July 24, 2018

PodCastle 532: Vetala

33 minutes

* Author : Rati Mehrotra

* Narrator : Srikripa Krishna Prasad

* Host : Summer Fletcher

* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh

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Previously published in the anthology Those Who Make Us: Canadian Creature, Myth, and Monster Stories.

Content Warning: domestic violence.

Rated R for brutal visions.

The night I was to leave Delhi for Toronto, my grandmother told me I was making a big mistake.

“The vetala is going to follow you,” she said, as I stuffed my clothes higgledy-piggledy into the shiny new suitcase I had bought for my shiny new life. “Think of how lonely it will be.”

I slammed down the lid of my suitcase. “There are demons everywhere,” I said. “Even Toronto.”

My grandmother sniffed. “Not our kind.”

“How would you know?” I countered. “You hardly ever leave home.”

She looked at me out of her sharp, blackbird eyes. “And you hardly ever stay here. What are you looking for, Pooja?”

“A good job,” I said flatly. We had been over this many times in the last four months, ever since I’d gotten an offer to work for Recreated Realms, the biggest Timescape company in Canada. “Money. Peace. Security.” Freedom.

“None of which you will find until you stop running away,” said my grandmother.

I didn’t reply. We didn’t talk about the past, but it sat between us, clacking its teeth and rubbing its stomach.

“What about Amar?” said my grandmother at last. “Nice young man like that won’t wait for you forever.”

I made a show of rolling my eyes, although the mention of his name still brought a lump to my throat. Now, I regretted having brought my ex-colleague home and introducing him to my grandmother. As if the demon wasn’t enough. “We’re through. I told you that weeks ago. Let it go, Nani.”

She subsided into a quiet grumbling that lasted until my taxi arrived — early, so she was forced to race through the tika, the ceremonial goodbye in front of the small kitchen shrine.

Later, at the IGI airport, I opened my suitcase and removed every item I had packed. It took over twenty minutes and people glared, but I found the three things my grandmother had sneaked in when I wasn’t looking: a pocketbook Hindi translation of the Bhagavad Gita, a sachet of ashes — my mother’s — and a small, red-painted stone. I closed my eyes and counted my breaths until I had vanquished my desire to scream. The stone, of course, was where the spirit of the vetala dwelt.

I stuffed the book and the sachet back in the suitcase along with everything else. The stone I flushed down a toilet. A gesture, nothing more, but it made me feel better, as if I truly had the possibility of making a fresh start in a new country. As if physical dislocation could dislodge the demon I was haunted by.

Toronto froze and bewildered me. I didn’t know where to start in that city, how to breathe in the -20°C air, how to navigate the driverless buses and taxis. Luckily, Recreated Realms had a guest suite in its headquarters, a sixty-storey tower at Yonge and King. I stayed there the two weeks it took me to find my footing and a cheap studio in Parkdale.

Lisa, my boss, introduced me to the different teams — Design, HR, Marketing, Defence. People from all over the world, picked for their talent, their brilliance. And now I was one of them. I shook hands and smiled until my jaw ached.

“Not that you’ll remember everyone’s names right away,

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