THE CURSE OF THE TEMPLE: What Three Centuries Tried to Bury

About The Book

Some doors don't stay locked because of what's inside. They stay locked because of who's protecting it. At the Padmanabhaswamy Temple, one door has stayed sealed for three hundred years — and the story everyone tells about why is a lie.
Meera Kapoor doesn't believe in the curse. She believes in what her boss keeps saying — people don't guard legends. They guard secrets. So when the Astral Heritage Foundation sends her, her sister Aarti, and their two-person team to Kerala to find out what's really behind that door, she expects folklore. Instead, she gets a warning that stops mid-sentence, a message that only appears when held over fire, and a scholar who's been hiding in plain sight for eight years because he got too close to the truth once already.
The only way to reach what's actually sealed inside is through a royal palace that hasn't let an outsider near its private wing in generations — so four archaeologists become the region's most convincing wedding planners, orchestrating a princess's swayamvar from the inside while racing to find a passage no royal map admits exists. What waits behind Vault B isn't gold. It's proof — of exactly what a family has spent three centuries pretending never happened, and exactly how far one man, born into a debt six generations old, is willing to go to make them answer for it.
The Curse of the Temple isn't a treasure hunt. It's about the difference between a legend and a cover-up — and what it costs to be the one who finally tells them apart.

About The Author

Kimaya has been writing stories since she was six years old, filling a small diary with the kind of tales that never quite fit on the page — pirates, mysteries, worlds that existed only for as long as the pencil kept moving. That diary never really stopped. It just grew up, and so did she, until the six-year-old who dreamed of one day publishing a real book finally got her wish.
The idea for The Curse of the Temple took root the day Kimaya visited Padmanabhaswamy Temple in person — standing in front of a door that has stayed sealed for centuries does something to a writer's imagination, and she came home unable to stop thinking about what might actually be behind it.
Writing has always come easily to her in a way that surprised the people around her before it surprised herself. In school, she's known for turning in story-driven work that stands out from everyone else's — and once, asked to give a speech with only five minutes to prepare, she stood up and delivered it with a voice and rhythm so unexpectedly polished that her teacher openly admitted to being stunned. It's not the only time a room has gone quiet listening to her.
A lot of that comes from her mother, who spent years making sure Kimaya never had to look far for a stage — pushing her toward every opportunity to write and speak in public, building, without either of them fully realizing it at the time, the writer who would eventually sit down and finish an entire novel.
These days, most of that writing happens in stolen pockets of time inside a boarding school routine that leaves little room for anything extra — which, if you ask Kimaya, only makes finishing this book feel more like something worth being proud of.