Sins cannot be washed away.

****

Radha lay in a pool of blood with a wreath of thorny roses on her head, like a beautiful sacrifice made to the devil.

A crowd of villagers had assembled around the dead body. Some cried at the sinister sight, some speculated the reason behind the heinous, gruesome act. Maya meandered through the crowd to finally reach the spot where the body was dumped– at the back of the temple. With sanctified shrines and soothing green all around, this mark of death toppled off the purity of the place.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

That was Maya's first thought.

Maybe Lucifer himself has arrived.

Maya felt a bolt of nausea course through her body. She covered her mouth and took steps back. A dirty malodour had conquered the area and spread over the premises. She took a deep breath. Her muscles tensed as she peered at the body of Radha.

She was naked, as naked as all are at birth. Someone had covered her private parts with a tattered piece of cloth. A slit on her throat was visible. Maybe that had taken her last breath away.

Maya could not break the gaze. The eldritch sight of her bulging open eyes, of her parted lips through which slithered a thin stream of blood held Maya in its witchy grip.

She was as naked as Radha in her dream. The realisation made her flinch.

"Maya!"

A known voice called out to her.

A sweating Aadi Babu pushed through the crowd to reach her. "What are you doing here?"

"I got the news–"

"Go back! Just go back!" He waved his hand in the air in agitation. "You are not supposed to interfere in this."

"Be honest– is this the darkness you were talking about?"

"Shh," Aadi Babu hushed her. "Do not speak about omens. Do not. Don't call it."

The man trembled from head to toe. He refused to look at Radha and took Maya by the hand, pulling her away from the place.

"Wait! You cannot do this to me!"

"I had asked you to be away from the darkness."

"But this is murder!" Maya yanked away her arm with brutal force and stood her ground. "I will not leave."

A guttural noise escaped her throat. Aadi Babu lowered his gaze when he saw her wrath. With a gentler, meeker voice, he requested her, "Please, do not involve yourself in this mess. I don't want harm to befall on you."

"Look, he is back!"

Aadi Babu and Maya turned to the source of the voice. A collective gasp rippled through the crowd. People began passing their opinions without any sensitivity.

"He is to be blamed for all this. From the time he has become the priest only deaths are happening."

"I agree with you. He is a nuisance. Mother doesn't like this priest. We must remove him immediately!"

"But no one is as qualified in the scriptures as he is. And I shall disagree with you all. I believe Maa is taking our test, taking his test."

"I have heard that he used to help Radha and her daughter. Look at him now, I pity this man. First he lost his love, then the woman he thought to be his sister."

Aadi Babu went to the stairs of the temple and Maya followed him. There, at the foot of the staircase, sat Hrishav with a ghastly pallor on his face. Shekhar held him and patted his back.

"He isn't fine. Not at all," Aadi Babu whispered.

"We, I mean me and Manas found him unconscious near the body. On waking him up, he said he had lost his senses when he saw the body while going towards the holy kitchen."

The beautiful face had lost its glamor. The ochre eyes that glimmered with charm now were veiled by a sheen of tears. He took deep, irregular breaths. Shekhar quickly fetched some water for him which he chugged in one go.

"He has been vomiting since then. I think his throat got cut because he spat out blood too," Shekar informed.

"We need a doc–"

"No," Hrishav spoke, for the first time. "I-I will be fine, Aadi Babu."

It was then that his eyes caught Maya. For once, she thought she saw the drowning helplessness in his gaze vanish in a poof, but it returned with a greater intensity. He looked sick and weak. He got up and walked to her with wobbly knees and held her hand while looking into her eyes.

"I hope you won't be writing about this in your article. It's going to give people a bad impression about my village. Trust me, I am trying hard to stop this all. I am doing all I can. I have gone till the end of the world"–the hollowness in his gaze petrifying Maya–"but I am unable to stop this massacre."

Maya pressed his palm and gave an assuring shake. "I will not write about all these."

"This is the fifth murder," Shekhar remarked with an indifferent awareness. "Four have already happened."

Maya did hear the shocking revelation. It shook her. But at the moment, her eyes were stuck on Hrishav who stared at the ground as if he was afraid to look anywhere else.

"They will blame me," he murmured. "They will all hate me."

Aadi Babu and Shekhar made him sit and went towards the crowd. Some people had gone to bring a mattress and some bedsheets to carry the dead body. Maya felt she would better stay beside Hrishav and calm him down than to stand near the dead body and delve into some existential crisis.

She knelt beside him and, somewhat fearfully, kept her palm over his. He had hugged his legs close to his chest and hid his face. When she touched him, he quivered and shifted back.

Maya swore that was enough to make her heart shout to hug him. But she muffled that advice and instead kept a healthy distance.

"I have heard that people say you have bad luck. But really, I don't understand the logic behind it. You can't be blamed for these deaths."

Hrishav chuckled coldly. "City-folk may not believe in these, but look at them"–he pointed at the crowd–"they believe in the supernatural. They believe Maa doesn't want me to worship her, so she is doing all these. But tell me Maya, would Maa ever kill or hurt any of her children?"

Maya listened to him in silence. He had depth to his words.

"No Mother would ever wish for her children's ill-fate," he added. "If she does, she isn't a Mother!" He spat.

With a brooding glance he stared where the crowd had gathered. His eyes seemed to cross all barriers and focus on the woman who was now asleep forever.

"She doesn't despise me, does she?"

Maya didn't know if he was referring to Radha or Kalika. But she had to reply.

"She can only love you, for you are a pure soul."

"Oh! Look there, look there!"

Again, the crowd turned hyperactive, anxious and struggled to be in one place. The people spread out like bees from a honeycomb. After a brief time Maya saw for whom they were making a way. She felt disinclined to leave Hrishav alone, but her attention was already claimed by this new visitor.

And then a pair of eyes that followed her.

She left Hrishav on his own and stood along with the crowd. The new visitor was a teen draped in a pink saree. She wore a stoic expression with a frown on her lips and carried a bunch of flowers in the cup of her palms. Trudging towards the dead body, this girl didn't notice that a pair of male eyes were ardently, maybe even obsessively following her.

But Maya had noticed the whole picture.

This teen girl was none other than Sahiba. She poured the flowers over her mother's dead body and joined her hands in a namaskara, reciting a silent prayer. A lone tear trickled down her cheeks. She knelt down to remove the earrings that her mother wore– the sole piece of jewellery on Radha's body– and brought it close to her heart.

Maya felt a pang in her heart. Those earrings would be her last memory.

They were also there on her body when she was murdered...

"Please make arrangements for her last rites. I shall do the mukhagni," Sahiba declared.

Things happened quite fast. The crowd began to disperse as men carried the body towards the cemetery and Sahiba followed them. Aadi Babu could also not be seen in the distance.

And the cloaked man who had been studying Sahiba intently had also vanished into thin air. But Maya kept in mind those eyes and eyebrows.

She went back to Hrishav and found that Shekhar had returned.

"Brother, I think I will be vomiting again," Hrishav told.

Shekhar helped him stand up. Hrishav wrapped an arm around Shekhar and had walked some distance when the fit of nausea took him over and he fell to the ground, vomiting.

"Don't be hard on yourself." Shekhar rubbed his back. "Can you walk?"

By now, Shekhar was literally pulling Hrishav along with him because the latter was too fragile. They went outside the premises of the temple. Maya saw both summon a bullock cart and leave.

All in all, she was now alone in the temple. Not a human was in near sight.

She definitely didn't want to go back at the place where the body was found. It was smeared with blood.

"I don't want to end up puking like Hrishav. Poor thing can't handle the sight of blood."

Well, what would have I done on finding a dead body inside my office early in the morning? Of course, I would have shrieked and fainted.

Maya, even though afraid of exploration at this point, could not shove away her risky instincts which whispered to her in a whooshing tone– find the culprit, find the culprit.

Thus, before she could realise, her feet began climbing the stairs and she headed towards the garbha griha.

Just days before, she had come here, to this temple and met Hrishav for the first time. It was a sweet meeting and Maya could have never imagined she would end up beholding him in such a feeble state.

"This temple where Mother lives is nothing less than horror for him."

She stood outside the door of the garbha griha, pondering about the veshyas, the mysteries, the rumours surrounding Hrishav's bad luck which could soon turn as solid as the dogmas of faith.

"And this is the fifth murder. The killer must be so cold-blooded. And to make their victim wear a wreath of roses as red as blood..."

He must have thought Radha was special.

Maya paced up and down in front of the garbha griha, talking to herself and making theories, or turning gloomy as the weather. While manoeuvring in her own mind, she heard some noise coming from inside the garbha griha. Now alert than ever before, she noticed it had been unlocked all this while, the door being kept slightly ajar.

In tiptoes, taking time to place every step and keeping her breaths in control, she opened the door. There was someone behind the idol of Kalika, which, quite oddly, was covered in a red cloth. The man was probably sweeping the area.

Maya felt scared to the core. She turned stiff and vigilant, watching if the man suddenly leapt from behind the idol or if any other danger was lurking near.

She almost gasped when her right foot slipped but she held onto a nearby pillar and balanced herself. She looked at the ground. Her foot was now spotted with remains of the dead.

It was blood. She had slipped on blood. Her observant eyes also saw a single strand of hair, long enough to be possibly of Radha or any other woman's lay near the marks of blood.

She was ready to turn back and take a sprint when a crotchety Manas appeared from behind the idol with a broom in his hand.

"No outsider is supposed to come here without permission," he snapped. "The garbha griha is prohibited for you all."

She wanted to lash out at him and ask why marks of blood were there inside the most celebrated part of a temple.

But if Manas is somehow involved in all this, I will have to be careful.

"Leave," he hissed, narrowing his eyes like a hawk inspecting its prey. "Don't probe into matters that are not yours to survey."

Maya knew better than to retort. Swallowing her wrath, she left the garbha griha. She heard the door shut with force behind her.

Now, on the way back to Aadi Babu's house, the only thought that plagued her mind was–

Is Manas trying to remove any evidence?