Start Here: Prologue - Tales of Karma
A bold experiment: Read my unpublished novel chapter by chapter for free
Today marks the beginning of a new experiment. I’ll be sharing chapters of my unpublished novel, Karma Unleashed (the first in a planned three-book series) here on Substack for free.
For those who are paid subscribers, you’ll have access to the archive once I’ve finished sharing the entire novel.
Some of my friends think I’m crazy for doing this: “Why give it away for free? What if someone steals it?”
Maybe I am a bit crazy, but I want to join the ranks of other authors who are trying this experiment on Substack. I’ll be sharing a chapter every week to see how it resonates with readers. Based on your feedback, I’ll adjust the manuscript to make it even better.
So, I would love to hear your thoughts as I go on this journey while I keep reminding myself of the words of the late Steve Jobs: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
If you enjoy these chapters, please share them with others who might appreciate this experiment.
Your feedback is invaluable, and I’m excited to see where this journey takes us.
Here is the synopsis of the novel Karma Unleashed.
Karma, who was born in the Middle Eastern country of Bilaq, has always known that she has a unique talent. She sees visions of lives still unlived. When she comes in physical contact with people, she sees snippets of their future.
After getting married and moving to the American suburbs, she works hard to surpass her powers, opting for a no-drama suburban existence. She only wants to assimilate into the new American culture and have children with her hard-working American-born husband.
But things are not working out as she hopes, as visions keep flashing in front of her despite her efforts to surpass them. She grapples with the purpose behind her unique talent. Was she put on this earth to stop her friend's son from taking his own life? To prevent a neighbor from dying from a drug overdose?
When Karma meets Danielle, a teenager who lives in her neighborhood, her life takes a dark turn. Danielle, who seems to know about her visions, is not an ordinary teenager. She is exhibiting demonic qualities, and she is after Karma!
Will diabolic Danielle be able to stop Karma from pursuing what she is meant to do? Or will Karma eventually be able to curb Danielle's sinister powers? In the battle between the demonic and the mystical, who will triumph?
So, without further ado, below is the very beginning: The prologue
Karma Unleashed
Natasha Tynes
Prologue
Karma couldn’t remember her first vision. She’d always had them.
Visions flashed before her uninvited, showing snippets of lives yet to be lived. They played like short Hollywood movies. She saw them everywhere—on her way to school, while playing with the neighbors, while seated on the bus, and while singing in the school’s choir. They were all triggered by physical interaction. A mere touch. A handshake. A tug. Or even a brush on someone else’s hand. When they happened, she became oblivious to her surroundings. To the outside observer, she would appear to be staring into space, like someone high on an illegal drug. Sometimes, a dull headache would precede the visions and linger for a while after they vanished.
But which one of those visions had been her first? When she saw Auntie Wafa falling down the stairs of their apartment building, breaking her neck three days before it happened? Or was it when she saw Bassam, the next-door neighbor with an arm cast, a week before he fell off his bicycle?
No, no, it might have been when she was seven years old, when she saw her neighbor, Arwa, on a plane, months before Arwa told her Karma was immigrating to the US from the city of Shifa in the Arab country of Bilaq, where they lived.
“I already know that,” Karma told Arwa when she broke the news. They were eating Falafel sandwiches while sitting in white, plastic chairs in their apartment building’s courtyard. It was a hot day, the sunlight bright in their eyes.
“Who told you?” said Arwa, squinting her eyes. “We just found out our papers were approved yesterday. Was it my brother Rami? He has such a big mouth!”
Karma took a deep breath and inhaled the scent of the jasmine flowers planted in a garden bed near the main gate of their apartment building. “No, it was not Rami. I just know things,” said Karma, then bit into her sandwich, as she revealed her secret to her childhood best friend.
Arwa rolled her eyes and tucked a strand of curly brown hair behind her ear. “You can be so silly sometimes.”
The two got silent as Karma watched their neighborhood cotton candy seller pass by their street. “Sha’r el banat, Sha’r el banat,” yelled the boy, whose bright pink confection dangled from a wooden log hoisted behind his back.
No. Scratch that. Perhaps her first vision had happened when she was only five years old when she saw her aunt chop her finger while cutting onions. Karma had tried to warn her. She had even gathered all the onions in her house and hid them in her mom’s purse while they were visiting. Her aunt ended up losing part of her finger anyway. Karma’s efforts to stop the incident had failed, and her mom’s purse forever smelled like onions.
When Karma was young, she thought everyone had visions. That the mystical was human, a mundane part of existing. Later, her mom explained to her she had a wild mind with a wild imagination. That she was not normal, unwell.
Sometimes her mom would curse the heavens above for what they had brought into her life.
“Ya Allah, why did you give me a daughter like this?” she would say, shaking her head.
“Ya Allah, you granted me one child and made her like this. Why Ya Allah, Why?”
Karma would wish the floor to just swallow her, erasing her forever.
“Don’t go telling everyone about your crazy mind. Keep it to yourself,” Karma’s mom warned her as she prepared her school lunch, labneh with Zaatar spice inside a pita pocket. “We don’t want people to start spreading rumors about you. That you’re crazy, you’ll never get married. Ever!”
Her mom wiped the back of her hands on her dress, then looked Karma straight in the eyes. “Do you hear me? No one should know about this! No one would ever want you. You’ll become an old spinster living with me and your dad.” She said, tapping Karma’s head with her index finger.
Of course, Karma didn’t listen, instead telling her friend, Rula, at eight years old.
“I see things before they happen,” said Karma as she sipped her banana-flavored milk during the school recess on a breezy September day. They were both sitting on a bench in the school’s courtyard, watching their classmates run around. The concrete courtyard was bare. There was no playground equipment, scattered toys, or any greenery. Aside from the worn-out benches, the yard was just an empty, open space for kids to run wild.
“What do you mean?” asked Rula, cocking her head.
Karma remembered her mom’s warning. “Sometimes, I see things before they happen to people before they know it themselves. Sometimes good things. Sometimes bad things,” she said, her eyes welling with tears.
Rula grabbed a cucumber from her lunch box and took a bite. “How do you see them?” she asked while chewing.
Karma rested her arms in her lap. She quickly wiped a tear from her cheek, hoping Rula hadn’t noticed. “In my head, they flash before me like a movie.”
“Really? When? Can you see something about me?” asked Rula, voice loud with excitement.
Karma shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it happens when I’m close to people. When I touch them.”
“Touch me now. Please? I want to know what you see?” Rula closed her eyes.
Karma looked at her best friend, a light breeze ruffling her straight brown hair. “Not today. I don’t think I can right now.”
Rula insisted. “Come on. Do it. Quickly? Before we head back to class!”
Karma grabbed Rula’s right arm. She closed her hazel eyes for two minutes. When she opened them, she let out a big sigh. “Nothing. It doesn’t happen every time. I don’t know why.”
“You’re lying,” said Rula, shaking her head. “I knew you were lying.”
Karma felt the blood get hot in her veins. “No, I’m not. I told you it doesn’t happen to everyone I touch all the time.”
Thankfully.
Rula stuck out her tongue. “Liar. My mom already warned me against playing with you. She said you and your family are strange and that we should keep our distance.” She stood up, wiped the cumber crumbs off her gray school apron, and walked away, leaving Karma alone on the bench.
As time passed, Karma realized her secret terrified those who learned about it, making them run away. It was a supernatural concept beyond their comprehension, like when she was 15 and warned her classmate Joumana that her father would lose his leg in a car accident, forcing him into a wheelchair forever.
Joumana hadn’t believed her. Instead, she said, “Be’id el Shar.” (May God keep evil away.)
When Karma’s vision proved true, Joumana came knocking on Karma’s door. “You are Satan’s daughter,” Joumana yelled as soon as Karma opened the door.
Karma felt the sting of the insult, then a feeling of dread crept in. “What happened?” asked Karma, her lips trembling.
“You cursed my dad! He’s a cripple now because of you!”
I did try to warn her. Can I be forgiven? “I’m so sorry,” said Karma as tears started falling down her cheeks.
“Stay away from me and my family. You’ll only bring evil!”
Karma’s mom was right. She had a crazy mind. She had to keep it to herself.
Her visions came and went. Sometimes she ignored them, and other times she acted on them. Occasionally, her visions would cause her headaches that her mom would cure with sage and camomile tea.
When Karma was 17 and Samir, the convenience store owner on the street behind their building, brushed against her hand as he handed her change, an image flashed of him pumping gas in his car, somewhere foreign, away from Bilaq. Europe, America? The few people around him had Western looks, blonde hair, and fair complexions. He was clean-shaven. His well-groomed mustache was gone. Where was he? There was greenery everywhere, and the gas station overlooked a mountain on the horizon.
She shook her head to ground herself back to where she was. She took a deep breath and looked at the store owner. “Ammo Samir, how are you?” she asked him.
“I’m good. How are you, ya bint?” (Little girl.) He always called her “little girl.”
She wanted to find a way to tell him about the vision. She had to think fast. “Things are hard these days. My dad says no one has money. He dreams of leaving for America someday!”
“Ah, isn’t that everyone’s dream?” he said as he bagged her groceries. “My brother in Alabama is trying to convince me to move there. He even helped me apply for immigration. Who knows when it will happen?”
Karma smiled. “It will happen, inshallah.” She was happy with this vision; Samir’s dream was going to come true.
Sometimes her visions terrified her, giving her nightmares, like when she was a senior in high school and saw her favorite teacher, Ms. Lilly, in a hospital bed. Her eyes were closed, and she looked frail, like a skeleton. Two IVs stuck out of her arm, and she had a tube in her mouth. Two young men and a young woman gathered around her. Her children, maybe? Was she dying? What would happen to her?
Would I ruin her life if I told her what the future holds? Would she believe me? Would she discipline me? Would she think I’m crazy?
She never told Ms. Lily about her vision, never looking into her eyes again after that day. Ten years later, Miss Lily died of ovarian cancer.
Karma sometimes stayed up at night, thinking and overthinking. Why was she different? Why did touch trigger her visions? Why did it happen with some people but not with others?
When she grew tired of tossing and turning, she would go to her parents’ bedroom. Her mom would let her sleep beside her as her dad would sleep soundly, snoring at the far end of their spacious, wooden king-size bed, its frame adorned with irregular polygons that Karama liked to stare at to lull herself to sleep.
“Stop overthinking things, Karma,” her mom would say as she caressed her hair. “If you continue like this, you’ll age quickly. Wrinkles will appear overnight. Then you’ll never get married.”
Karma knew her mom was right. Her visions were venomous, slowly poisoning her body and soul. Even the happy ones were evil because she was not supposed to see the future; no one was supposed to see the future except for God or the devil. God had made her that way, part human, part devil, she would think as she recalled some of her most recent visions.
Every vision left a scar on her and changed her forever. She wished she was not the way she was. She would sigh and tried to go to sleep, but she couldn’t.
She wished her family would attend church, just like all other Christian families comprising 5% in the predominantly Muslim country of Bilaq. Her family was a minority. She was a minority, a pariah. A pariah within a pariah, within a pariah.
Maybe being in a church close to God would heal her and exorcise the devil out of her, but her mother was adamant about not going to church.
“The incense at the church gives me an allergy," she would say. "And the priests are always cranky, and I don't need more drama in my life."
Her dad never objected to his wife's aversion to the church and went along with whatever she wanted. Her dad, her baba, was always like this, a peacemaker, who wanted his girls to be happy.
If they ever got invited to weddings, funerals, or baptisms, her mother would stay outside the church by the front gate. She wanted to be seen, for her relatives to know that she had done her societal duty, but going inside gave her "heart palpitations," she claimed. "It's the incense. I can't stand it."
The incense. The hallmark of Greek Orthodox churches where most Arab Christians prayed.
Maybe I should go to church without my mother knowing; Karma would think late at night when she couldn't sleep. "Maybe God would accept me and cure me of this evil. Perhaps God is just testing me like he tested Jobe with the death of his children and leprosy and all of that.
Her mom would put her hand on her head. “Shhhh. Shut that mind of yours.”
P.S: If you enjoyed this chapter, I think you'll love my novel They Called Me Wyatt—a speculative murder mystery set in Jordan and the U.S. You can grab your copy here. Thank you so much for your support!