an immersive reading
Supritha’s Story
a true gappa from the fire
press play · read aloud over an eerie dark · headphones on
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begin the readingbrowser voice · send a recorded narration + ambience and it swaps in
A pot of tea, a low lamp, and the dark pressing on the window. They told stories till the sun came up.
On a cold Denver night, four of us were catching up over chamomile tea when Twinkle said her mamaji still can’t forget one night in Sinola, Dehradun. He passed a woman in a white saree walking beside her bicycle. “If you have a cycle, why not ride it?” he asked, and pointed her the way. As she moved ahead, he glanced back — her feet were turned the wrong way. He rode home without stopping once, and all he would say was: that was no woman… that was a daayan.
Another friend still has to take the fire. Her story arrives as the night deepens.
I first heard this from my friend Supritha, late one night in Denver. In her girls’ hostel in South India, no one would take the bed facing the window — so they left it to her. Every night her roommate woke crying, having seen a pregnant woman staring silently through the glass; Supritha slept untouched. A temple priest said her ancestral Goddess Devi pendant carried a protective aura — the spirit could see her, but never reach her. Upstairs, students called spirits almost weekly, stones rolled through the dark, and dozens of slippers gathered outside locked rooms. When I asked if she believed it, she only smiled: “Whatever haunted that hostel could see me… but it could never touch me.”
Before the sun comes up, one final story — the one they saved for the end.
