The Bell That Counts

The train from Siliguri had been delayed, so I didn’t reach the junction town of Ghoraghat until half past four. The sky was already the color of bruised plums, and the air smelled of dust and diesel. I shared a rickety jeep with a woman who said she was going to the village of Harinmara, off the main road. We chatted about the paddy fields and the recent rains. When we reached Harinmara’s dirt track, she hesitated, then admitted her destination was actually a smaller hamlet, Gopalpur, another ten kilometers down a lonely lane flanked by sal trees. The driver grumbled, but for an extra hundred rupees, he agreed. We dropped her at a mud house with a tin roof, and the jeep reversed onto the main road. Darkness was falling fast, swallowing the forest edges. I was alone now, the driver silent, the engine humming. I leaned back, listening to the creak of the jeep, and let sleep pull me under.

I woke to the squeal of brakes. The jeep had stopped so abruptly that I was thrown forward. The driver was pale, gripping the wheel, staring at something on the road ahead. I asked what was wrong, but he just pointed. In the headlights’ beam, a figure stood—a woman in a white sari, her back to us, perfectly still. She was at the edge of the road, facing a large banyan tree. The driver whispered, ‘She shouldn’t be here.’ He said they’d climbed a steep incline just now, a place called Jhora Ghat, where the road curved and the jungle pressed in. No one lived within miles. I thought it was a traveler, maybe lost. I told the driver to honk, but he refused. So I rolled down the window and called out. The woman didn’t move. My voice felt swallowed by the dark. After a long minute, she turned her head, just slightly, and I saw her face was white, smooth, with no features at all—no eyes, no nose, no mouth. The driver slammed the accelerator, and the jeep lurched forward. I looked back, but the space was empty.

The driver’s hands trembled. He kept muttering about the ‘Chhaya’—a shadow that appears to those who are about to die. I didn’t believe it, but my skin crawled. We sped toward town, the road bumpy and dark. After a few miles, the driver slowed, checking his watch. He said something about a bell. There was an old railway crossing ahead, a private crossing for a tea estate, and the watchman used to ring a brass bell to warn of trains. The tracks were abandoned now, but the bell was still there, rusty and hanging from a post. As we approached, the headlights illuminated a shape sitting on the tracks—a small figure, like a child, hunched over. The driver gasped and braked again. The figure lifted its head, and I saw it had no face, just a smooth oval. It raised a hand and waved, slowly, as if greeting us. Then it vanished. The driver was sobbing now, saying we had to go back, that the bell was ringing, and if we crossed without hearing it, something bad would happen. I heard nothing. But he insisted we wait. We sat there in the dark, engine idling, the only sound the wind in the trees. Then, after five minutes, he said, ‘Now it rang. We can go.’ He drove on, his face drained.

When we reached Ghoraghat, the driver wouldn’t take my fare. He just said, ‘You don’t deserve this,’ and drove away. I never saw him again. I later learned that this stretch of road was notorious—a place where a woman and a child had died years ago, killed by a train, their bodies never recovered. The locals would tell you that the bell rings not for trains, but for the dead, and that if you see the faceless ones, you have been marked. I told myself it was just exhaustion, some trick of the light. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had witnessed something beyond my understanding, and that the driver’s fear was more real than my own calm. I returned home, but I never again took that road at night, and every time I hear a bell, I wait for a count.