation and auto-suggestion.
I titled the chapter “Night One: The Circle of Delusion.”
I felt in Submit and went to sleep.
In my dream, Baba’s white eyes stared at me from the ceiling.
And the black line on my forehead was bleeding.
Episode 2: The First Taste
I woke up tasting ash.
The line on my forehead had scabbed over during the night. When I picked at it in the mirror, it came off in one perfect strip—like a leech that had finished feeding. Underneath, the skin was unmarked.
I told myself it was henna mixed with some local anesthetic. Classic street-magician bullshit.
Pintu was waiting outside the hotel with a new story: a foreign tourist had vanished two nights ago after visiting the smashan. The police found her camera. Every photo after midnight was completely black—as if light itself had died.
I gave him another five hundred to take me shopping.
We bought:
– one bottle country liquor (the kind that can strip paint)
– fresh fish wrapped in banana leaf
– a small packet of human bone powder (Pintu swore it was from a virgin who died in childbirth—highest potency)
– five human teeth pulled from corpses (price negotiated down from 2000 to 1200 rupees)
– a piece of red cloth that had wrapped a dead body
Pintu looked like he was going to vomit the whole time.
“You are really doing this, sir?”
“I’m doing research,” I said.
He dropped me at the banyan tree and fled.
Baba was already waiting, sitting on a pile of skulls like it was a throne. The evening sky behind him was the color of dried.
“You brought offerings,” he approved. “Good. The Goddess is hungry.”
He took the fish and bit its head off raw. Blood ran down his chin in black rivers. Then he drank half the bottle in one pull and offered it to me.
I took it. The liquor burned like acid. I gagged but kept it down.
“First lesson,” he said. “Tantra is not prayer. Prayer is begging. Tantra is command.”
He made me sit inside another circle, this one drawn with menstrual blood mixed with the bone powder. The smell was unbearable.
He placed the five teeth in front of me in the shape of a pentagram.
“These teeth belonged to people who died in agony,” he said. “Their pain is still trapped inside. We are going to set it free—and direct it.”
He taught me the mantra.
It was short. Only nine syllables.
But when he spoke it, the air around us thickened, as if gravity had doubled. The pyres flared higher even though no one had added wood. Dogs began howling in perfect unison.
He made me repeat it one hundred and eight times.
By the fiftieth repetition my tongue was bleeding. By the hundredth, I was crying without knowing why.
At the hundred-and-eighth, something answered.
It came from the teeth.
A sound—like five people screaming at once, but the screams were inside my skull. The teeth rattled, jumped, spun in the dust. Then they flew up and arranged themselves into a perfect circle in mid-air, spinning faster and faster until they became a ring of fire.
Baba laughed like a child.
“Behold,” he said. “Pain obeys you now.”
He told me to choose a target.
I laughed. The liquor, the exhaustion, the mania—I was beyond caution.
“There’s a guy,” I said. “Back in Delhi. Rohan Malhotra. Stole my girlfriend, my book deal, my life. I want him to suffer.”
Baba’s white eyes gleamed.
“Specific,” he approved. “Specific is good.”
He made me visualize Rohan’s face while chanting the nine more times.
Then he crushed one of the teeth under his heel. The sound it made was exactly like bone snapping.
“Go back to your hotel,” he said. “Tomorrow we will see how well you listened.”
I stumbled back through the dark. Somewhere behind me, a woman screamed—one long, endless note that cut off abruptly.
I told myself it was coincidence.
At 4:07 a.m. my phone rang.
Unknown number. Delhi code.
When I picked up, all I heard was breathing—wet, ragged, desperate. Then a voice I recognized.
Rohan.
“Arjun,” he sobbed. “Something’s in the room. It’s biting me. It’s—oh God the pain—”
The line went dead.
I checked WhatsApp. His last seen was 4:06 a.m.
At 7:12 a.m. I got a message from a mutual friend.
Rohan was found dead in his apartment. Cause: massive cardiac arrest induced by extreme terror. His face was frozen in a scream. There were five perfect bite marks on his throat—human teeth, the coroner said, but the impressions were too small, like a child’s.
Or like five extracted human teeth animated by something that should not exist.
I sat on the hotel bed and stared at the remaining four teeth I had brought back in my pocket. They were warm. They vibrated slightly, like phones on silent.
(To be continued……)