The Root of the Ash

I have read tarot since I was fourteen, and I have always felt a strange pull toward the unseen currents that run beneath the ordinary world. It is a gift, or a curse, depending on the day. When I married Major Arjun Mehta, I knew his posting would take us to remote cantonments, but I never questioned the safety of our surroundings. The forests that ringed our quarters felt like a protective embrace, not a threat. We had lived in that house for two years, and it had been a place of laughter and quiet contentment. Then, on the fifteenth of February, everything began to unravel.

That afternoon, my mother came to visit, and a petty argument about a misplaced heirloom escalated into something vicious. My husband, who had always been gentle, turned on my mother with a fury I had never seen. His mother, my mother-in-law, sat in the corner, her lips curved in a smile that never reached her eyes, whispering fuel into the fire. I watched her, and I felt a cold certainty: her words were not just cruel; they were a catalyst. Arjun’s eyes seemed glazed, his anger not his own. That night, I could not sleep. I took out my tarot deck, the one my grandmother had given me, and I laid the cards in a pattern I had only used once before, for a client who feared a curse. The cards fell into a shape that made my blood run cold: The Tower, The Devil, and The Moon, all reversed. Something was wrong in this house.

The next morning, I searched every corner. I checked under the beds, inside the closets, behind the paintings. It was my intuition, a nudge, that led me to the ash tree in the backyard. Its roots, thick and gnarled, pushed up the soil near the old stone wall. I knelt and brushed away the earth. A small, clay pot, its surface cracked and stained, was buried there. Inside, I found a lock of dark hair, a piece of red thread, and a dried, blackened root that crumbled to dust as I touched it. My breath caught. It was a binding curse, an old and powerful one. Someone had placed it to sow discord and break the bonds of love. I knew with a horrifying clarity that my mother-in-law, with her knowledge of the old ways, had done this. She blamed me, I later learned, for ‘taking her son away’.

What I did next was both foolish and desperate. I wanted to prove to myself that I could break the curse, that my own power could counter hers. I took the pot to a clearing in the forest, where the moonlight fell in silver patches, and I burned it. I chanted the words I had learned from my grandmother, the words to sever and release. As the smoke rose, I felt a tremor pass through the ground, as if the earth itself had sighed. I knew she would know. I had thrown down the gauntlet.

That night, Arjun came to bed with a fever, his skin burning but his eyes cold. He looked at me as if he did not know me, and then he spoke my mother’s name with a hatred that made my stomach lurch. I tried to reach for him, but he recoiled as if I were a viper. I saw, just for a moment, a dark shape behind his shoulder, a silhouette that seemed to cling to him like a second skin. I have seen many things in my tarot cards, but never anything like this. The following days were a nightmare. Arjun grew distant, then openly hostile, and my mother-in-law watched me with a smug, knowing smile. I could not sleep, for every time I closed my eyes, I saw the ash tree, its branches like grasping hands.

The last experience, the one that broke me, was on the nineteenth of May. I woke at midnight to find the room filled with a sweet, cloying scent, like rotting jasmine. Arjun was standing at the foot of the bed, his back to me, perfectly still. I called his name, but he did not move. I reached out and touched his shoulder. He turned, and his face was not his face. It was gaunt, the eyes sunken, the skin stretched tight over the skull. A voice, not his, rasped from his lips: ‘You should not have burned the offering.’ I screamed, but no sound came. The thing that wore my husband’s face leaned close, and I saw the roots, dark and pulsing, emerging from his mouth, burrowing into the air. It whispered a name, my mother-in-law’s name, and then it laughed. I fled the house, running through the forest until my lungs burned, and I collapsed at the edge of the road.

I never went back. I filed for a divorce, and I have not touched my tarot cards since. The army hospital treated me for a breakdown, but I know what I saw. My mother-in-law died a month later, of a sudden and unknown cause, but the curse she set in motion is not finished. I still feel it, sometimes, at the edge of my dreams: a root, growing in the dark, reaching toward me. And I know, one day, it will find me again.