Aaryan Sen
Amaan Khan believed in facts. As a forensic journalist, he had covered everything from organ trafficking in Jaipur to political assassinations in Bihar. His articles were precise, unflinching, and deeply respected—because Amaan believed there was always a logical explanation behind every mystery. That belief began to crack the day he arrived in Bhimtara, a forgotten village cradled in the Satpura foothills.
It started with a death—officially recorded as cardiac arrest. The deceased: District Magistrate Nalin Jadhav, age 41, no prior medical conditions, found slumped over his desk in the government guest house. But it wasn’t the death that caught Amaan’s attention. It was the condition of the body. A black thread was wound around Jadhav’s left wrist—tight, deep, almost embedded in the flesh. Amaan noticed it in a grainy post-mortem image leaked by an anonymous source. Below the wrist, the word “Shabd” had been carved into his skin, fresh and clean.
Jadhav’s death hadn’t made national headlines, but the thread had pulled Amaan in. So he left Mumbai and took the next train to Madhya Pradesh, determined to write one more expose.
The journey to Bhimtara took a whole day—first by train, then by jeep through a snaking forest path. The air grew heavy with the scent of damp earth and something else—burnt leaves or herbs perhaps. The driver barely spoke. “People don’t like visitors,” he said once, while lighting a beedi. “Especially after dark.”
Amaan checked into a crumbling dak bungalow on the village outskirts. It was built during the British era—wide verandas, peeling lime plaster, wooden ceilings that creaked with every movement. The caretaker, Babu, brought him chai in the evening but said little. When Amaan asked about the magistrate’s death, Babu simply stared at the floor and muttered, “Kaala dhaaga.” Black thread.
The next morning, Amaan began digging. The village was unusually quiet—no television, no phone signals, and an unnerving absence of children. The school had shut down a year ago, after a teacher was found dead in the staff room with a garland of black thread knotted around her neck. Locals claimed it was suicide. Amaan found the death certificate—“Asphyxiation due to self-inflicted ligature.” But the family had insisted she had no reason to die. Her father had written “This is not her handwriting” at the bottom of her supposed suicide note.
Then there was the farmer’s case. Amaan met his widow, Sunanda, who lived alone near the peepul grove. Her voice trembled as she recalled that night. “He had dreams,” she said. “He said someone was tying his hands in his sleep. I thought it was stress. But then he stopped speaking. He wouldn’t eat. On the fifth night, I found him…hanging from the neem tree. With a black thread around his tongue.” She showed Amaan a photo on her old keypad phone. It was grainy but unmistakable. There was blood—yes—but also something else: a small clay bowl at the base of the tree, filled with ashes and lemon slices.
“Do you know who does this?” Amaan asked.
Sunanda didn’t blink. “Everyone knows. But no one will say.”
Frustrated but more intrigued than ever, Amaan ventured deeper. He found an old priest at a broken Hanuman temple who agreed to speak after sunset. The priest was blind in one eye and missing two fingers. He sat cross-legged, sipping from a brass tumbler.
“This land,” he said, “was cursed by silence long before you were born. Before even the British came. Black magic was not always evil, but some men twisted it. The kaala dhaaga is a seal. Once it touches you, it knows your fear. And it feeds.”
Amaan almost laughed. “A thread that feeds?”
The priest didn’t smile. “Laugh. But remember—if you see black thread near your bed, do not cut it. Do not burn it. Leave. Immediately.”
That night, Amaan returned to the dak bungalow, typed his notes, and uploaded his drafts. No signal, no WiFi. Just his files and a cup of instant coffee. Around 2 a.m., he heard a scratching sound outside his window. Probably a rat, he thought. But when he turned off the light and lay on the cot, he felt something cold brush his ankle. He turned on the torch.
A single black thread, about four feet long, was lying in a perfect spiral on the floor. It hadn’t been there earlier.
He picked it up. The moment he touched it, his palm twitched involuntarily.
He dropped it. The next morning, Babu refused to enter the room. He stood outside and said, “Sahab, leave. They know now.”
Amaan laughed, this time out loud. “You think a thread is watching me?”
But Babu didn’t answer. He simply walked away.
Over the next two days, the air grew heavier. Amaan began to feel it in his bones—an oppressive weight. His dreams turned vivid. In one, he saw the magistrate writing his own name in blood. In another, he watched himself sleep from a corner of the ceiling. His appetite vanished. The room smelled faintly of burnt turmeric.
And then came the fever. It started with a chill. Then sweating. Then black spots in his vision. Amaan tried to leave, but every time he packed, something went wrong—the car didn’t start, the road was blocked, the driver refused.
He began waking with scratches on his chest. Once, he found a line of salt spread neatly under his cot. Another time, a dead pigeon on the veranda, with its feet tied in—yes—black thread.
Amaan was a rational man. But he was also scared now.
He found the sadhu on the fifth night. A bent, shriveled man who sat near the edge of the peepul grove, surrounded by brass bowls, chilies, and lemons. His forehead was smeared with black ash, his eyes pale yellow. Amaan approached with a tremble.
“I need help,” he said.
The sadhu didn’t look up. He dipped a black thread into a bowl of blood and whispered, “You stayed too long. It’s tied now.”
“What is?” Amaan asked.
The sadhu looked at him then, his face expressionless. “Your name. It has been written. Unwritten only by sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice?”
The sadhu stood. “A goat. A bird. Or blood. Yours.”
Amaan backed away. “You’re all mad.” The sadhu sat down again, and said simply, “Then die educated.”
That night, the fever spiked. Amaan passed out on the bathroom floor. He dreamt of a woman with no eyes, sewing thread into his stomach. When he woke, there was pain—but no cuts. Just dried blood on his belly.
He took off his shirt. A single line of black thread was stitched under the skin—just above the navel. Six stitches. Neat. Almost surgical.
He screamed. In the morning, he left Bhimtara. Didn’t pack. Didn’t say goodbye. Just ran.
Back in Mumbai, he checked into a hospital. Doctors ran tests. Clean. No infection. No cuts. When he showed them the thread under his skin, they called security. Said it was “self-inflicted.”
Amaan had no memory of doing it. But there it was. Like it had grown there.
He cut it out himself that night with a pocket knife, burned it, and flushed the ashes. But it grew back. Not visibly—but every night he felt it crawling under his flesh, tightening.
A week later, he stopped sleeping. Then one morning, he woke up to find his desk covered in salt. A pigeon feather on his keyboard. And scrawled across his computer screen:
Shabd. He moved. Changed cities. Changed names.
But the black thread always finds him. Sometimes in his laundry. Sometimes inside his shoes. Once, inside his toothbrush handle—coiled.
He never writes about it anymore. But he writes.
Because the thread listens. And if he doesn’t write, it begins to pull—tighter.
Amaan moved into a rented apartment in Pune under a new name—Rehan Akhtar. He stopped writing articles. Stopped speaking to friends. All he did was sit in front of the mirror and wait for the next appearance of the thread.
He told himself he’d imagined it all. Fever dreams. Psychological suggestion. Sleep paralysis. But then, every week—like clockwork—he found it. In socks. Under fingernails. In food packets. Always coiled. Always patient.
Desperation drove him to a retired professor of anthropology at Fergusson College who had studied folk rituals in Central India. The professor laughed nervously when Amaan mentioned Bhimtara.
“You went there?” he asked, turning pale. “No one goes to Bhimtara twice. You’re lucky.”
“I don’t feel lucky,” Amaan muttered.
The professor poured him chai and brought out an old palm-leaf manuscript.
“This is from the early 1800s,” he said. “Mentions a tribe called the Arajya. They didn’t believe in gods. They believed in vachan bandhan—the power of spoken curses bound by threads. You could write someone’s name, tie it in a thread soaked in blood and turmeric, and bury it. The body might live, but their will belonged elsewhere.”
“Like voodoo?” Amaan asked.
The professor shook his head. “No. Worse. Because the victim begins to participate. First with fear, then with belief, then—finally—with obedience.”
Amaan leaned forward. “Is there a way out?”
The professor hesitated. “Only one recorded. Not destruction. Transfer.”
“Transfer to?”
“Another name. Another soul. The thread must be accepted willingly by another.”
Amaan went cold. “You mean I have to… give this to someone else?”
“No,” the professor whispered. “You don’t have to. But it will find its own way if you don’t.”
That night, Amaan locked every door and window. He unplugged electronics. Burned incense. Poured salt in a circle around his bed.
Still, at 3:13 AM, he woke to find the thread stitched into the skin above his heart.
This time, in a name he hadn’t seen before.
“Kavya.”
He screamed. Tore it out. But the wound was bloodless. As if the skin never broke.
His mind spiraled. Who was Kavya? Was she next? Or had he unknowingly begun the transfer?
He ran a search the next day. There were hundreds of Kavyas. But one name caught his eye—Kavya Jadhav, the magistrate’s daughter.
She was studying law in Bhopal. Amaan didn’t want to. But something in his hands—no, something beneath his skin—typed her name, wrote her address, booked a ticket.
In Bhopal, he stood outside the university library, watching her from a distance. She looked normal. Smiled often. Wore a red scarf.
But as he turned to leave, she looked directly at him. As if she’d known.
“You’re the man from Bhimtara,” she said. Not a question.
He froze.
“My father used to talk about you,” she said. “He admired your work. Said you could see truth where others saw fog.”
Amaan nodded slowly. “Your father… he wore a black thread?”
Kavya nodded. “From a sadhu. For protection, he said.”
Amaan clenched his jaw. “He died.”
“I know. But I don’t think it was the thread,” she said. “I think it was you.”
The accusation hit like a slap. “What?”
“He came back from Bhimtara and told us everything. Said he saw a man investigating tribal rituals. That the man asked too many questions. That after he met you, he couldn’t sleep.”
Amaan’s mouth dried.
“I saw the thread,” she whispered. “It didn’t bind him. You did. With your words. With your curiosity.”
He took a step back.
“Do you have it now?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. She nodded as if she already knew.
“Don’t give it to me, Mr. Khan. Because if you do, I’ll make sure you carry it in your bones.”
Amaan fled.
Not just the college. The city.
He went to a temple town in Rajasthan where a tantric named Omkar Nath was rumored to unbind life curses.
Omkar Nath lived in a crumbling haveli, with crows circling its minaret like sentries. Amaan knocked for an hour before the door opened.
The tantric was bald, with one eye sewn shut. His fingers were blackened at the tips.
“You’ve come late,” he said, without greeting. “The thread has fed.”
“I want it removed,” Amaan pleaded.
“You cannot remove what you invited.”
“I didn’t—!”
“Yes, you did,” Omkar snapped. “You followed death. Took its picture. Wrote its name. You didn’t walk into the curse. You chased it.”
Amaan fell to his knees. “Then kill me.”
The tantric laughed. “Death is too clean. You’re already beyond it.”
He handed Amaan a folded palm-leaf. “Bury this under your birth tree. Do not speak for seven days. Do not look into mirrors. Do not write your name.”
Amaan didn’t ask why. He only nodded.
He followed every instruction.
For seven days, he stayed silent. Avoided his reflection. But on the eighth day, he checked his laptop.
The screen blinked.
And across the document, hundreds of times—typed without his knowledge:
Kavya. Kavya. Kavya. Kavya.
Months passed.
Amaan never wrote again. His articles stopped. His name faded from media circles.
But dark stories began to circulate—of a journalist who mailed letters with threads in them. Who left books with margins filled with black lines. Who once handed a child a toy with thread inside the stuffing.
One day, in a hotel in Assam, a woman found her husband sitting stiff in bed, silent, eyes rolled back, and a thread running across his wrists.
No sign of Amaan.
But his byline was scrawled on the mirror—Amaan Khan.
Written not in ink.
But in black thread.
—The years passed, but Amaan didn’t age the way others did. His beard grew patchy, hair turned grey before forty, and his eyes took on a glassy dullness, as if someone else lived inside him. He lived in cities anonymously, never staying long. Sometimes in temples, sometimes in hostels, mostly in motels where no one asked questions.
He stopped writing under his real name. But the stories never stopped coming—blog posts under false bylines, journal entries tucked into borrowed books, messages typed and deleted late at night. He couldn’t help it. The thread wanted to be remembered.
And the thread had become clever.
It no longer left itself where he could see it. Now it appeared in memories. In patterns on walls. In the edge of a page. In shadows that looked like thread curling across the ceiling. It moved. It watched.
One night, in an alley behind an old printing press in Lucknow, Amaan met a boy.
The boy was no older than ten. Barefoot. Eyes sharp. He was selling rags.
“Want to know your name?” the boy asked.
Amaan hesitated. “What?”
The boy smiled and pulled a bundle of black thread from his pocket. It was damp, knotted, still warm. And tied around a slip of paper.
Amaan unwrapped it. It had his name, written in red.
“Where did you get this?” he whispered.
“The thread gives it,” the boy said. “To those who stop listening. You forgot to listen.”
“To what?”
“To yourself.”
Amaan backed away. “Who are you?”
The boy only laughed and disappeared into the dark.
Later that night, Amaan burned his last copy of his own book, Threaded Truths. He knew what must be done.
In the weeks that followed, his behavior changed. He stopped hiding. He shaved. He bathed. He booked a ticket back to Mumbai.
He visited the newsroom where he had started his career, greeted the receptionist by name, and asked to meet the editor.
“You’re alive?” the editor said, stunned. “People said you vanished. That you’d lost your mind.”
“I’m better now,” Amaan said. “I have a story.”
The editor sat up. “About what?”
“About a thread. About something that writes people’s endings before they’ve even begun.”
And so Amaan submitted a story.
He called it “The Black Thread.”
It was elegant, detailed, strangely captivating. His best work in years. The editor published it the next day under a section called “Investigations into the Unknown.”
But that night, the editor found his laptop covered in fine black thread. His cat was found dead—with its tail knotted around its neck. The next morning, he called Amaan.
But Amaan’s number was disconnected.
He no longer existed in any government database. Passport invalid. Bank accounts frozen. Like a ghost that had shed its name.
And the story?
It went viral. People loved it.
Some said it felt too real. Too personal.
Some said after reading it, they found strange threads in their pillowcases, shoes, bookmarks.
One woman claimed the story typed itself into her Kindle overnight.
But here’s the question.
You’ve just read it too.
Have you looked around yet?
Look under your desk.
Check the crease in your blanket.
See if there’s a black thread curling at the corner of your vision.
Because once the name is read, it begins.
And once it begins, it writes.
Not your story.
But your ending.
****
