Two Twisted Feet and Seven Lives

In the folds of the Sahyadri hills, where the forests breathe and the mist carries whispers, there is a village that doesn’t appear on most maps. Just a name passed from lips to ears, never written down. And in that village, surrounded by dense teak woods and memories no one wants to remember, stands a ruin.

The villagers call it Raktachhap Wada—The House of the Blood Stain.

Most people avoid it. The elders don’t speak of it. But if you sit by a dying fire and ask the right old man with enough paan and patience, you’ll hear the name that the ruin once belonged to.

‘Vasundhara’.

She was a woman so beautiful the earth itself seemed to pause when she walked by—though, of course, she never truly walked. Her skin was like fresh sandalwood paste, her eyes the colour of a coming storm, and her voice softer than the rain. Men travelled just to wait outside her house for a single glimpse of her at the balcony.

But behind the silks and the jasmine perfume, Vasundhara harboured a secret.

She had been born with two twisted feet, curled and malformed since the womb. Her ankles bent like cracked branches, her bones cruelly misaligned. No one saw them. She kept them hidden beneath layers of silk, never stepped outside with people around, and never danced, despite every song that begged her to.

The villagers say her mother angered a goddess—mocked a blind beggar near the temple gates while pregnant. And so the daughter bore the curse.

But Vasundhara never wept. Instead, she listened. It began with dreams. A whisper from the old banyan tree that stretched its roots far into the soil just behind the mansion courtyard. A voice older than the hills, speaking from the space between sleep and waking.

“Beauty comes with blood.”
“Seven lives for the perfect body.”

And so, in secret, Vasundhara took lovers—men lured by her beauty, none of whom were ever seen again. One by one, she bore them children. Seven in total. One every year.

And one by one, she sacrificed them beneath the banyan tree’s sprawling roots. She read from a tattered black book, chanted in a tongue unknown, and poured warm milk into the soil. With each tiny life buried, her bones shifted, her feet straightened—just a little. Ligaments lengthened. Pain lanced through her nerves like lightning. And still, she endured.

By the seventh child, she stood.

Then, she walked.

And then she danced!

Barefoot beneath the full moon, her feet flawless, her laughter echoing through the dark hills like a lullaby gone wrong. Her anklets sang again, and for the first time, she twirled beneath the banyan that had made her whole.

But the dead don’t stay buried forever.

One evening, a group of village women—led by suspicion, by instinct, by something unspoken—found the shallow graves. Seven of them, spaced like petals around the banyan trunk. Inside each: small bones and cloth-wrapped feet, twisted like Vasundhara’s had once been. The rage that followed was the kind that only mothers can understand. They dragged Vasundhara back into her own house. Shut the doors with rusted iron nails. Plastered mantras onto the walls. And they burned down the house, chanting prayers and pouring ghee until the flames swallowed the night.

But through it all, Vasundhara never screamed. She stood in her courtyard, bathed in firelight, as the inferno consumed everything she had built. She didn’t run. She didn’t beg. She simply turned toward the banyan, her silhouette flickering in the smoke,

And she smiled!

Years passed.

No one rebuilt the house. The roots of the banyan still twist around blackened stones. And once every few years, a traveller goes missing near that part of the forest. Sometimes their shoes are found. Sometimes, their cameras. But never their feet. And sometimes, in the late hours of new moon, villagers say they hear anklets chiming near the banyan. The sound of footsteps—light, graceful. And if you're ever there, and a woman in a red saree asks you:

“Do you think I’m beautiful?”

Don’t answer. Don’t look at her.

And above all—don’t look at her feet.

(Disclaimer: The events and characters depicted in this story are entirely fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, or real events is unintentional and purely coincidental.)