The great Raja Vikramaditya is assigned a task by the tantric yogi Kshantisheela. He is told by the holy man to bring him a corpse that is hanging on a shisham tree. This leads to a battle of wills between the raja and the vetala that has possessed the corpse. Every time the raja tries to haul the corpse to the tantric, the ghostly trickster begins to narrate a tale that he says will end with a riddle that the raja must solve: all that the vetala tells the raja is that if he knows the answer and doesn’t give it, his head will shatter into a thousand pieces.