The Poisoned Feast: A Horror Tale
In the heart of New Delhi, the Sharma family had it all—wealth, status, and a seemingly perfect life. Devinder Sharma, a powerful businessman, had built an empire from the ground up, his family by his side. His wife Suman, ever the doting partner, had supported him through thick and thin, their two children the picture of health and happiness. Their home was a fortress, filled with the finest things money could buy. It was a life many envied.
But tonight, in the midst of their grand success, something darker lurked—something ancient, something that could not be bought or controlled. The Feast.
The Sinister Dish
It was a night of celebration. Devinder had just closed the biggest deal of his career. To mark the occasion, Suman decided to prepare a special family dinner: fish curry—a recipe passed down from her ancestors, one that had never failed to impress. She had spent the afternoon in the kitchen, perfecting the dish with her own hands, her movements graceful yet focused. Little did she know, she wasn’t alone.
As the curry simmered on the stove, an eerie presence seemed to fill the air. The kitchen, once warm and inviting, felt suddenly cold. Suman brushed it off, attributing the chill to the late evening hour. But something was wrong. The fish—bought fresh from the market that morning—looked… off. The eyes of the fish seemed to follow her, their glossy black pupils unnervingly lifelike.
Unaware of the sinister force creeping into her home, Suman continued preparing the meal.
When the family sat down to eat, they felt an overwhelming sense of unease. Devinder, always the picture of strength, felt a sudden tightness in his chest. Suman felt a cold shiver run down her spine, her hands trembling slightly as she lifted her spoon. Their children, usually so full of energy, seemed oddly quiet, their eyes darting around the room as if hearing something only they could perceive.
The fish curry—rich, fragrant, and spicy—was the center of the meal, and for the first few minutes, it seemed like nothing more than a hearty dinner. But then, the darkness began to unfold.
The Terrifying Symptoms
Within minutes of swallowing their first bites, the family began to feel sick. At first, it was mild—just a slight nausea, an odd tingling in the stomach. But soon, the symptoms escalated.
Devinder’s breath grew shallow, his skin pale and clammy, the blood draining from his face. Suman doubled over in agony, clutching her stomach as an unholy pain twisted inside her. Their children—normally the picture of vitality—began to wail, their eyes wide with terror. It was as though something was crawling inside them, eating them from the inside out.
But it wasn’t just food poisoning. No. This was far worse. Something ancient had been awakened.
The house grew darker, the air thicker with the weight of something malevolent. The walls of the once-grand dining room seemed to close in on them, suffocating in their suffocating isolation.
As they scrambled to get to the hospital, shadows danced at the edges of their vision. The familiar world seemed to warp, the bright lights of the city outside now dim, the streets unrecognizable, as if the world itself was shifting into something unearthly.
The Unearthly Presence
In the hospital, the family was quickly admitted, but the doctors were powerless to help. They had never seen anything like it. The bloodwork showed nothing. There were no traces of bacteria, no toxins, no signs of infection. Yet the symptoms only worsened. Organs began to fail. Fevers spiked uncontrollably. They were dying—slowly, agonizingly—but there was no logical explanation.
But as the night wore on, things grew even stranger. Devinder, barely conscious, began to hear whispers—soft voices that seemed to come from the walls. Suman, her mind fracturing under the strain, saw shadows moving in the corners of the room, figures that were not human. They would vanish when she blinked, only to return again, just out of sight.
A terrible thought began to gnaw at Devinder’s mind: this wasn’t a natural illness. It was a curse.
The Revelation
As the family’s health deteriorated, the truth began to reveal itself. The whispers grew louder. The shadows more persistent. And then, as if driven by some unseen force, Devinder tried to recall what he had missed earlier. The fish—the fish curry—hadn’t been just an ordinary meal. There had been something wrong with it from the start.
He remembered something that Suman had said earlier in the day, a strange reference to her grandmother’s recipe. “This curry has been in my family for generations,” she had said, her voice soft, almost reverent. “It was made for occasions like this. The night when everything changes.”
The words hit him like a bolt of lightning.
Her grandmother. The source of the recipe.
It was then that the whispers stopped, and an image formed in his mind. The grandmother’s portrait that had always hung in the dining room—her eyes cold and unblinking. A woman he had never really thought much of. But something about her was wrong. Her gaze had always been too intense. Too knowing.
He began to piece it together. Suman’s family had once been part of an ancient, occult circle, one steeped in dark rituals. The fish curry wasn’t just a family recipe—it was a vessel for a curse, passed down through the generations. A curse meant to bring death to those who consumed it, a curse that would consume them in the most horrific way possible.
The poison in the curry wasn’t a mere chemical—it was supernatural, tied to something far older than mere mortal understanding.
The Horror Unleashes
The house itself seemed to come alive, now. The hospital room became a funhouse of horrors. The walls began to ooze blackened ichor, dripping down like liquid sorrow. The shadows seemed to grow, closing in, whispering names, familiar and foreign at the same time.
Devinder tried to scream, but no sound came out. He looked at Suman—her face pale, her eyes hollow—suddenly realizing that she had known all along. She had invited this into their home.
Suman, her face twisted with a strange, unnatural calm, stood up, her eyes black pools of emptiness. “It’s too late,” she whispered, as the room seemed to swallow her words. “It’s been passed down. We couldn’t escape it, Devinder. None of us can.“
The walls trembled, the ceiling cracked, and from the depths of the shadows, a figure emerged. It was the shape of an old woman, her face pale and gaunt, her eyes wide and unblinking. The grandmother. Her twisted form seemed to float above the family, an entity of pure malice and ancient power.
“Devinder,” she crooned, her voice not human, but something much older, “your soul is mine. And so is your family’s. You have invited me into this world with your greed. Now, you will pay.”
The lights flickered, and the room spun into chaos. Devinder’s world shattered, his vision filled with images of death and decay. The walls seemed to pulse with a life of their own as the figure of the grandmother drew nearer.
The End of the Line
Devinder’s scream was drowned by the unnatural silence that followed.
In the aftermath, the Sharma family was found, but not as they once were. Their bodies were decayed beyond recognition, their eyes wide open in eternal terror. The poison had not just killed them—it had twisted their souls, binding them to the house, to the curse.
And in the stillness, the house remained. Silent. Watchful. Waiting for the next soul to come.
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The Tragic Tale of Devinder Sharma’s Family – The Beginning ; The Truth
The Poisoned Feast: The Curse of the Forgotten Cult
The Sharma family thought of themselves as modern, progressive, and distant from the old world. They prided themselves on their wealth, their accomplishments, and their status. But buried deep in the roots of their family tree was a secret—a terrible, bloodstained secret—one that had remained hidden for generations.
It all began centuries ago, in the isolated village of Kumarhati, nestled in the shadow of the Aravalli Hills, where superstition and dark rituals ran as deep as the river that cut through the land. There, a group of powerful and wealthy landowners had formed an elite cult, dedicated to an ancient and forgotten god—Maalok—a deity of darkness, death, and rebirth. The cult’s purpose was simple: to gain immortality and eternal power, they would have to make sacrifices of great blood and soul, offering their lives—and the lives of others—to Maalok.
The cult was led by Raghunath Sharma, the patriarch of the Sharma family and the first of their bloodline to seek the ancient knowledge that would make him and his descendants rulers of the earth. Raghunath had heard whispers of Maalok from an old sage, a man whose eyes were said to see beyond the mortal realm. The sage had given him a forbidden text, a grimoires written in blood, filled with incantations that would unlock the gateway to the god’s power.
It was in the small hours of the night that Raghunath performed the first of many rituals, invoking Maalok’s name under a blood-red moon. He killed a child—a sacrifice that would be the first of many—and as the blood pooled around the altar, the earth seemed to tremble beneath his feet. Maalok appeared, a towering figure of shadow and smoke, his eyes glowing with an unnatural fire.
In exchange for the sacrifice, Maalok granted Raghunath immortality—not in the form of eternal youth or a long life, but in the form of a curse. He was promised power beyond his wildest dreams, but with a terrible price: his descendants would forever be bound to Maalok, forever cursed to feed the god’s hunger for souls.
For the first few generations, the cult’s power grew, the family’s wealth expanded, and they prospered. But with each generation, the rituals grew darker, and the cost became heavier. Blood sacrifices were required every few decades to keep the curse from consuming them entirely. Every member of the Sharma family was born with an inherent link to Maalok, but as the years went on, it became harder to maintain the god’s favor.
The curse had taken root in their bloodline, and each child born of the Sharma family had to play a part in the sacrifice—whether they were willing or not. They had to offer up someone close to them—someone they loved or held dear—to Maalok, feeding the god’s hunger for human souls.
The Breaking Point: Suman’s Grandmother
As the cult’s influence spread, the Sharma family moved away from Kumarhati, settling in the bustling heart of New Delhi. The family’s wealth flourished, and the cult’s rituals, once carried out in secret, became more subdued, disguised under the guise of normal family traditions. But the curse never stopped following them.
It was during this time that Suman’s grandmother, Radha Sharma, a highly influential woman in the family, became aware of the true weight of their legacy. Radha had always been strange—quiet, cold, and distant from the other women in the family. The elders had whispered that she was the “chosen”—the one who could hear the god’s voice in her dreams, feel his whispers in her bones.
Radha’s power grew alongside the family’s prosperity. She was the one who had kept the ancient rituals alive in secret, continuing to offer up sacrifices to Maalok to ensure the family’s continued fortune. But by the time Suman’s mother was born, Radha had grown deeply conflicted. She was beginning to see the true horror of what the family had become.
Her nightmare began when, in one ritual, she tried to break the pact with Maalok, refusing to sacrifice another innocent soul to feed the god’s hunger. She attempted to destroy the grimoires, hoping to sever the connection between the family and Maalok, but it was too late.
In that moment of defiance, Maolak exacted his vengeance.
The god cursed her—cursed the entire Sharma bloodline—with a more horrific fate than death. Radha became a vessel for Maalok’s power, a living nightmare, a shell of a woman consumed by the dark god’s presence. She could never escape Maalok’s grasp, and soon, she realized the curse wasn’t just about death—it was about enslaving the soul forever.
Radha’s mind began to break under the weight of the curse, and she found herself passing on the forbidden knowledge to Suman, telling her that one day, she, too, would be forced to carry the weight of the curse on her shoulders.
The Return of the Curse: Suman and the Fish Curry
Radha’s final days were spent in torment. Her last words to Suman were cryptic: “The fish curry. The recipe.”
Suman had never understood, but in the years that followed, she often found herself drawn back to her grandmother’s legacy. She never imagined that the fish curry—a seemingly innocuous family recipe—was part of the ritual. The fish, the spices, and the poisonous herb that only grew in the family’s ancestral village were all components of an ancient, ritualistic dish, designed to lure the god’s power back into the world through a blood sacrifice hidden in plain sight.
Suman had no idea that by making the fish curry for her family, she was unknowingly awakening Maalok again—inviting the god into their home through the blood and the feast. She was not just feeding her family; she was feeding Maalok’s hunger. And as the curse took root, it was not just a family meal that they were consuming—it was a ritualistic offering to the ancient god, one that would bind the souls of her loved ones, just as it had bound Radha, and every Sharma before her.
The poison, unknown to the family, had been introduced not just to cause death, but to open a gateway—a gateway through which Maalok could pass into the world once more. The suffering they endured wasn’t just from the toxin—it was from the god himself, feeding on their souls as they slowly withered away.
The End of the Bloodline
As Devinder began to unravel the truth in his fevered state, he realized that there was no escaping Maalok. He had been a fool to think they could ever outrun the curse. They were doomed from the moment they took the first bite of the fish curry, just as Radha had once been, just as Raghunath had been. The pact with Maalok was eternal.
Devinder’s last thoughts were filled with terror, knowing that even if he survived the poison, he would never escape the grip of the god.
And as the hospital room descended into darkness, the whispers of Maalok began to fill the air, signaling the start of something far worse than death: the return of the ancient curse that would consume their very souls.
In the end, the Sharma family would never be free. They were merely the latest victims in an ancient ritual, bound to the god forever, the cycle of sacrifice and suffering repeating until the end of time.
Conclusion
The curse of Maalok, born from a long-forgotten cult, had finally claimed its due. The fish curry, the family recipe passed down through generations, had become the key to unlocking Maalok’s return—a god of death, hunger, and souls. With each generation, the Sharma family had fed the god with their own blood, unaware of the horrors they were perpetuating.
Now, as the last of the Sharma bloodline crumbled, the ancient curse was complete. The power of Maalok would never fade, and the family’s bloodline would remain forever tainted, bound to a god that feasted on their souls for eternity.
The shadows lingered, and the curse would continue. Forever.
Readavorous (Dastan-e-Kitaab) 