As the soft night winds brushed Neena’s face, she closed her eyes to let the winds slip through her hair. It was quite late but Neena always loved going on late night rides. She decided to take a different route than her usual one. It was the serene, secluded road by the Hymavathy pond.
Today was a long day. The University of Kerala was buzzing with the preparations for the upcoming Youth Festival. Neena was an excellent dancer. Her speciality was Mohiniyattam and she was selected to represent her college in this event.
As she was riding towards the serene but secluded road, she made mental notes for the next day’s rehearsal. She was listening on repeat to ‘Panimathi Mukhi Baale’, one of the tracks she loved to dance to. In the song, the nayika shared with her friend her despair and her wait for her lover.
Soon, Neena reached the road by the Hymavathy pond. She stopped at the beginning of the magnanimous and unkempt road. In the beautiful moonlight, every niche and groove on the road were clearly visible. The way the stunningly starlit sky met the canopy of the trees could be symbolic to the meeting of lovers. Neena had always been a romantic at heart.
She accelerated her bike with childlike curiosity, to see more of this road that she was on. Some minutes after riding down the road, Neena’s bike came to a halt. The bike had enough fuel to last three more days and it was serviced just a few days ago. She couldn’t guess any obvious issue with the bike. She got off her bike to check if the tyres were punctured. All seemed fine. Nothing she did got the bike back to life.
She finally called her friend, Sameer, and asked him to come pick her up. When she shared the location, he was instantly concerned. He asked her to be on the call throughout and start walking out of that road. Thinking that her friend was just trying to pull her leg again, she hung up on him and decided to explore the road a little further.
She walked further into the secluded road…
The overgrown trees were entwined in an embrace. As she walked further, she could see water glistening in the moonlight. She stopped to behold the paradise in front of her.
Suddenly, the eerie silence was broken with the crying sound of the bats flying overhead. Neena started feeling chilly, which was odd, in humid Trivandrum. She continued walking. Suddenly she felt a looming presence. The chilly wind made the hair on her nape stand. As she rubbed the heat of her palms onto her nape, she noticed a distant figure walking towards her. Unsure of the kinds of people who might frequent an empty secluded road, she started walking back to the spot where she had left her bike.
She turned around to look where the figure was. The figure was quite closer than before, which was surprising as the figure had covered quite a distance in a short while. She began walking faster as the figure got closer. Her fear kicked in and she broke into a sprint. Constantly looking back at the figure, she made her way to her bike. A little later, when she looked back, the figure had vanished.
Panting heavily, she stopped to look where this figure had disappeared. After a few moments, it hit her that someone was standing behind her. She turned to look, and sheer horror took over her countenance. It was the figure; a woman, twice her size breathing down upon her. Water was dripping from the woman’s hair on Neena’s face. The face had decomposed and was half-eaten. You could see the teeth and jaw bone peeking through the skin. Her eyes, looking down at Neena, were hanging, gouged out of the eye sockets. With one swift move, she grabbed Neena by her arms and screamed at her, in a soul wrenching manner…
Neena woke up screaming, begging to be left alone and unharmed. Sameer put his arms around her to calm her down and assured her that she was safe. After a few minutes of looking around frantically, she realised that she was in a hospital. Unable to comprehend her surrounding, she broke down, crying inconsolably. The doctors rushed in and pumped meds in her to calm her down.
After some time, she slowly opened her eyes. She noticed that Sameer was sleeping on the chair next to her bed. With a shaky voice, she called his name to wake him up.
Seeing Neena awake and calm, Sameer asked Neena what happened. He and some other friends had found her unconscious on the road by the Hymavathy pond. They checked her bike and surprisingly, it was working.
A puzzled Neena told him everything that went down that night till her last memory of the scream ringing in her ears.
Out of nowhere, an old cleaning lady, working in the hospital, broke into the conversation.
She blurted out, ‘It was Hymavathy!’. She had been eavesdropping on their conversation, standing at the door. Sameer ushered her out of the room and warned her not to come back.
The next day, the old lady came to meet Neena again. This time Sameer was not there. He had gone out to get some things. Neena, with a confused look, asked her what she wanted.
With sad eyes, the old lady said that she just wanted to help Neena understand what had happened and also to tell her the story of Hymavathy.
After a pause, Neena reluctantly agreed to lend her a ear…
It was in the 1950s. A young graceful Mohiniyattam dancer entered the University of Kerala campus. Soon, she met a young man, Murali, and fell in love. As years went by, their fondness and love for each other grew. The pond was their meeting point. There, he used to sing ‘Panimathi Mukhi Baale’ and she would dance to the song. But their beautiful world was soon going to be met with pangs of pain, tears, and loss. Fate had planned a disastrous end for them.
Hymavathy’s world came crashing down when her mother told her that she was promised to another man. And, she would not be returning to college after the vacation. She flatly refused to marry him and ran away from home. She met Murali and told him everything that had happened at home. He listened to all she had to say. Then, Murali, with a gorgeous dazzling smile, asked Hymavathy where she wanted to get married. Hymavathy’s happiness knew no bounds. Finally, things were starting to look better. They planned everything for their wedding. They both decided that they wanted to marry at the pond, which had been a witness to their love.
Meanwhile, Hymavathy’s parents came to know of the reason for their daughter’s elopement. While the women were sobbing about the disgrace Hymavathy brought to their household, the men were fuming with anger that would eventually burn Hymavathy’s world.
On the day of wedding, Hymavathy, Murali and a few of their friends made their way to the pond to solemnize the wedding.
A happy couple, their friends, the heavenly constant sky, the strong rooted land and their beloved pond… It was a picture-perfect day, until it was not.
The men of Hymavathy’s family attacked the wedding party. Everyone was beaten unconscious. They only kept Hymavathy and Murali conscious. In front of her eyes, her love was strung up and beaten with sticks, bats, batons; with anything thing they could lay their hands on. Hymavathy ran to the head of her family and begged him to stop; she promised to marry anyone they wanted her to. She fell at his feet for mercy.
After a few moments, the head raised his hand. All stopped hitting Murali and took him down. The head grabbed Hymavathy by her hair and got her on her feet. He looked down at her and smiled.
‘This is what happens when you go against my decisions.’
She joined her hands and begged for Murali’s life.
The head grabbed her head and turned it so that she could see what happened next.
His men killed Murali in front of Hymavathy. She was too frail to take this. She fell unconscious.
Hymavathy’s life had shattered to pieces. All that was left of her was a vegetable existence. She could not come to terms with loss of her love and the brutality shown by her family. Paying no heed to Hymavathy’s pain, her family flung themselves into the preparation of her marriage with a man of their choice.
She had become a mere spectator, a statue. One night, the pain was too unbearable and the heartbroken Hymavathy decided to end it.
What better place to end it where love had breathed into her life and was snuffed out by others? If life couldn’t be theirs, then death would be theirs. In the dead of the night, she made her way to the pond.
She sat by the pond for a long time, just staring into the unending darkness. This darkness mirrored the darkness within her. After some time, she slowly got up and walked into the water. She kept going till the water was over her head. Her tears became one with water of the pond and slowly her life left her…
The old lady with tears in her eyes looked up at Neena just to notice that Neena too was silently weeping. She got up and walked towards the door.
At the door, she stopped to look at Neena and said, ‘When I heard ‘Panimathi Mukhi Baale’ that night, I thought Murali came back to me. But, then, it was you. My heart broke all over again.’
With these words lingering, the old lady vanished.
A perplexed Neena stared into the thin air to find some evidence of the old lady, only to find nothing. She ran to the door and then, through the corridor to the nurse station and asked about the old lady, but everyone told her that nobody of that description ever worked in that hospital. A shell-shocked Neena fell to the ground with moist eyes trying to make sense of her encounter.
(Note: The Legend of Hymavathy is one of the haunted tales of Kerala. It has been fictionalised in this piece of work; however, the basic story line remains the same. This piece of work does not try to create rumour, to hurt or insult the sentiments of any group of people. It is purely written to tickle the Halloween nerve.)
Jincy Joshua
Faculty, ELTIS