Malayatoor's Yakshi

This is the story of Srinivasan, who is a teacher of Chemistry in a college. He is a very handsome gentleman in his late twenties. Srinivasan tells his story from a hospital to which he has been admitted by his friend Chandrasekar. It is a home for mentally deranged people. Srini, for his close friends and his wife, has lost his charm on his countenance very recently in an accident in the college laboratory. Much before the accident, he was planning to go to the US on Ford Foundation Scholarship, that would be available only to talented and hard working people. The accident prevented him from going to the US as he had to spend many days in hospital like the present stint of him in a different one. He was very proud to be a man of charm and beauty. The accident had corroded the left cheek of him reducing the part to veins and bones. His nose was smudged and made out of its shape. The doctor who removed the swathing bandage was very kind enough to say a few words of solace to him. The appearance of him in the mirror took away his confidence and bundled him into a puny figure. His dreams of marrying a heavenly beauty to suit his standards of outlook turned nightmares as the rejection came from his first love: Vijayalakshmi. She is a literature student who has fallen in love with him. Though they spent a lot together before the accident, Srini had never made love with her.

The rejection leads him to take interest in 'Black Magic" and he starts collecting palm scripts and is spending a lot of time reading about performers of black art. While he is in the fad of exploring the forbidden art, he meets a great beauty Ragini, in an unearthly hour standing lonely in a thoroughfare. She calls out to him and seeks his help in reaching the railway station. She even calls him 'Srini' in the first meeting. He meets her again in a cinema hall after some months and the relationship turns to love. She shows him her house but as he reaches it the next day it remains locked and no one nearby is aware of her stay. After sometime he meets her and brings her home and they decide to get married. The witnesses are Chandrasekar and his wife and Ananathan and his wife, his neighbours. He fails to make love with her in his honeymoon and shows symptoms of impotency. A strong inclination grows in him that she must be a 'Yakshi', a blood sucking vampire who is after his blood. The reasoning is that why such a great beauty has come forward to marry a man with an eroded face. The suspicion grows much assisted by nightmares and some suspicious activities. In the meantime, Srini, while rummaging her suitcase unearths a diary written by his yakshi. It reveals certain things about her however all has been taken with a pinch of salt by Srini. He confirms her origin and practises ant-ablution, not a sacrificial washing but burning of them to kill her as she is a yakshi, since there is no other means of wiping her out. On one occasion she swirls her grabbing on to her tresses and raps her at the wall. He even tries to nail her head with a stone like an exorcist to get rid of her. In the end she reveals herself to him before the Yakshi temple that she is really a yakshi who came to the earth three centuries ago with her friends. It is a practice among the yakshis to visit the earth by travelling on the tails of comets to suck blood from humans once in a month. She wavered and got lost and when she went back her feet were touching the celestial scarlet carpet, a symptom of losing her power. She was then ordered by the head-yakshi to stay on the earth until she sucks blood from one thousand men. She pardoned a poet already in another set up who did stay without being emaciated with sucking. She has chosen to do the same with Srini and accept the punishment of becoming a wisp of smoke. The world does not believe in this and accuses Srini of murdering the wife and arrests and convicts him though he lacks sanity.