The Merchant of Chittagong
Folk stories from the Polong tradition — original tales, analysis, and storytelling history
The Merchant of Chittagong
There was a cloth merchant in Chittagong who had made his fortune trading between the Bengal coast and the ports of Malacca. His name was Rafiq, and he had lived in the Malay lands for seven years before returning home with silks, spices, and something else — a small glass bottle wrapped in black cloth, sealed with wax and bound with red thread.
Rafiq's neighbors knew him as a quiet man. Generous at festivals. Kind to children. He prayed five times a day and gave to the poor. But there was a room in his house that no one entered — not his wife, not his children, not the servants who cleaned every other corner. The door was always locked. Rafiq went in once a day, always at dawn, always alone. He came out with a fresh pinprick on his left index finger.
The first death happened six months after Rafiq returned. A rival merchant — a man named Ismail who had undercut Rafiq's prices and taken three of his best customers — fell ill one evening without warning. His nose bled. Then his mouth. Then his eyes wept red. He raved in a language no one recognized, clawing at his own chest as if trying to pull something out from inside his ribs. By morning, Ismail was dead. The doctors said it was a hemorrhage of unknown origin.
The second death came a year later. A moneylender who had refused Rafiq a loan and publicly humiliated him at the marketplace. Same symptoms. Sudden bleeding. Delirium. Words in a foreign tongue. Dead before dawn.
After the third death — a cousin who had challenged Rafiq's claim to a family property — people began to talk. Not openly. In whispers. In the market, women pulled their children away when Rafiq walked past. The imam visited Rafiq's house and left looking pale. He said nothing to anyone, but he never visited again.
It was Rafiq's wife, Fatima, who ended it. She had watched her husband weaken over the years — his hair thinning, his hands trembling, dark circles deepening under his eyes. She had heard the buzzing from behind the locked door. She had seen the pinprick on his finger every morning and the way he winced when he pressed it.
One night, while Rafiq slept, Fatima took the key from around his neck. She opened the door. The room was bare except for a small wooden shelf, and on it sat a glass bottle filled with something dark that moved on its own. It pressed against the glass when she approached. She could feel it looking at her, though it had no eyes.
Fatima was not a learned woman, but she had grown up in a village where the old women still remembered things. She knew what blood in a bottle meant. She carried the bottle to the river — the Karnaphuli, swollen with monsoon rain — and she threw it as far as her arms could manage. The glass shattered on a rock midstream. What came out was not liquid. It was a sound — a single, sustained shriek that echoed off the water and then stopped.
Rafiq woke screaming. He bled from his nose and mouth for three days. The thing he had fed for years had taken its final payment on the way out. He survived, but he was never the same. His fortune dwindled. His hands never stopped shaking. He died four years later, an old man at forty-two.
The people of Chittagong did not speak his name after that. But the old women remembered. They always remembered.
What Is Polong?
The Polong (पोलोंग) is a bottle-bound spirit created from the blood of a murder victim, used as an instrument of assassination in Southeast Asian-influenced Indian black magic. Unlike entities that arise from grief, injustice, or cosmic law, the Polong is deliberately manufactured — a weapon forged from violent death and kept in servitude through daily blood-feeding. It entered Indian tantric practice through centuries of maritime trade between the Malay Archipelago and the Indian subcontinent, merging with indigenous traditions of spirit-binding and blood magic.