I. The Text They Read at Funerals
The Garuda Purana is a conversation between Vishnu and Garuda, the king of birds.
It covers death, the soul’s journey, funeral rites, and the stations between lives. Portions of it are read at Hindu funerals. Some consider it inauspicious to read outside that context.
The community that is the subject of this collection reads it at funerals. They know it describes consequence. They have apparently never sat with its specific categories of transgression and compared them against their own conduct.
So now, we are going to do exactly that.
The Garuda Purana describes twenty-eight narakas. Not hells in the Western permanent-damnation sense – stations of consequence, temporary, calibrated to the nature of the transgression. You go where the shape of what you did sends you.
What follows is not interpretation. It is the text, mapped against the patterns documented in this collection. We did not author either document. We are only noting that they describe the same people.
II. Krimibhojanam
For those who make use of others only for their own gain.
The punishment: worms, insects, serpents eat the sinner alive. Once the body is consumed, a new body appears. The process repeats until the term expires.
The Guruji with the marketing funnel. The platform with the sixty-one page automated report and the hundred and ten million customers. The priest processing four-minute archanais on rotation at Kalahasti. The matrimonial committee that circulated your birth data without your knowledge and called it finding you a good match.
They took people in genuine spiritual distress – marriages fracturing, careers collapsed, money spent that could not be afforded – and extracted from them. They delivered nothing that addressed the actual longing. They scheduled the next appointment.
On the real plane: the customer returns because the platform never resolves what it monetised. The recurring subscription is the worm. The follow-up remedy is the worm. The upgraded package is the worm. The body consumed, replaced, consumed again. The cycle runs until the customers stop coming.
They are beginning to stop coming. To the extent they aren’t leaving the spiritual domain entirely; they are being welcomed with open arms into religions and faiths that don’t cause them permanent anxiety. The rise of Christianity and Islam in India is a direct consequence we can observe on the real plane.
III. Avici
For false witness. For false swearing.
The punishment: the sinner is hurled from a great height. Smashed to dust on impact. Restored to life. Hurled again. Until the term expires.
A child discovers at twenty-eight, via a passport renewal form and a birth certificate, that the family’s entire structure of piety and discipline was built on a circumstance its architects concealed for three decades. The performance of dharmic rectitude was running on a foundation its performers knew to be false.
The Garuda Purana is not interested in the original transgression. People are imperfect and the tradition accounts for this. It is interested in the false witness. In the sustained construction of a version of events that was not true. In the implicit swearing by the tradition’s standards while knowingly violating them at the root.
On the real plane: Avici is the passport form. It is the ground arriving. It is the restoration and the ascent and the next question the lie has to answer, and the fall again. The impact was always waiting. The height was always there.
IV. Sukaramukham
For those who oppress the dependent through misrule.
The punishment: crushed to a pulp by heavy beating. Recovered. Crushed again. Until the term expires.
The parent who hits a child and calls it discipline is not a magistrate. But the Garuda Purana’s category is not about political office. It is about the use of power over those who cannot refuse it. The child cannot leave. Cannot negotiate. Cannot appeal to anyone who will actually help. The child absorbs.
The parent who used the child’s dependence to manage their own anxiety, shame, and need for control is in this category. Power exercised against the structurally unable to refuse. Justified by the role. Unaccountable to anyone.
On the real plane: Sukaramukham is a house the children left and do not return to. It is a phone that does not ring. It is the absenteeism noted at the deathbed.
It is the silence of someone who mistook fear for respect, discovering too late that:
- Fear produces compliance; and
- Compliance metastasises into contempt the moment the dependent becomes independent.
The beating administered. The recovery. The beating again. The term running on its own schedule.
V. Paryavartanam
For those who deny food to the hungry and abuse them for asking.
The punishment: upon arrival, crows and eagles pierce the sinner’s eyes with their beaks. Continuously. Until the term expires.
The diaspora temple circuit described in the preceding piece ends. The archanais are complete. The dakshina is paid. God has been approached at the correct shrines in the correct sequence at considerable expense. Devi has been “honoured” across seven days of devotion.
Devi is then standing on the pavement outside the house. Malnourished. Recently nursing. Requiring not much more than fresh water and nutritious meals for her and her litter.
She gets sneered at.
This is not a failure of religion. This is religion completing its inversion. The apparatus spent a week approaching Devi in sanctums where she costs money and draws an audience. It then encountered Devi in a form that costs nothing in comparison and draws no audience whatsoever – and responded with contempt.
The Garuda Purana does not have a naraka for insufficient temple attendance or missed sandhyavandanams.
It does, however, have one for this:
The hungry being present, a need for basic compassion raised, the response a sneer.
The tradition that just performed a week of devotion to the divine has a specific naraka for the moment the divine appeared without an audience and was dismissed.
On the real plane: Paryavartanam is the narrowing. The world contracting to surfaces that reflect the performance back approvingly. The birds arrive as the slow recognition, over years, that every room eventually empties when there is nothing in it except the performance. That the divine was always outside. That it was always being walked past.
VI. Asitapatram
For those who abandon their own duty.
The punishment: flogged with whips made of sword-shaped leaves. If they run they fall on stones and thorns and are stabbed until unconscious. On recovery the flogging resumes. Until the term expires.
The priest at the sanctum is not performing his duty. He is performing a transaction. The duty – the tradition is entirely clear on this – is transmission. The person who arrived in distress and left with a receipt and a piece of prasad received no service. They were processed by an operator in a sanctum-shaped office.
The Guruji whose face is on the email blast, who correctly identified that the need is real and inserted himself permanently between the seeker and the answer, for recurring revenue, abandoned his duty before the funnel was built. The duty was never to monetise the longing. It was to address it.
On the real plane: Asitapatram is the knowledge that the work was never done. That the role was performed. That the duty was abandoned inside the performance and the abandonment is not recoverable because the decades are not recoverable. The sword-shaped leaves are not external. They are that knowledge, arriving in the quiet hours, on its own schedule, requiring no cosmology to function.
VII. They Are Already There
The narakas are described as stations after death. We note only what is visible now.
The Gurujis whose longing-monetisation model is running out of longing to monetise, as adherents convert to Christianity and Islam, or exit the domain of faith entirely. The temple boards administering an apparatus from which the meaning drained out before anyone noticed. The diaspora parents whose optimised children have optimised themselves out of the family entirely. The compliance theatre administrators whose audience is getting smaller by the year.
These people are not waiting for Yama’s servants. They are living the consequence in real time. The contraction of the social circle that was the only audience the performance had. The children who do not call. The community that grows polite and thins. The prayers that stopped feeling like contact long ago.
They read the Garuda Purana at funerals – but it was describing them the whole time.
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