Ekanor

Trigger Warning:

Murder, Torture, Sexual Assault

There was an odd silence in the shamshan ghat. The only noise was the sound of shoveling and the flow of the river. Ramanand Sen was standing by the river and watching Asif dig the ground. "Devanand! Light up some more incense sticks and kappur here. These bastards have become even more disgusting after dying.", he scoffed in disdain before lighting up a Cuban cigar. Devanand quickly brought a bundle of incense sticks in one hand and a handful of kappur in the other. With lightning speed he placed the sticks and kappur in their respective holders and lit them up.

In the light of the burning kappurs he got a glimpse at all the mound of the rotting corpses by the river. Shivers ran down his spine. In a moment of guilt Devanand told his brother "Ramanand bhaiya, let us just burn them! Why go through all this trouble?", immediately Ramanand's eyes lit up and rage washed out all rigour on his face. He clenched his fists, breaking the cigar in hands, he roared like a wounded tiger "Burn them? And let them be in peace? I will not even let their souls rest! They dared to disobey me! Their master! Today we let them go then tomorrow more will rebel! This will serve as a warning to the coming generations of this scum. They will never rebel after this.".

Ramanand let out a sigh and took another cigar out of his pocket but before lighting it up he told Asif "Asif, how much longer? Make it fast!", Asif turned to his master and replied "Master if I could get the help of a few men then—", Devanand interrupted Asif and said "We killed every Chandal in this district Asif, where will we get people to bury them from? And no one else will touch Chandal corpses, that too rotten ones.". Asif went back to digging the mass grave.

Mehul ran to his grandmother, the moment the car stopped, and took her into a tight embrace. His grandmother also reciprocated, as if her love for her grandson had given her arms some new found strength. Mehul's grandmother, Sarla devi, eventually had to break the embrace as age caught up to her. "Listen up, I've made lots of Kul[Indian Jujube] pickles for you. Eat to your heart's content okay?", saying this she gently kissed Mehul's forehead.

Mehul's parents and his younger sister– Ahilya, came up to Sarla devi to touch her feet. Mehul was exempted from these formalities, after all he was the one who had to carry forward the family's legacy. He was the only boy of his generation in his family. Of course his paternal aunt had a son too, Ankush, but he didn't bear the family name. This never bothered him, he saw it only as justified. He was the one who will take care of his parents so he should get the property, not his sisters.

"Now go inside and wash yourselves. Your cousins have already freshened up. Quick." Sarla told her grandchildren. They ran inside to greet their cousins while their parents talked to their grandmother. The siblings did not have to look for long either, their cousins were seated in the courtyard of the house. They had formed a circle around a plate of Nadu and Khoi Rupda. The sibling duo was received with wide smiles and high fives, to which they responded with equal intensity.

As they were about to sit down with their cousins, their paternal uncle's daughter Anushka impeded them by saying "At least freshen up guys, look at yourselves. You look like chamars.". "What's a chamar? And where are you learning this kind of language from?", said Anushka's elder sister Alisha. "It just means a cleaner but can be used for poor people or dirty and unhygienic and stuff. You should learn more about your mother tongue and native culture. You act like a British princess sometimes.",as Anushka finished, Alisha made a face at her.

"Guys, I have a plan for which I need your help." Ankush said, "See for my next YouTube video, I want to cover some on the ground action. Listening to other people's supernatural experiences and narrating them is much different than actually feeling something first hand.". "But what will you cover?" asked Mehul. A coy grin appeared on Ankush's face, "Our district, Chaitanyagarh village, both have a spooky and bloody history you know. That shamshan ghat near the river? It is said that the whole shamshan is haunted. The story behind the shamshan being haunted is even more interesting and also unique. Apparently during the late 60s the Dalit peasants of this district, inspired by the Naxalite rebellion, rebelled against the zamindar. This was before the land reforms of Bengal and so the landlords were quite powerful back then so they too retaliated with the help of the police. But the peasants, under the leadership of some Naxalites, looted the weapons of the police and fought against the landlord's henchmen, which included the police too."

"So the casualties of the conflict were massive?", Mehul asked. "No, the State forces didn't stand a chance against the peasants who used guerrilla tactics. What happened is that later under the influence of some Left parties the peasants surrendered arms to the State in the early 80s. The landlord families of this area saw that opportunity and killed nearly every peasant in the district, rebel or not. In the dead of the night, they massacred whole villages and destroyed everything. The landlords were put on trial by the and sentenced to death, although later the sentence was reduced to rigorous imprisonment for some years by the High Court. Now, according to the police report they had left the corpses to rot for a few weeks and then buried them in the shamshan. The police report doesn't specify where in the shamshan but it's somewhere there. Interestingly, everyone avoids the Nyara ghat even today. People don't even wanna talk about it." Ankush took a breath after finishing his monologue. "So who's in?", all of them raised their hands in unison. Ankush smiled and said "So here's the plan…"

"Why can't we just walk in through the gates?" Anushka asked. "Because people might see us and cause a ruckus, I thought that much was obvious!" Alisha scolded her sister. They had planned to enter the shamshan through the adjoining jungle which would provide them with appropriate cover during the night. The full moon's light and their cell phone flashlights together made it possible to navigate through the jungle. "Guys, you see the shiny surface? That's the river, it's shining under the moonlight. According to Google we're about 200 meters away from the shamshan. We just walk straight along the river for 5 minutes and bingo." the good news that Ankush reported filled his cousins with new found motivation. Within a few minutes they were inside the shamshan.

"I'll start recording on 3..2..1 and go!" Ahilya said. "Hello guys, today I've got something different for you people. In this episode of Pret Tales you guys will witness me spending a whole night in a haunted shamshan. This shamshan is situated in Chaitanyagarh…" As Ankush was recording, the others began to take pictures of the shamshan. The soothing calm light of the full moon, contrasted with the dead darkness and the shining river created a mesmerizing atmosphere. As if nature itself had set a stage for the climax of an epic saga. "Why's the ghat so silent?" Anushka asked, her voice heavy with concern "Even the adjoining forest, it was oddly silent. Such places, especially forests, are supposed to be always noisy. We didn't even see any scavengers on the way", Alisha added. Mehul scoffed at their reservations. He moved ahead further into the ghat as a display of his masculine bravado but even he had a bad feeling about this place. This ghat was not used for any purpose by villagers and with the forest so close, it should be bustling with flora.

"As you people can see, there's not a single sign of life of any kind in this ghat. Nothing but a single tree. This absence of plants is also what gives the ghat its name, 'Nyara Ghat' which translates to 'Bald Ghat'. As I told you people, this is my ancestral village. I literally grew up here, I'm a man of the soil." Ankush lied to the camera, Ahilya couldn't help but laugh a bit. Ankush continued talking to the camera, but Ahilya's mind was elsewhere. She found it very odd that there was not a single plant on that soil even though it has not been used by people for more than 40 years now. Not just that there was something else too, she did not know whether it was a coincidence or something else, but it was suspicious. It seemed like the trees on the boundaries of the ghat were scared of the ghat itself. Branches which usually grow in random directions, avoided growing towards the ghat. Not a single branch had grown on the ghat-side of the trees that bordered the ghat, let alone trespass into the ghat. As if even the mere touch of the ghat would unleash a great plague on them or destroy their very chastity.

"Now I'll give you a closer look at the tree I was speaking of. The tree that stands tall in defiance of its circumstances and against all odds, survives everyday." Ankush began walking towards the tree and Ahilya followed his lead. Alisha and Anushka were already inspecting the tree with curious eyes. Their curiosity was understandable too, the tree was like nothing they had seen before. The tree was the perfect example of a stygian being, it was black as a shadow. But the most interesting part of the tree was the fact that its bark seemed unusually smooth, with only a few pores that leaked a weird puss. There was not a single leaf on the tree, but all its branches seemed boney. Puss was dripping from the branches too. But no one could figure out what tree it was, which was expected from people who grew up in concrete jungles made up of boxes.

"Why does it smell so awf-" Before Mehul could complete his remark, his stomach sent his lunch back the way it had come. This made everyone jump from Mehul and exclaim in disgust. "It's not his fault, the tree smells like rotten meat. Maybe it's because of the puss, but then again where would that come from?" Anushka said. Mehul was still emptying his stomach when suddenly his legs gave out. He lost balance. He was about to fall face first into his own spew when suddenly a hand held him by the elbow. Mehul took a breath of relief and immediately his face slammed into the pool of puke he had created. Beneath the disgusting mix of dirt and vomit, Mehul's face was burning with rage. Someone intentionally let him fall and that someone will face the consequences of that. He heard a scream, no, he heard many screams. As he got up to enquire, he felt something on his left elbow. Someone was gripping it tightly, but Mehul could still move it freely. He looked at his left elbow, a single hand without a body was gripping it. A chill ran down his spine, he stopped breathing as if he had forgotten how to breathe at all, every muscle in his body stiffened. Time had stopped for Mehul, his mind could not think of anything but the hand. It was rotten, with flesh falling off of it. The tip of the finger bones were already exposed. He was brought back to his senses by a sharp pain in right shoulder. Something had pierced his skin, something was biting him. The horror of the hand had blended Mehul to the larger and a much more horrific picture.

The tree wasn't a tree at all. Ahilya was the first one to notice it. Just as Mehul started puking, something on the tree started moving. Two swollen creases, something was moving within them. From the corner of her eye, she saw an appendage hold her falling brother before being ripped. Yet she didn't even flinch. She was engrossed with the movement in the tree's bark. The motion was now not just limited to two points but had spread within the whole tree. As if the tree was like a machine, made up of slimy and soft parts which were now all brought to life. The points, where this motion originated, suddenly started splitting. They were eyes. Human eyes. Looked straight at Ahilya as if they could see through her. As if her fear and anxiety were all visible to them. She was so lost, so mesmerised by the eyes that she did not notice the that a branch had bent down behind her. It would be wrong to call it branch though, it was a bunch of limbs. The limbs grabbed her by the throat. Ahilya, back in her senses, finally saw the monstrosity in front of her.

Countless half rotten corpses were growing out of the tree, no they weren't growing out of the tree. They were the tree! Hundreds of bodies were crammed together, to form a tree. Now these masses of half rotten flesh were reaching out to her. They were pulling her towards themselves. Their bony fingers dug into her chest and stomach, pulling her like hooks. She wanted to scream, in fear, in agony, but the chokehold that the corpses had on her throat stopped her from shouting. She couldn't see any of her cousins or her brother, they were already absorbed. She too was being submerged into the pile of meat. She could feel only soft rotten flesh around her, multiple hands pulling her into the core of whatever this thing was. She was desperately trying not to be submerged within the mound. But all in vain. A veil of darkness fell over her eyes as consciousness slipped away from her.

Ahilya found herself in a small hut when she opened her eyes. A woman was talking to her children, trying to put them to sleep. Three children, two sons and a daughter. 'We were euphoric that night. We had won a battle, or that's what we thought.', Ahilya couldn't find the source of the voice, as if it was everywhere at the same time. "So much for a piece of land?" Ahilya asked. The voice, which was of a woman's, spoke with fury 'Land? Just land? It wasn't just land for us. It was our livelihood, it was our wealth, it was our dignity. That land meant we had some dignity, that land meant we had a share in society, a say in its decisions.' the anger in the voice washed away to make way for something else, grief, 'Land also meant dominance to them. This dignity is what got us killed. If we had land, we'd have self-respect, we'd be equals. Us and them. How could those brutes have accepted that!?' the voice was screaming at this point, wrath was returning to it but the pain or grief never faded for a second. 'You wanna see what they did to us!? I'll show you, I'll show you everything!' As soon as the voice completed her sentence, the door of the hut was kicked open. A couple of familiar faces stood on the other side of it with torches and guns in hand.

The men on the other side of the door were Ahilya's grandfather, Ramanand Sen, and his brother Devanand Sen. As the men entered the house, the woman began pleading and begging them, holding their feet. The men kicked her off. 'I knew they weren't gonna spare me but I pleaded to them to spare my children. But little did I know.', suddenly Devanand heard something and got alarmed. The woman's husband was approaching them with a sickle, he shot the man in his knees and then shot his hands. The man laid there incapacitated, Ramanand commanded his brother to bring the man in. 'You know the worst part about this? I knew the final outcome, I knew I was gonna be raped. I knew they would kill me. But I couldn't come to terms with it. I couldn't accept it and that anticipation made it even more painful.'. Her anticipation was right. When it happened, she screamed, she screamed as loudly as she could. But to no avail. She thrashed her hands. Her bangles broke and pierced her wrist, yet she kept thrashing. The slit wrists were the least painful thing happening to her. The torture lasted for half an hour. First Ramanand, then his brother and then both of them together. That half an hour seemed like an eternity, every second of it was made unbearably painful by the atrocity being committed against her. They were clawing her like foxes, eating her away piece by piece. Every moment, a part of her died. Her children were not spared from torture either, they were forced to watch the whole monstrous act. The kids, unable to comprehend what was happening and seeing their mother in such pain, kept sobbing and screaming. Wails that could even crack open the pearl gates of heaven, the pain in them burnt into Ahilya's soul like acid and the guilt of her ancestors' actions was like the sky to her Atlas like consciousness. They kept screaming and crying beside their weeping father. Towards the end, she couldn't even shout or thrash or move. She laid there like a lifeless pile of flesh. That's when they stopped. The Sen brothers then killed children and dragged the couple outside where similar acts of horror were being committed. It wasn't about the carnal pleasure for her molesters, it was about the pain they were causing her. It was about seeing her suffer. It was about asserting dominance over her and her community. It was about pride. All this just for their hollow pride. Even when they were done, the woman didn't move, she couldn't move. Blood dripped from her injured organ, but the mark of this atrocity ran much deeper than some flesh wounds.

The air was filled with wails of women who were being assaulted. Ahilya could smell the ever pervading smell of blood. Human blood. From the corner of her eyes she noticed something. She turned her head to witness the most horrific view of her life. 'That girl can't be more than twelve' she thought in horrified incredulity. Men, at least seven of them, were clawing at her, slapping her, punching her. They kept on going as the soil underneath them turned red with blood that flowed from her organ. Helpless husbands and fathers watching while they take their last breaths. Whatever this was, calling it a massacre would be charitable. As if the earth itself had spit out the most cruel demons of hell to wreak havoc on this village and its people. The pain, the madness, the chaos, it was unbearable. Ahilya's mind was giving up, her senses were failing. "STOP THIS! PLEASE STOP THIS! I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!" she pleaded to the force that had kept her captive. Everything around her froze. The voice spoke again 'This went on for the whole night. All night, we had to bear their torture before they finally granted us the relief of death. Most women died because of the brutality of their assault and the rest of the population was awarded the bullet. But they didn't stop there. They dragged our corpses to the ghat and kept them there. Vultures and insects desecrated our bodies. Even in the afterlife, we felt them eating away at our corpses. Our spirits were filled with rage. We wanted justice. We found justice. Our Lord gave us Justice.' "Who's your Lord?" asked Ahilya. 'They don't have a name or a caste or a gender or even a physical form. They're above all this or even ideas like morals and justice. They only understand grief and pain. They are the conscious manifestation of grief and pain, anguish personified. They harnessed our grief, our pain, to turn it into power. Raw power. They gave us a new form— a seed, a seed of death. When your ancestors buried our bodies, they sowed the seed of death. Now you will reap the fruits of it.'. Even the mention of this Lord of theirs just added another layer to the suffering that was around Ahilya. "But this doesn't make sense! How can you worship someone without knowing their name? And why should we be punished for the crime of our ancestors? We didn't do anything!". Laughter boomed all around her, a bone chilling laughter. 'It is really telling you know. You even need to know the name of your gods before worshiping, you need to know the name of your cooks before eating their food lest you are polluted by some so-called inferior. But you are not polluted by these same inferiors when you rape them! You say that your hands don't have blood on them, tell me something, did you not inherit your ancestor's wealth? The wealth that was accumulated through our oppression! The wealth that had blood on it! Look closely and you will see the stains on your hands too. I have seen your memories, you talk of change and equality but the maids in your home have separate cups. Why Ahilya? Cause our touch will make you impure? Will you rot at our touch? So be it. We've touched you and your siblings, let's see how impure that makes you'.

Suddenly darkness set in around her. She felt her consciousness slowly escaping her grip like sand in a fist. She could hear a whisper, a very distant whisper "Remember what we are, what your ancestors turned us into— Ekanor!" Before she could even ask what was happening, she was put to sleep again.

"I think we should shift them to Orion Hospital sir. We are unable to understand what this is; we've never seen anything like this." Dr. Das told Mehul's father Arindam Sen. "But doctor, at least tell us what the symptoms are!" Arindam asked. "It is exactly what it looks like. Their body is decomposing everything except the vital organs that are keeping them alive. Other than those organs, every cell, every tissue is breaking down by itself. This is causing the inflation of their bodies, soon it will start releasing bodily fluids. They are literally rotting to death sir.", the doctor left Arindam alone with that information. Arindam sat down on the hospital bench. It all started the day the villagers found Mehul, Ahilya, Alisha, Anushka and Ankush under that wretched tree. Sarla devi had always warned her children about the tree, he never believed any of it but the tree did always seem odd. She would say that the tree was home to a demon, an Ekanor, a pishach that was fathered by anguish, conceived in a mass grave and raised by the spirits of revenge. Ekanors were mythological figures of rural Bengal, demons that lived on top of trees, killing whoever tried to steal the fruits of their tree or disturbing them in general. Arindam would consider all this superstition born out of the absence of knowledge regarding an unusual tree and creative mythology of rural Bengal. He didn't think of Ekanor as anything more than a boogeyman for children of Bengal. He never thought a myth from his childhood stories would destroy his life.

"DAD! DAD! HELP ME! HELP ME PLEASE!" Mehul screamed. The pain was the worst thing about their condition. According to the doctors it would feel like being constantly dipped in the Piranha Solution(a mix of Sulfuric and hydrogen chloride). The pain would only get worse when the fluids would release. It began with a few black spots but within hours it got worse. Blood began flowing from their nose, eyes and mouths. All it took was a day for their muscles to start rotting. They were rushed to Panorama Hospitals first, but no progress was made so they were shifted to Rebirth Nursing Home but that turned out useless too. All the doctors knew for now was that it spread through physical contact, that's how the rest of his family got infected too. "God knows what's going to happen." Arindam mumbled as he stared at the soft black spot on his wrist.

This whole floor at Orion Hospital was reserved for only one family. Their screams filled the corridor. It was even difficult to work on that floor. Day and night, one could hear nothing but shouts of agony. There was no sleep or rest, only the shrieks of the Sen family. All of them begging for death. Today Dr. Pal was going to grant them that mercy. They were to be put down. He calmly walked into that floor carrying a tray of poison syringes. He tried his best to ignore the screams. Alas! His best wasn't enough. He was in a hurry to get this over with, as soon as possible.

"PLEASE KILL US! KILL US! DON'T DO THIS TO US! PLEASE LET US GO! O EKANOR LET US GO!", they screamed.