“It was always the quiet ones who learned to speak to devils.”
– from the village lore of Panchdaha
In the old village of Panchdaha, nestled between gnarled banyan trees and fading memories, time moved slowly—like smoke from a dying fire. The people were simple, their lives small and steady. They feared change more than death and believed in stories more than facts. When strange things happened, they simply looked the other way.
Madhav had grown up in one of the older houses, the one with cracked lime walls and a crooked well in the courtyard. It was a house that echoed with laughter—Anil’s laughter. Anil, his elder brother, had a voice like wind chimes and eyes that twinkled like oil lamps. Everyone loved Anil.
Madhav was different. Quiet. Withdrawn. His answers were clipped, his presence forgettable. Even as a child, he walked alone, talked less, and listened too much. Their mother found him strange. “Don’t sulk like that, Madhav,” she’d say often, frowning. Their father barely acknowledged him unless it was to point out something he’d done wrong.
Anil could do no wrong. He helped in the fields, scored well in school, and always greeted the elders with folded hands. Madhav often watched him from behind doorframes or trees, wishing—just once—to be seen the same way.
He began to retreat into himself. Spoke to birds. Scribbled strange symbols in the dust. His classmates teased him. “Ghost-boy,” they called. Anil would laugh with them sometimes.
There was only one person who didn’t treat him like a shadow. His grandmother.
She was old, bent like the question mark he’d once drawn in the sand. Her voice was rough, like sandpaper over stone, but her touch was gentle. She would find him sitting alone under the neem tree, his eyes clouded.
“Come here, baccha,” she’d say, settling beside him with a sigh. She always brought him something—warm milk, roasted peanuts, a sliver of jaggery. She would run her fingers through his hair, slow and patient.
“You’re not mad, you know,” she once told him, as he wiped his nose on his sleeve. “You just see the world differently.”
One evening, when the house was full of Anil’s admirers and Madhav had been scolded for spilling buttermilk, he found her waiting near the shrine behind the kitchen. The lamp flickered beside her, and her eyes glowed strange in its light.
“There is a secret in this house,” she said, her voice barely more than a breath. “A very old one.”
He blinked at her. “What kind of secret?”
She reached for a rusted key hidden in the folds of her sari and pressed it into his palm.
“Behind that door,” she whispered, pointing to the far corner of the courtyard, “is Kaaldhwaj—the god of time and death. But he’s not for everyone. Only those who are forgotten may speak to him.”
“Speak how?” he asked.
“You write a name on a betel leaf with rice paste,” she said. “Place it at his feet. If he accepts it… death will come for that name.”
Madhav’s heart thudded. He didn’t fully believe it. Not yet. But something inside him stirred—a seed planted.
“But why are you telling me this?”
She touched his cheek, her eyes sad.
“Because you are alone, Madhav. And someday, you will need a friend who listens. Even if it’s a devil.”
He never forgot that night. Or the feeling of the cold key in his hand. Or the way her voice cracked when she said, “Even devils have a soft spot for the overlooked.”
****
Years passed. Madhav, now a lean man with greying temples, worked as a clerk in Seth Banwari’s grain office—a small, sunless room with dusty ledgers and a cracked ceiling fan. His work was meticulous, his handwriting neat, his calculations flawless.
But no one liked him.
Vikram did, though. He was the overseer—loud, confident, always with a joke on his lips. The workers laughed around him, even the Seth seemed lighter in his presence. He was everything Madhav wasn’t.
One summer, the news spread that the district wanted a new head clerk. Both Vikram and Madhav were being considered.
“Your numbers are good, Madhav,” Seth Banwari told him one evening, sipping his watery tea. “But work isn’t just about numbers.”
Madhav sat across from him, hands on his lap.
“You don’t talk to people. Don’t laugh. Don’t make friends. You make them uneasy. That matters too.”
Madhav’s throat felt dry. “But I’m just as qualified.”
“You are,” the Seth nodded, “But qualifications aren’t always enough.”
And just like that, the decision was made.
That night, Madhav didn’t eat. He sat in the verandah, staring at the dark courtyard. The neem tree rustled gently. Somewhere in the kitchen, a tap dripped.
He rose slowly, like a man following a dream.
The door to the old shrine still stood at the edge of the house, hidden behind half-dead hibiscus bushes. He hadn’t opened it since his childhood.
But the key still fit.
The hinges groaned.
Inside, Kaaldhwaj waited. The black stone idol, with its wide, lidless eyes and cruel mouth, stood in the flickering glow of an old oil lamp he lit with trembling fingers.
Madhav knelt.
He dipped his finger into a bowl of thick, white rice paste—still there, as if time had paused inside these walls. Slowly, carefully, he wrote Vikram’s name on a fresh betel leaf. The paste ran slightly, like slow tears.
He placed the leaf at the feet of the idol.
The room felt colder.
He waited for a sound, a whisper, a sign. But there was nothing.
He walked back to his room in silence.
By morning, news spread—Vikram was dead. Trampled in the sugarcane fields. “A rogue buffalo,” someone said. “A tiger,” said another.
Madhav said nothing. Just nodded slowly.
And by the end of the week, he had Vikram’s chair.
But as he sat in it, spine straight, pen in hand, ledger before him, he did not feel pride.
He felt… nothing.
Only cold.
****
Madhav first saw Leela one monsoon morning, standing at the village well. Her hair was wet and loose, sticking to her back, and she wore a blue cotton saree that matched the rain-dark sky. She was laughing—softly, sincerely—at something a friend had said.
That laugh stayed with him.
She wasn’t like the other village girls. There was grace in her step and sharpness in her gaze. She helped her father at the post office and never hesitated to speak her mind, even to the elders. People admired her, spoke of her like one might speak of rain after a dry spell.
Madhav noticed her everywhere—at the market, at temple, beneath the pipal tree. He never spoke. Just watched. Just imagined.
In his mind, she belonged to him.
But it wasn’t Madhav she fell in love with. It was Anil.
He watched, helpless, as their friendship bloomed into something deeper. They shared sweets, exchanged books, laughed with ease. It was the kind of connection that came naturally, without force. The kind that made others believe in fate.
When the families announced the engagement, the village rejoiced. Garlands were hung. The pandit’s voice echoed through courtyards. Anil and Leela stood side by side, matching in yellow, glowing as if the sun had blessed them both.
Madhav stood in the shadows, teeth clenched, heart pounding.
He wanted to scream. To disappear. To break something. Instead, he went to the storeroom, sat with old grain records, and listened to the house vibrate with celebration.
A voice inside him whispered, He always gets what you deserve.
That night, under a sky heavy with clouds, he made up his mind.
The shrine door was stiff, but it opened.
Kaaldhwaj watched him silently, as it had once before.
He lit the lamp. Stirred the paste. Took a betel leaf in his hand.
And wrote: Anil.
Each stroke was slow. Measured. Final.
By morning, the screams had begun.
They found Anil in the temple pond, his body contorted, his face frozen in horror. There were no injuries, no signs of drowning. Just death—swift, inexplicable, unnatural.
The engagement was never spoken of again.
The garlands dried where they hung. The house fell silent.
Leela vanished from the village for a time.
Madhav stood by the pyre, face blank, hands folded.
But nothing within him felt finished.
He thought he would feel triumphant.
Instead, he felt like the world had gone greyer, heavier. And whatever he had destroyed, it had taken something out of him, too.
Only Kaaldhwaj knew what that was.
****
Time moved on, but nothing truly changed. The chair remained Madhav’s, but it never felt like it belonged to him. His days were mechanical, his nights sleepless. The hollowness that once gnawed at his childhood crept into his marriage-less home.
Anil was gone. The village mourned. And Leela—who once brightened Panchdaha with her presence—had turned into a shadow of herself.
After Anil’s death, she stopped laughing. She stopped meeting people’s eyes. She still walked to the post office with her father, still nodded politely to elders, but something vital had dimmed within her.
Madhav noticed.
And for a while, he tried. Tried to speak to her at the temple steps, at the grocer’s, under the pipal tree. But her answers were few, her voice flat.
So he changed his strategy. If she wouldn’t respond to him, perhaps her parents would.
One afternoon, he sat with her father under the mango tree and spoke gently, respectfully.
“I can offer her a good life,” he said. “Stability. A home. No one will speak ill of her. I would care for her. I promise.”
Her parents were hesitant, but also tired. The whispers about her returning to normal life had begun. Madhav was now a man of position. Quiet, yes—but stable.
And in time, the marriage was arranged.
Leela never agreed outright. She didn’t protest either. She simply nodded when asked, eyes downcast.
The village celebrated the wedding, but the drums beat a little softer. The flowers wilted too soon.
In the early days, Madhav tried to make her smile. He brought her her favorite sweets. Sat with her in the courtyard. Bought new curtains for the windows.
But she remained distant.
Then came the children. Two of them. A boy and a girl. For a while, there was laughter in the house again—tiny feet padding across stone floors, giggles from under beds, scribbled drawings on the walls.
But not from Leela.
She cared for them, yes. Fed them, bathed them, held them when they cried. But her gaze rarely softened. Her smile never reached her eyes.
Madhav watched it all. Watched her drift farther with each passing year. And something inside him began to twist.
He became colder, crueler. His efforts turned to commands. His longing to possessiveness.
“Why don’t you look at me when I speak to you?” he snapped once over dinner.
She didn’t respond.
“Do you love anyone at all? Even the children?”
She looked up at him for the first time in days.
“I try,” she said simply. “But some things… don’t come back.”
It was not anger in her voice. It was fatigue. Deep and final.
That night, Madhav sat in the courtyard long after everyone had gone to bed. The moon hung low, the neem tree casting broken shadows across the floor. He felt like a man sitting in the middle of his own failure.
The next morning, Leela stood by the door with a cloth bag in her hand.
“I’m leaving,” she said. “I can’t pretend anymore.”
“Where will you go?” he asked, voice quiet.
“Anywhere that isn’t here.”
He stepped closer.
“If you leave this house, you leave everything. The children. Your name. Your safety.”
She didn’t flinch.
“I’ve already lost myself, Madhav. There’s nothing else you can take.”
And that night, the shrine called him again.
The rice paste was thicker than he remembered. His fingers trembled not from hesitation, but exhaustion.
He wrote her name slowly. Steady.
By morning, she was gone.
They found her near the riverbank, her body torn in ways no man or animal could explain. Her death became another whisper in the village—spirit, curse, madness.
Madhav said nothing.
But sometimes, late at night, he would hear the creak of the swing in the courtyard. The soft rustle of a cotton sari. Slippers moving over stone.
And for the first time in decades, he kept a lamp burning beside his bed.
****
After Leela’s death, the house changed.
It was still the same in shape—same rooms, same corners, same crooked staircase—but it had lost its breath. The walls no longer held conversation. The windows stayed shut even on breezy afternoons. The laughter of his children no longer echoed across the verandah.
Madhav tried, at first. He cooked for them, told stories, even bought small gifts from the city on market days. But children know things before they’re told. They knew something wasn’t right. They grew quieter around him. More watchful.
In time, they left. One after the other. First the daughter, then the son. Letters came in the beginning—brief, polite—but soon even those stopped.
Madhav was alone again.
The silence now was different from his childhood. Back then, it had been an unwanted guest. Now, it had become his companion.
He grew old faster than most. His back bent. His hands shook when holding a spoon. Even Kaaldhwaj seemed to look at him differently now—less like a servant, more like a reminder.
It was during one such evening, while he struggled to light the kitchen stove, that he felt it—a quiet, growing weariness. He could not keep up with the day-to-day.
The house was too large. His body too tired.
So, he did something he had never done before.
He asked for help.
Through a distant cousin in the city, he found someone—a young man named Ramanuj. Newly married, soft-spoken, eager to please. He arrived one misty morning with a trunk and a warm smile. His wife, Rukmini, joined him a few weeks later. She was sharper than her husband, quicker to notice things.
At first, Madhav said little. He gave instructions with a nod or a grunt. Ramanuj didn’t mind. He cooked well, kept the house clean, trimmed the plants no one had touched in years.
But there was something else too.
Ramanuj listened.
Not the way villagers listen—out of fear or habit—but like someone who cared. When Madhav coughed, Ramanuj brought warm water. When his knees ached, he placed a pillow beneath them.
And slowly, Madhav began to speak again. Not much. Just enough.
He told him about the neem tree. About the cracked wall that always leaked in monsoon. Even about Anil—though never the full truth.
And Ramanuj listened.
And for the first time in many, many years, Madhav felt something that almost resembled peace.
But peace, like all things in Madhav’s life, was never meant to stay.
****
It started with small things. A missing ladle. An open cupboard. The oil lamp by the shrine burning low, though he hadn’t lit it in weeks.
Madhav noticed, but said nothing.
He had grown used to shadows by then.
Then came the questions—soft, curious, and seemingly innocent. Ramanuj once asked him, “Baba, what’s that old locked room near the courtyard? The one with the carved door?”
Madhav paused before answering. “Just a place to keep old things,” he said. “Nothing worth seeing.”
But Ramanuj’s eyes lingered on the door whenever he passed it. And Rukmini, sharp as ever, began watching Madhav’s habits more closely. She asked about his past. His children. His late wife.
One evening, after a long spell of silence between them, Madhav finally opened the shrine.
He didn’t know why.
Maybe it was loneliness. Maybe it was trust. Or maybe it was the way Ramanuj had tucked a blanket around him that morning, as if he were his own father.
He called him into the shrine. The oil lamp flickered, casting long shadows against Kaaldhwaj’s cold face.
“This,” he said, voice low, “is Kaaldhwaj. Not a god for prayers. Not for hope. Only for endings.”
Ramanuj listened, wide-eyed, his hands cold.
Madhav told him about the leaf. The rice paste. The silence that followed each offering.
He didn’t tell him about the names.
But he didn’t have to.
Days later, Rukmini whispered to her husband as they cooked in the kitchen. “Do you know what this means? We could have everything. This house. Whatever he owns. No one comes to visit. No one would even ask.”
Ramanuj was quiet. At first, he refused. Shook his head. But the thought lingered.
And one night, it grew louder than his conscience.
****
The sky was starless when they moved. Rukmini kept watch by the door while Ramanuj crept across the courtyard, a small brass plate in hand. The betel leaf glistened under lamplight. The rice paste was ready.
Inside the shrine, the air felt thick. The black stone idol stared forward as always—unyielding, unreadable.
Ramanuj bent down and began to write.
The name: Madhav.
It looked strange, even to him. He hesitated a moment—only a breath—but it was enough for guilt to crawl up his spine.
He stood, hurried, and placed the leaf at Kaaldhwaj’s feet.
Behind him, Rukmini’s whisper came like a hiss: “Quick. Let’s go.”
But just as they turned, a sound came from the house. A soft creak. Footsteps.
Madhav stood at the threshold, a shawl over his shoulders, eyes wide and shining in the dim light.
He saw them. He saw the plate. He saw the name.
For a moment, no one moved.
Then, Ramanuj and Rukmini ran—out through the courtyard, past the neem tree, breath sharp and short.
Madhav stepped into the shrine. Looked down at the leaf. At the name written in white.
His hands trembled.
A sharp chill passed through him, not from the night but from the name written on the leaf. His name.
He backed away from the shrine, breath ragged. A thousand thoughts surged through him—death, silence, judgment. It was coming for him now. He had always believed himself in control. But now, standing here, with his name before the god of death, he felt very small. Very human.
“No,” he whispered. “Not yet. Not like this.”
His eyes darted around the room as if searching for a door that wasn’t there.
And then, in a sudden burst of desperation, he dropped to his knees. Grabbed another betel leaf. Dipped his finger into the remaining rice paste, clumsier this time.
He wrote: Kaaldhwaj.
The air thickened.
The flame in the corner flickered, then vanished.
The shrine darkened.
And from the silence came a voice—not loud, not angry, but ancient. Tired. Like stone dragged over stone:
“You cannot name me. I do not belong to the pact.”
Madhav looked up, eyes wide with fear. “Please,” he said, “I don’t want to die. Take something else. Anything.”
Silence answered.
And then, softly:
“You ask for life. A gift not given lightly. Why should I give you what no one else receives?”
“I have nothing,” Madhav whispered. “No one. Let me have time. Let me stay. I’ll carry your name if that’s the price.”
Another pause. Then:
“If you take my place, the pact continues. You will become what I am. You will no longer fear. Nor age. Nor love.”
A single breath passed before Madhav nodded.
“I accept.”
The idol cracked.
A sound like thunder beneath the earth. The walls of the shrine groaned. A gust of air blew through the space as if the building itself exhaled one last time.
And Kaaldhwaj was no longer there.
But Madhav was.
****
The next morning, Ramanuj and Rukmini returned.
They came quietly, cautiously, slipping in through the back gate. The house was silent. The trees still.
The shrine was in ruins—pieces of the idol scattered like dark bones across the floor.
They tiptoed inside. Through the kitchen. Through the hallway.
And then they saw him.
A figure in the shadows. Not hunched. Not frail.
Straight-backed. Broad-shouldered.
He stepped forward.
Ramanuj’s eyes widened. “Sir?”
The man’s face was changed—stronger, darker, sharper. But the eyes… the eyes still held that old, terrible quiet.
Madhav smiled.
“Not Sir,” he said. “Kaaldhwaj.”
And the last thing they heard was the sound of their own screams echoing into the stone walls of the house.
