Veena Mehta
One
The ancient ghat on the banks of the Narmada shimmered under the golden light of Kartik Purnima. Clay lamps floated silently on the water like drifting prayers, their flames barely flickering in the still air. Pilgrims descended the wide, weathered stone steps in silence or chant, some with folded palms, some with copper pots brimming with sacred water. The Deshmukh family, visiting from Pune, stood together at the edge of the ghat. Vinay adjusted his spectacles while Malini held tightly onto their youngest daughter Ahalya’s wrist. The girl, all of eight years old, was already tugging away—drawn not just by the lamps and river, but by the strange geometry of the ghat itself. The steps fascinated her. She wanted to count them all. “Only after the dip,” Malini said gently. Ahalya pouted, but nodded.
After their ritual bath, with their clothes dripping and souls supposedly cleansed, the family emerged onto the upper steps. People began offering sweets to the poor, while priests murmured mantras under banyan trees. Ahalya had slipped away by now—just a few feet—her bare feet splashing on the ancient stone. She had begun counting out loud, her voice as clear and light as a flute. “One… two… three…” Her tiny finger tapped each step as she descended again, this time alone. Malini, brushing wet strands from her face, heard the counting and smiled at her daughter’s harmless game. But Revati, the old blind grandmother seated under a shawl nearby, suddenly stiffened. Her milky-white eyes blinked sharply. “Not beyond six,” she murmured hoarsely, but no one listened.
“Four… five… six…” Ahalya paused. There was something unusual about the seventh step—it wasn’t as worn down as the others. It was smooth, cold, oddly darker in color. She placed her foot on it with a tentative giggle. “Seven!” she declared triumphantly, turning to look back at her family—but in that instant, she was gone. No splash, no scream. Just… absence. Malini turned at the silence and let out a shriek that shattered the evening calm. In a moment, pilgrims dropped offerings, priests paused mid-prayer, and the sound of rushing feet echoed across the ghat. Vinay ran to the seventh step, panting, searching the water below. But it was calm, reflecting only the lamps and the darkening sky. No ripple, no trace. Only Ahalya’s ribbon—red silk with white dots—lay curled on the seventh step like a question mark.
As the temple bells tolled and prayers shifted to fearful murmurs, Revati began to rock back and forth. “I told them,” she whispered to no one in particular. “The seventh step isn’t stone… not anymore.” Vinay screamed for help, diving into the water, but it was no use. The police were called, the area was sealed, and soon rumors began to swirl. Some said it was a kidnapping. Others swore they’d seen her vanish like smoke. But an old beggar near the banyan tree muttered to himself, “Another one… another child to the forgotten land.” The night fell heavy and strange, as if the river had closed its eyes and taken a breath.
Two
The police arrived before midnight—three constables with flashlights and a bored-looking Inspector Sadanand Bhonsle. By then, the ghat had emptied of pilgrims, its eerie silence broken only by the lapping of water and the shrill cries of Malini. She sat collapsed against a temple pillar, clutching Ahalya’s discarded ribbon, her sari soaked and hands trembling. Vinay was still pacing like a man possessed, his trousers drenched to the knees, staring into the river as if willing it to surrender his daughter. The inspector took down statements mechanically, frowning at the lack of any obvious evidence. “No ransom call, no scream, no splash. You say she just… vanished?” he asked skeptically. “Yes,” Vinay snapped. “She was there. And then she wasn’t.” Bhonsle muttered under his breath and called for divers at first light. Until then, they could only wait—with hope eroding like sand.
That night, Vinay didn’t sleep. He sat on the verandah of their lodge, staring toward the ghat through an iron-grilled window. The silence was oppressive, broken only by the hum of insects and the occasional barking of a stray dog. Around 3 a.m., just as his eyes began to close, he heard something faint. A child’s voice—high-pitched and soft. He leaned forward. It was counting. One… two… three… The sound echoed across the water, as though it were coming from beneath it. “Ahalya?” he whispered, frozen. The voice stopped at six. Then after a pause—a whisper so faint it felt imagined: Seven. He shot up, heart pounding, and rushed outside barefoot. But there was nothing. Only the moon hanging like a silver wound in the sky and the river glowing with the leftover lamps still floating like memories.
The next morning, the divers searched every corner of the ghat basin. Mud was stirred, reeds were cleared, even the narrow caves beneath the stone structures were checked. Nothing. No body, no cloth, no trace. Bhonsle stood with his arms crossed, increasingly irritated by what seemed like a waste of manpower. “She’s probably drowned and swept away,” he declared. “The current’s strong under the stone arches.” But even the most experienced divers shook their heads—there was no undertow, and the water had been calm. Vinay protested. “She didn’t fall! I saw her standing… and then she was just gone.” Malini had to be sedated with temple herbs by a local healer, and Revati refused to eat. She kept repeating something about the “seventh not being a step, but a doorway.” Raghav Pandit, the temple priest, overheard her and felt a shiver run down his spine. He had heard the legend too—but always thought it metaphorical.
That evening, as the sun began to dip again over the river, the ghat returned to silence. Only one oil lamp floated now—a late offering from a grieving father. Vinay watched it drift, remembering Ahalya’s little hand gripping his just the morning before. Her laugh still echoed in his ears, mocking the cold indifference of the river. Then, as the last light faded, he saw something impossible: wet footprints, small and bare, trailing up from the water to the seventh step—and stopping there. No one else had entered the river. No boats. No wind. Just those tiny, vanishing footprints, glistening like water tears on stone.
Three
The following morning, the Deshmukh lodge was thick with incense smoke and whispers. Villagers had begun to avoid the ghat, some murmuring about curses, others pressing marigold garlands to their foreheads in prayer. Inside, Malini lay motionless on the floor mat, clutching Ahalya’s ribbon to her chest as if it were a living thing. She refused food and spoke only in fragments—half in memory, half in delirium. “She was counting… like I used to,” she mumbled. “We weren’t supposed to go past six… Did they forget? Did I forget?” Vinay paced endlessly. His disbelief in the supernatural began to erode, not because he believed in ghosts—but because nothing made sense otherwise. And in that cloud of helplessness, it was Revati who finally broke her silence. Sitting propped against the wall, eyes clouded with blindness but voice clear, she spoke a name no one had heard in years: Meena. Malini went rigid.
Meena was Malini’s cousin, nearly the same age as she. Thirty years ago, their joint family had visited the same village, the same ghat, on the very same night of Kartik Purnima. Meena, like Ahalya, had gone missing. No one talked about it afterward. The family had hushed it up, called it a drowning, and moved on. But Revati had never forgotten. “Meena said she heard voices in the river. She said the steps talked. Then she disappeared. Just like Ahalya.” Vinay was stunned. Why hadn’t Malini told him? She stared ahead blankly. “I was a child… they said she drowned, and that’s all we were allowed to say.” The coincidence was impossible to ignore. Two girls. Same age. Same ghat. Same night. Same disappearance. The story was too exact to be random. Revati whispered one last warning: “This ghat remembers who it takes.”
Vinay went to the temple that evening, ignoring Bhonsle’s warnings about “stirring up villagers with ghost stories.” Raghav Pandit, seated in a small chamber near the sanctum, had already begun sifting through ancient temple scrolls. When Vinay asked him about the seventh step, the priest hesitated, then unrolled a palm-leaf manuscript charred at one corner. It was old—far older than the current temple. The script was Devanagari but with strange, archaic inflections. Raghav read slowly, translating aloud. The scroll told of a sadhu—nameless—who had carved seven steps into the river stone for his penance. He meditated on the seventh, unmoving, for seven years. When the villagers found him, he had turned to salt. But the seventh step had changed. “They said it no longer led to the river,” Raghav murmured, “but somewhere else. Somewhere where only the forgotten dwell.”
The next day, Vinay sat at the ghat from dawn till dusk. He stared at the seventh step, ignoring curious looks from villagers and passing pilgrims. He placed his hand on it, feeling its smoothness—colder than the rest, almost like glass. The same place where Ahalya’s ribbon had rested. He leaned in, pressing his ear to the stone. For a moment—just a moment—he thought he heard something. Not water. Not wind. But… voices. Faint. Layered. Like hundreds speaking at once, none loud enough to understand. He pulled back, breath short, heart thudding. The step beneath him felt wrong, like it didn’t belong to the physical world. That night, when he returned to the lodge, he found a small mud-smeared drawing under the door—a child’s sketch. It showed a temple, seven steps, and a girl waving from behind a dark arch. No name. No signature. But the drawing was unmistakably Ahalya’s.
Four
The village was beginning to tremble beneath the weight of its own silence. Locals whispered behind closed doors, and the ghat stood strangely deserted despite it being the season of pilgrimage. The temple priests had halted group rituals for fear of scandal, while Inspector Bhonsle dismissed Vinay’s continued questions with growing irritation. But the mystery refused to die. Word had spread—of the girl who vanished on the seventh step—and with it came others. One such figure appeared one misty afternoon, seated quietly near the banyan tree beside the ghat, her eyes hollow yet alert. Her name was Gouri. A middle-aged woman in a faded yellow sari, she had been coming to this very spot for seventeen years. She told Raghav, in a voice dry as leaves, that her son had disappeared on Kartik Purnima, in the same exact way.
Vinay met her the next day. Gouri had nothing to offer but truth—raw and aged. Her son, Rohit, was nine when he vanished in front of her on the ghat while she was preparing his offering plate. “He loved counting,” she said softly. “He would say ‘seven is my lucky number.’ That’s the last thing he ever said.” Her eyes did not water. There were no more tears left. Then she pulled out a folded diary page—stained, torn. On it was a hand-written list, barely legible. Names. Seven of them. All children. All between the ages of seven and ten. All vanished on Kartik Purnima, from different years—but always at this ghat. “There are others,” she said. “The village forgets them, but I remember.” And then, almost to herself: “Maybe someone will finally open the gate from the other side.”
Vinay took the list to Raghav, and they spent the evening cross-checking temple records. The names matched the register entries of visitors—some as old as 1963. Seven children. Seven names. Seven Purnimas. Always the seventh step. Always the youngest child. Raghav’s hands shook slightly as he retrieved another manuscript from the back of the temple vault. It contained an obscure ritual—long outlawed—designed not for worship, but for searching beyond the veil. A ritual not meant for living eyes. It required three things: a true offering of memory, the object most beloved by the lost one, and a precise chant to be performed under the full moon. But the final line made both men pause: “The path opens only for blood-bound memory. The gate takes one to give another.” It was not merely a key—it was a bargain.
Vinay now faced a truth darker than myth. If Ahalya was alive—or something like alive—she was in a realm tethered to this step by ancient grief and forgotten rituals. And retrieving her would come at a cost. That night, as he lit an oil lamp and stared across the moonlit Narmada, he felt the weight of decision pressing on his chest. Gouri sat beside him in silence. “You still have time,” she whispered. “You still have choice. I didn’t.” Vinay closed his eyes and whispered his daughter’s name, letting the wind carry it toward the river. Far away, beyond stone and water, in a realm of twilight and silence, something stirred at the sound. Something small. Something waiting.
Five
The full moon arrived like a great unblinking eye in the sky—bright, full, and unnaturally still. Even the river seemed to pause, as though it too awaited something. Vinay stood barefoot on the ghat, his shirt clinging to his back with sweat, a folded scroll in one hand and Ahalya’s red ribbon tied tightly around his wrist. Raghav stood beside him with a copper plate bearing tulsi leaves, ash, and camphor. The ancient chant was memorized, practiced silently for nights. The air around them felt heavy, the night strangely breathless. No birds. No insects. No breeze. As they stepped downward in rhythm, starting from the topmost level, their lips whispered sacred syllables in unison. One step after another. “Om smaranam asatya… Om smaranam atitah…” The sixth step greeted them like a familiar floor. The seventh was different.
As soon as Vinay’s foot touched the seventh step, the stone beneath changed. It did not feel like stone anymore. It was cooler, smoother—like water hardened into glass. The world tilted. The lanterns on the ghat flickered, though there was no wind. And then, like a page turning, everything shifted. A pale fog rolled in, thick as memory. Vinay blinked—and the river was no longer the same. He stood not in darkness, but in twilight. The ghat was still there, but abandoned, overgrown with moss. Statues were cracked and vines crept across the railings. And on the seventh step, just a few feet away, sat a group of children. Silent. Still. Their faces were drained of color but not life. Their eyes blinked slowly, unseeing. And among them sat Ahalya, her hair loose, her dress faded, looking straight at him—but not reacting.
He called her name. Once, twice. No response. It was like she heard the sound but didn’t recognize the meaning. He stepped closer, but with each step, the space around him thickened. Not with fog, but with resistance. Like walking through time. He reached out and finally touched her shoulder. She blinked—and the moment her eyes met his, something cracked. The children turned their heads in unison. Their mouths opened slightly, but no sound emerged. The river behind them began to churn, black and soundless. And then came the whisper—not a voice, but a presence. It filled the air like a storm cloud inside the skull. “You take what is mine… Then offer what is yours.” Vinay’s body trembled. The scroll in his hand burst into ash. The red ribbon tightened around his wrist.
Raghav, watching from the edge, saw Vinay’s figure flicker like flame. He shouted, chanting the final verse aloud: “Atma jalam anudrishyat, punarprapti bhavet smaranam!” A sudden wind roared through the ghat. The children vanished like mist. Ahalya’s form turned fluid in his arms. And just as a long, shadowy hand reached from the stone beneath, Raghav pulled Vinay backwards—his hand locked to Ahalya’s. They fell together onto the sixth step, gasping. But something was different. The ghat returned to normal. The river, still. The fog gone. Ahalya blinked—and this time, she saw her father. She whispered, “Baba?” and clung to him with desperate strength. Raghav stared in awe. But then Vinay looked down at his own wrist. The ribbon was gone. And so was the shadow behind his eyes. Something had followed them back. Or something had stayed behind… in his place.
Six
The return of Ahalya should have been a miracle—should have been—but no one in the Deshmukh household spoke of it as such. Not even Malini, who wept with joy and horror in equal measure when her daughter stumbled into her arms. Ahalya was alive. Her skin was warm, her breath real. But there was a hollowness in her gaze, as if part of her had stayed somewhere else. She didn’t remember the twilight ghat or the silent children. All she could say was, “I was dreaming… and it was so quiet.” Vinay sat for hours watching her draw with crayons. Her sketches were strange now—upside-down temples, rivers that curled into spirals, stairs leading into the mouths of sleeping giants. When he asked her what they were, she only said, “From the inside.” And Malini, seeing her husband’s haunted silence, knew something was wrong.
Raghav too had changed. The young priest who once avoided whispers of curses now sat long hours in the granary archives, poring through forbidden texts that once frightened him. He found records even older than the temple—scraps from a sannyasi’s memoir, etched on dried bark, describing a deity without a name. Not a god, but a memory, once worshipped at the seventh step during the era of forgotten kings. It demanded not offerings, but remembrance. When people stopped chanting its name, it turned the step into a gate. Those who stepped upon it on the brightest full moon—especially children, brimming with unformed memory—were taken as fuel to feed its fading self. And those who returned never returned whole. Raghav had read this in horror, connecting the truth to the shadow in Vinay’s eyes. The father had retrieved his child—but what had stayed behind to even the weight?
Vinay, meanwhile, could no longer sleep. His dreams were filled with soft counting—one to six, and then silence. He would wake drenched in sweat, clutching the bedsheet as if it were stone. He began writing down what he remembered from the twilight realm. Details returned in fragments: Ahalya’s pale feet. The absence of wind. The presence that whispered not in words, but in need. And the moment it took the ribbon from his wrist. Raghav warned him: “The gate demands balance. You may have pulled her back… but what did it take from you?” Vinay laughed bitterly. “Everything,” he said. For in the days that followed, he no longer saw his reflection in water. Mirrors fogged when he stood before them. Strangers didn’t notice when he entered rooms. Once, his own mother-in-law walked past him without a glance.
Bhonsle, now reluctantly involved again, visited the family one last time. He had read the old files, dusted off reports of vanished children over decades. The pattern was undeniable. But he had no words for this—no section in any police manual for memory-eating deities. “So what do we tell them?” he asked. “Another drowning?” Vinay shook his head slowly. “Tell them the river keeps what we forget. Not just bones—names, prayers, and gods.” Bhonsle lit a cigarette and nodded without looking at anyone. He left that evening and never returned to the ghat. Raghav performed a sealing rite days later, placing a sanctified slab on the seventh step. But he confessed to Vinay, “Stone may block feet, but it can’t stop memory.” The seventh step was still there, beneath it all—waiting. And somewhere, in her silent moments, even Ahalya remembered. Though she never said it aloud, she sometimes drew a shadow with no face, always standing one step behind.
Seven
The Narmada flowed quieter that morning, like a mother holding her breath, watching over a child lost in dreams. In the twilight before dawn, mist curled low across the ghat, silencing birdsong and village chatter. Purnima, clutching her silver-threaded dupatta, returned once again to the steps. Behind her, old Devkinandan shuffled, his rustling prayer beads sounding louder than usual. Neither had slept. In their eyes danced images of Aashi — counting, stepping, vanishing — and the shadowy figure of a woman who called herself Vaidehi. They had crossed into something unspeakable. And now, a decision waited on the riverbank.
“I dreamt of her again,” Devkinandan whispered. “She was near the seventh step… but beneath the water. And something… something was feeding her lullabies.” Purnima didn’t respond. She looked up instead, beyond the banyan trees to where temple bells had ceased to ring since that night. Silence had infected every corner of the village. Shopkeepers whispered of curses, children no longer played near the ghat, and elders spat holy ash over their shoulders when the topic of Aashi arose. Purnima knew time was running thin. The barrier between worlds had weakened, and the river was listening.
She descended slowly, barefoot on the stone — one… two… each step laced with prayers. By the sixth, her heart thundered. But as she lifted her foot, Vaidehi emerged from the mist, eyes glowing with urgency. “You cannot go alone. The seventh step takes from the living what it never returns,” she warned. Devkinandan stepped forward, voice brittle. “What must we offer for her soul?” Vaidehi gazed into the swirling water. “A choice. Life for life. Memory for memory. To awaken her, someone must become forgotten.” Purnima’s knees buckled. The price was clearer now — the seventh step demanded a soul to close the breach it opened.
Suddenly, the water rippled violently, and Aashi’s soft voice echoed like a chant from underwater. “Maa…” It was neither hallucination nor dream. Purnima wept as she cradled the voice in her arms. Vaidehi stepped back, shimmering faintly, her outline growing thin against the morning sun. “Decide now,” she urged. And before another moment passed, Devkinandan stepped forward. He removed his mala, kissed it, and placed it on Purnima’s palm. “Let me go. Let her return.” And with that, he stepped down — the seventh — and was swallowed not by water, but silence. A great hush followed. The river stilled. Then, slowly, Aashi’s small form rose, gasping, her hands reaching upward. She was alive. But the seventh step now glowed faintly, a reminder of the price.
Eight
The seventh step had always been whispered about, feared, revered—yet never understood. Now, the temple steps were deserted, their stone faces slick with morning mist, oil lamps extinguished, and silence reigning where chants once echoed. The villagers gathered in anxious clumps around the edge of the ghat, whispering prayers and clutching talismans. News had spread beyond Omkareshwar to nearby hamlets: a girl had returned from the Land of the Forgotten. But not the way they expected. Amaya sat beneath a neem tree, wrapped in a woolen shawl, her eyes hollow and voice barely above a whisper. “They’re not dead,” she had said again and again. “They just don’t remember.” Sadhvi Mira knelt beside her, her own eyes misted. “What did you see, child?” Amaya had opened her mouth but only strange syllables came, a language too ancient to decipher, too cold to belong to the world of the living. It was the same chant the girl in white once hummed on the steps.
That afternoon, the wind shifted, bringing with it a scent no one could place—wet earth, burnt incense, and something older. Mira and Arvind led Amaya to the temple once more, not to force her down the steps again, but to let her memory settle into place. She touched the carved yoni of the shrine, and a tremor ran through the stones. The bells rang though no one had pulled them. Shadows flitted between pillars. “The Land of the Forgotten is not a place,” Mira murmured. “It’s a state—a threshold where memory decays, where names evaporate. And the seventh step… it is the passage.” Amaya’s fingers traced a line on the dusty floor—seven circles, overlapping. She then pointed toward the river. Arvind followed her gaze and froze. On the seventh step, stood the girl in white. Again. Only now she looked older. Her eyes met Amaya’s, and for a heartbeat, the wind stopped. Amaya stepped forward. “Ranya,” she whispered, naming her.
The girl smiled, the first emotion her face had ever held. As if released by recognition, her body shimmered and scattered into a thousand motes of light. The wind rushed back, knocking coconuts off trees, stirring the waters of the Narmada. The seventh step glowed faintly and then faded. The priests later declared the step sealed again—for now. Amaya’s family chose to remain in Omkareshwar for a time, finding peace among rituals and learning. Arvind returned to his village, often staring at distant rivers as though expecting someone to rise. Mira resumed her teaching at the ashram but left an oil lamp lit every night at the ghat. Some nights, a girl’s laugh echoed from the river. Not Amaya’s, but someone else’s—like a name half-remembered, echoing from the gap between worlds.
Years later, children would once again play near the ghat, daring each other to step down and count aloud. None reached seven. No one vanished. But Amaya, now older and with a daughter of her own, would sometimes pause by the steps. Her child would run ahead, stop at the sixth, and look back curiously. “What’s after this, Ma?” she’d ask. Amaya would smile faintly and shake her head. “Only the river,” she’d reply. But when alone, she would sit on the seventh step as twilight painted the waters gold and whisper the forgotten chant. Not to summon—but to remember. Because remembering, she now knew, was the most sacred act of all.
End
