Chapter 3: The Jal-Pishach's Tale

Chapter 3: The Jal-Pishach's Tale

Two days. It had been two days since I’d eaten a proper meal. My body was a battlefield, and the craving was winning. The phantom scent of sizzling oil had become a permanent resident in my sinuses. It was a cruel, perfidious ghost that whispered of crispy, golden-brown perfection, of spices exploding on the tongue. My stomach, a hollow drum of misery, cramped and twisted with a hunger so profound it felt like a physical wound. I was light-headed, my hands trembled, and every shadow in our heavily warded home seemed to lengthen and writhe.

The silver nail my mother had hammered into the doorframe seemed to mock me. The smoke from the herbs she burned daily choked the air, but it couldn't choke the hunger. I was trapped, a prisoner in my own home, besieged from within and without. Vikram’s angry denial and Sameer’s terrified silence echoed in my mind. There was no help for me there. I was utterly, terrifyingly alone with my mother and her desperate rituals.

That evening, I couldn't bear it anymore. The pain in my gut was a white-hot poker, and my mind was fraying at the edges. I found my mother sitting in the dim light of the main room, her prayer beads clicking through her fingers like a frantic, failing clock. Her face was etched with exhaustion, her eyes fixed on the front door.

“Ma,” I rasped, my voice thin and reedy. “You have to tell me. What is it? You can’t just say it ‘attached’ itself to me. You knew. The moment I said ‘samosas,’ you knew. You have to tell me everything.”

She stopped her chanting, the beads falling still in her lap. She looked at me, and for the first time, the fear in her eyes was overshadowed by a deep, ancient grief. She sighed, a sound of profound surrender, as if I had finally pushed her past a point of no return.

“There are names man is not meant to speak,” she said, her voice a low murmur. “To name a thing is to give it power, to draw its attention. But its attention is already on you.” She paused, her gaze dropping to the floor. “It is a Jal-Pishach.”

The name fell into the quiet room like a stone into a deep well. Jal. Water. Pishach. A ghoul, a demon that feeds on flesh and spirit. The words felt foul on my tongue even as I thought them. The nameless dread from the riverbank now had a title, a place in the dark folklore I had always dismissed. It made it worse. It made it real.

“A water ghoul,” I repeated, the words tasting like ash.

“Not just any ghoul,” she corrected, her eyes lifting to meet mine, dark and serious. “The one in our river is old. Patient. And it has a preferred way of hunting.”

She gestured to the floor beside her. “Sit, Arjun. If you are to fight this, you must understand what you are fighting.”

I sank to the floor, my legs barely holding me. She began to speak, her voice taking on the rhythmic cadence of a storyteller, but her tale was no children’s fable.

“This is not a story I read in a book,” she began. “It is a memory the town tries to forget. Forty years ago, when I was just a little girl, there was a boy who lived two streets over. His name was Dev. He was seventeen, strong, always laughing. He had a big heart and an even bigger appetite.”

A cold dread began to pool in my stomach, one that had nothing to do with the craving.

“There was a wedding in the village, the biggest feast of the year. There were mountains of food. Puri, kachori, pakoras, jalebis… all fried in huge pots of bubbling oil. Dev, he ate like a king. Everyone laughed and cheered him on. They said he had an empty leg to fill.”

She paused, her eyes growing distant. “The next day, his mother was worried. Dev wasn't himself. He complained of a hunger that wouldn't go away, a gnawing emptiness that nothing could satisfy. He refused the roti and dal she made him. He said all he could think about, all he could smell, was the hot oil and fried dough from the wedding.”

My blood turned to ice. My own obsession, my own private madness, was being recited back to me as a forty-year-old memory.

“He grew agitated,” my mother continued, her voice dropping to a whisper. “He told his family he was going for a walk to clear his head, that he felt a strange thirst that water couldn’t quench. Some boys saw him. He wasn't walking towards the market. He was walking towards the river. Towards the Ghat of the Hungry.”

She took a shaky breath. “He never came back.”

The room was silent save for the frantic beating of my own heart. I knew what was coming, but I was powerless to stop her words.

“They searched for days. Finally, a fisherman found him. His body was caught in the reeds downstream. At first, everyone thought he had slipped and drowned. But when they pulled him from the water…” She squeezed her eyes shut, as if replaying a scene she wished she could forget. “Arjun, there was no water in his lungs. His body… it was wrong. It felt light, like a bundle of dry sticks. His skin was pale and tight, stretched over his bones like paper. He was… hollow.”

“Hollow?” I whispered, my throat constricting.

“Desiccated,” she confirmed, her voice trembling. “Drained. Like a coconut husk after the water has been drunk. The pandit at the time was an old man who knew the ancient ways. He said the Jal-Pishach had marked Dev at the feast. All that laughter, all that life force, all that hot, greasy food—it was like a beacon in the dark. Dev gave in to the craving. He fed it. And in doing so, he fed the Pishach’s hold on him, strengthened the line between them until the pull of the river was stronger than his own mind, his own soul. He didn’t fall into the river, Arjun. He walked into it. Willingly.”

The story hung in the air between us, a grim prophecy. This wasn't a monster that ripped you apart. It was a parasite that made you hollow yourself out from the inside, that made you an accomplice in your own destruction. The gnawing in my stomach suddenly felt infinitely more sinister. It wasn't my hunger. It was the creature’s pull. The line.

My mother leaned forward, her eyes pleading, desperate. “That is what awaits you if you fail. It doesn’t want your body, Arjun. It wants your prana. Your life essence. It will drink you dry until there is nothing left but a shell to be tossed aside by the current.”

As her final, chilling words settled over me, a sound echoed from the kitchen.

Drip.

My head snapped towards the sound. The tap was new. It never leaked.

Drip.

It was slow. Deliberate. A single drop, followed by a long, waiting silence. An answer to my mother’s story. A reminder from the thing lurking just outside our sanctified walls.

Drip.

The Jal-Pishach was listening. It was patient. And it knew, with absolute certainty, that sooner or later, I would break.