Chapter One: Hellbent

Here's the tale I've come to tell...

Hello, my wonderful friends! Janani K. Jha here. If you’re reading this email, it means that you have signed up to receive exclusive snippets of a written project I’ve hinted at on my social media pages.

First and foremost: Thank you for being here! I believe in this project and the music that is tied with it more than anything I’ve ever believed in before, and I’m truly so grateful to be sharing some of the most exciting parts of this journey with you all here. If you haven’t already, you can subscribe for free using the button below!

One of the advantages to being on this email list is being the first to learn about upcoming projects in the Janani K. Jha cinematic universe. And so, without further ado, here is an announcement I’ve been waiting for what feels like eons to share: I’ve been working on a story that takes place in the classical Underworld. Huzzah!

If you’ve been listening to my music for a while, you’ll know that I love Greek mythology, arguably more than most things in this world. Like many of you, I was an avid Percy Jackson kid, and I always dreamed of one day getting to put my own spin on the classical literature I grew up analyzing in English class. Musically, I got to try this with my debut EP Poetic License, a concept project that took inspiration for each track from some touchstone of the Western canon, texts ranging from Greek and Roman epics to twentieth-century American poetry to Shakespearean plays. But the itch hasn’t gone away.

It was a running joke in the ancient world that at some point in their careers, every author would attempt their version of the katabasis trope: a hero’s descent into the Underworld. We see this concept scattered across mythologies — Odysseus’ troubled voyage to Hades to consult seer Tiresias in Homer’s Odyssey; Enkidu’s Netherworld adventures in the Sumerian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh; emperor Yudishthira’s decision to travel to the Hindu equivalent of Hell, Naraka, in the Mahabharata; Orpheus’ infamous failure to rescue his beloved Eurydice from the ancient Greek Underworld; and, of course, Dante Aligheri’s exquisitely detailed journey through nine levels of Hell in his fourteenth-century Italian epic, The Divine Comedy. These are only a fraction of the recognizable katabases, stories as familiar to us as the hero’s journey itself. While the trope’s basic structure endures through each of these iterations — a hero embarks on a quest to the Underworld to retrieve something of value — the endings of each version differ. In some, the hero returns, triumphant; in others, he fails, doomed to languish in the depths of the Underworld for eternity. This tension, this uncertainty, is what sets these stories apart.

This year has been one full of so much uncertainty for me. And, so, I decided to channel that angst into a story about a girl who goes through Hell and back (literally) to retrieve someone of incredible importance to her.

I can’t divulge too much just yet about my Underworld story, but I did want to share with you another snippet from its first chapter. I just couldn’t wait any longer for at least part of it to be yours. <3

[You may notice that this chapter begins with a lyric or two….and, specifically, for this first chapter, a lyric from my most recently released song, “Hellbent.” In fact, “Hellbent” seems to be the name of the first chapter. How interesting.]

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Chapter I: Hellbent

“Saw the edge & then I shook — then I leapt before I looked.”

There is something delicate about Veritas Boulevard in the morning. Life on the bustling downtown street proceeds as it always does—above my head hangs the rosy glow of the sky, streaked with wisps of clouds; a few feet ahead, on the side street that stretches past my apartment, tributes of early risers trickle by, eyes ringed with purple and mouths limply holding coffee straws; through the open window, wafting from a street corner with an almost visible string of scent, I register the sickly sweet aroma of lemonade. Lemonade. Made and sold fresh every Sunday morning by my enthusiastic neighbor Henry and his eight-year-old son, also named Henry. There was a time I would savor these hushed early morning moments. I would silently peel away the bedcovers at the crack of dawn, careful not to wake the others, and rush to the living room to see my fellow city residents at their finest, marching down the street with the purpose of drone ants. These mornings should still be a beautiful sight, but somehow, it’s hard to shake the feeling these days that all of it is just so engineered, so delicate—as if at any moment, the idyllic tableau could be disrupted. It would take only a shock of wind or a bolt of lightning to do the trick. This street is one accustomed to aesthetic perfection—housed within a city that has, arguably, made its name from it—and I’m not quite sure it is duly prepared for a disaster.

It is on a morning like this that I decide to go to Hell.

When I say “go to Hell,” I don’t mean it in the coy, metaphorical sense of an aggravated teenager. I mean go to capital-H Hell. Embark on a journey to the subterranean lair of the horned devil. Descend through the nine levels, each more perversely decorated than the last, until I reach the core of the Earth, either incinerated in the process or, if I’m lucky, permitted to fall through the middle and to the other side of the world. I mean Katathon, the ritual our country relies on to keep its wealth insulated. The quest very few undertake, and even fewer survive. These days, I’ve found myself more and more willing to take that chance.

When you learn about Hell in school, you also learn about purgatory. The two concepts—alongside, of course, the much more palatable “heaven”—exist seemingly in tandem. Purgatory is, admittedly, less sexy than heaven or hell. Of course it would be—it’s definitionally boring. A state of semi-perpetual limbo you encounter in the tedious moments after death occurs and before eternity begins. A place of nothingness, to be endured until you are assigned a more appropriate afterlife. In the Middle Ages, when the concept of afterlives was freshly introduced to the masses, corrupt priests would sell certificates intended to expedite the assignment process, guaranteeing less time in purgatory. People preferred paying for a speedy relocation to Hell to waiting any longer than absolutely necessary in purgatory. That is how unappealing it is.

And yet, frustratingly, ironically, so many of us choose to exist in limbo willingly in our actual lifetimes. We see nothing wrong with it. We straddle that space between sadness and satisfaction and build our lives around it. We settle for contentness and silently resent those of us who have chosen otherwise. And if it sounds like I am preaching from a higher place of understanding, please make no mistake: I can only say this because I am this. I have elected to live in a metaphorical purgatory for so long that the concept of Hell has intrigued me for years, to an arguably unhealthy degree.

Alas. I digress.

On the morning of my decision, I pack a single duffel bag with some basic toiletries, a couple of my favorite books, and four outfits: a pair of khakis and a yellow turtleneck; an electric blue jumpsuit I’ve been told complements my brown skin; a black cropped sweater vest and maroon pants; and a floral sundress, because why the heck not. Hell is supposed to be hot, after all.

Perhaps it is a testament to the current state of my life that there are not many people for me to say goodbye to. I hover in the open doorway, taking in the sleeping forms of my roommates, and briefly consider waking them. Something in me cautions against it. Up until this point, I have told no one about my hellbent intent. This was a decision made mostly out of convenience, and partly out of somewhat paradoxical self-preservation. If I hadn’t kept my plans so secret, I know for a fact my few confidants would have fallen over themselves trying to convince me not to go. Katathon has rightly garnered a negative reputation over the years; I wouldn’t have blamed them.

And so I am faced with two equally depressing roads: risk undoing everything I have worked toward for years, or leave my own home as silently and ineffectually as a ghost. As if I had never really lived here at all; as if I were simply a shadow occupying the space a human might. As if life would chug on the way it always has for everyone up here if this whole debacle ended with me permanently tucked beneath the Earth.

I close my eyes. It hurts to think about all this. I grab my things and descend in the elevator for very possibly the last time.

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