I should have died a year ago.
Not tonight. Not under this cursed sky.Not with violet light spilling like venom through the cracks of a fractured world.
I should have died on a quiet Thursday afternoon.It was summer, and the Mumbai heat had begun to settle in like a fever. I'd come home from school—my bag still slung over one shoulder, shirt half-untucked, sweat crusted under my collar. I remember thinking only of cold water and leftover dal.
And then I opened the door.
They were hanging from the ceiling fan.My mother and father. Side by side.Two bodies, gently swaying in perfect, synchronized stillness—like dolls hung up after playtime was over.
The room smelled like copper and sandalwood.There was a cushion stained red on the couch where I collapsed, not from grief—grief would come later—but from something else. A rupture in the soul. A blankness so heavy it felt like gravity itself had turned cruel.
They left a note.
Five words. Scrawled in my mother's familiar handwriting. Jagged, rushed, but unmistakably hers.
"Zinda rehna, beta. Maaf kar dena."Stay alive, son. Forgive us.
I don't remember falling.I don't remember the neighbors shouting or the constables stepping carefully around broken glass.I don't remember the ambulance's siren or the flashbulbs or the priest who whispered something about karma and rebirth as if that explained anything at all.
But I remember the silence.The kind that stays.Not the kind you sit in, but the kind that sits inside you—tight and unmoving, like dust at the base of your lungs, like ashes that never cool.
Since that day, I've lived on the edges of life.Not living. Not dying. Just… continuing.Breathe. Eat. Sleep. Repeat.
No joy. No rage.Even grief, eventually, dulled into a numb ache, a kind of quiet weight that kept me from disintegrating.
Until tonight.
Tonight, the world outside caught up with the silence I'd been carrying inside.Tonight, everything changed.
It began just past eleven.
I was on the rooftop of our apartment building in Malad.I often went there when I couldn't sleep—which was most nights. The ledge of the old cement water tank had become my regular perch. The city below was always loud, always moving—but up there, there was a strange kind of peace. A loneliness that mirrored my own.
That night, the sky was too clear for monsoon season.No clouds. No haze. The stars shone unnaturally bright, as though they had drifted closer to the earth to listen in. Or bear witness.
Then, everything stopped.
No cars. No auto-rickshaws sputtering past.No ceiling fans humming from open windows.No dogs barking. No breeze.Not even the insects buzzed.
It was as if the city had paused.Like an orchestra frozen mid-symphony.Like the universe had stopped breathing.
And then—it came.
A sphere of deep, living violet appeared in the sky, miles above the earth.It pulsed slowly, rhythmically, like a heartbeat made of thunderclouds and dying stars.It didn't fall. It descended. Controlled. Measured. As though something above was guiding it.
It wasn't alone.
I counted seven others—distant, smaller, fainter, but unmistakably real. Each one drifted toward the city with the same deliberate grace. They looked like celestial wounds—tears in the sky bleeding violet light that didn't illuminate so much as bend the air around it.
Then—blackout.
Mumbai died in a blink.
No lights. No billboards. No phone screens.The glowing veins of the city—the endless trails of electricity and neon and noise—went dark all at once.
I held my breath.The silence deepened.The sphere hovering above the mangroves shivered.
A thin fracture split across its surface—like pressure breaking stained glass.
There was no explosion. No boom. No tremor.Only a low, thrumming vibration that I didn't hear, but felt deep in my sternum.A primal sound. Not mechanical. Not natural. Something older. Something beyond.
I bolted.
Down the rusted stairwell. Past doors that never opened.My breath came in jagged pulls. My legs moved before I could decide to move them. There was no logic to my panic, no enemy to flee from—but something inside me had shifted. Something in my bones had remembered fear.
When I reached our flat on the second floor, I knew immediately—something was wrong.
The air inside felt thick. Oppressive.Too warm, like the inside of a furnace.It stank of burnt incense—and blood. Like the aftermath of a ritual no one had invited me to.
That's when I saw it.
My mother's old prayer book.Her Kali mantra granth, bound in worn leather and ashes, lying open on the floor in the middle of the living room.
I hadn't touched it in over a year. I'd locked it in the bottom drawer of her shrine the night after they died. I'd sworn never to look at it again.
Now it was open.Pages fluttering in still air.And on the open page, a single mantra gleamed like molten metal:
"ॐ क्रिम कालिकायै नमः"Om Krim Kalikayai Namah.
The ink bled violet.
Then—
"Aarav."
My name. Whispered not from the room, but from within me.Not loud. Not soft. Not sound at all.
I spun around. Nothing. No one.But something was there. A presence.It pressed against my ribs—invisible hands, weightless but undeniable.
"You are broken. But your pain is pure. That is why I choose you."
The voice wasn't male.Wasn't female.It wasn't even voice.It was fire turned to thought. A current of awareness that flooded every nerve in my body. It didn't speak—it entered.
I staggered back. My legs weak. My heart pounding. My spine felt like it had been struck by lightning.
The air became too much. Too heavy to breathe.I ran.
Out the door. Down the building. Into the streets.
Behind me, the city was coming undone.
Fires bloomed in distant towers like angry blossoms.Sirens wailed—but they were human voices. Not ambulances. Not police.A child cried on a dark balcony while her parents screamed at each other in the dark.Somewhere, a crowd chanted in Sanskrit. Somewhere else, a man laughed—deep, hollow, without stopping.
I didn't look back.
I ran through muck and trash and shattered glass. Through the reek of rot and smoke. Toward the ruins at the edge of the mangroves—the crumbling temple no one visited anymore.
It had flooded years ago. The roof had collapsed. The murtis were half-buried in moss and algae.
But now—it was awake.
The orb hovered above it, low and trembling.Cracks spread across its skin like lightning.The trees leaned away from it—as though afraid.
I stepped into the clearing.
And the orb split.
A violent slit of violet fire tore across its center, and through it—something moved.
A silhouette. A shadow.A goddess.
She didn't walk.She unfolded.
Ten arms, each bearing a weapon I couldn't name.Hair like black rivers, whipping in windless space.Skin darker than night storms.And eyes—oh, her eyes—two suns drowning in blood and eternity.
She stepped only halfway through the rift. She did not need to cross. Her presence—her truth—reached through it.
I dropped to my knees.Not out of reverence. Out of instinct.
She looked at me.
"I am Kali. I do not choose lightly."
Pain tore down my back like a blade of flame.I screamed. Fell forward. My spine burned.
Symbols—ancient, unknowable—etched into my skin in spirals of fire.
I wasn't breathing.I wasn't standing.I wasn't me.
The world melted into blur.
And in that blur, I saw—
My mother, humming a mantra while tying my school laces.My father, quiet at dinner, his eyes like hollow voids.The fan.The couch.The silence.The emptiness.
And then—my own voice.Calm. Clear. Steady.
"I do not want to be saved. But I will not die for nothing."
I opened my eyes.
I was no longer in the forest.No trees. No temple. No earth.
I was floating.Suspended in a void of violet and ash.
The stars above me pulsed—dim and broken, like dying hearts.The sky twisted in on itself, like paper burning in reverse.
And before me—she stood.
Not as a body.Not as a form.
But as truth.
Kali.
The storm made flesh. The blade behind silence.
She raised one arm—not in blessing. In judgment.
"I will give you fire," she said. "But you must choose what to burn."
Behind her, shadows moved.
Shapes. Masks. Faces.
And one of them stepped forward.
It had my face.
But the eyes—the eyes were wrong.
And it was smiling.