The Last Fare on Khandala Ghat

My father managed a fleet of night buses for a private carrier in Pune, his office a humming warren of screens and phones. When a drunk driver plowed into their car on the newly widened Khandala Ghat, my world split into two: the sterile ICU where my mother lay in a coma and my father’s legs were pinned in traction, and the dirty, oil-stained garage where our old Maruti waited. The doctors said he’d be bedridden for months. At sixteen, with a learner’s permit (the only one I’d managed to forge), I became the family’s sole breadwinner, ferrying passengers along the dangerous mountain routes that snaked through the Western Ghats.

One Thursday, a booking came through for a family of four to drop at a village near the foot of the ghat. The pay was generous—enough to cover my mother’s next round of blood tests. The family, sun-darkened with weathered faces, climbed into my car at dusk. They spoke in a dialect I barely understood, the women wrapped in faded sarees, the men clutching bundles of firewood. They asked me to stop at a small shrine before the climb, and I waited as they placed a coconut and a few marigolds on the wet stone. ‘For the mountain,’ the eldest said, his eyes old and knowing. ‘It does not like to be rushed.’

I drove carefully, the headlights carving a pale tunnel through the fog that swallowed the switchbacks. The family fell silent, watching the trees close in. At the summit, a sudden bang—a flat tire. I pulled over on a narrow ledge, the valley a black void below. The men got out to help, their hands deft, but they kept glancing at the forest. As they worked, I saw a figure standing at the edge of the light, half hidden by a wet branch. It was a woman in a white saree, her face blurred like a smeared photograph. She raised her hand and pointed down the slope, where I knew there was no road.

‘Don’t look,’ the eldest muttered, tugging my sleeve. ‘She’s been waiting for a ride since last year’s landslide.’ My blood turned cold. I remembered then: a bus had plunged into that ravine, killing everyone aboard. The tire was fixed, but my hands shook on the wheel. I wanted to speed, but the fog now clung to the windshield like a fist, and the road seemed longer, the curves sharper. The family began to murmur, praying in hushed tones. The woman’s face filled my rearview mirror, her mouth open in a silent scream, her fingers leaving frost on the glass.

I didn’t stop again. I drove through the dawn, the ghat finally spitting me out onto the flat coastal road. The family got out at their village, not thanking me, just nodding as if I’d passed some test. I drove the empty road back, my eyes burning with exhaustion. When I reached the garage, I checked the back seat—there was a wet patch on the seatbelt, shaped like a hand. I tried to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes, I saw that woman pointing down, and I knew I’d be seeing her again, maybe in my next fare, maybe in my last.

Months later, my father regained enough strength to sit up. My mother woke, frail but alive. I told them the story, expecting disbelief. But my father, for the first time, looked at me with a strange fear. He reached under his bed and pulled out a yellowed map of the ghat. ‘That spot where you say the woman stood,’ he said, tracing a line. ‘That’s where the old bus stop was. Before the landslide. A young bride was swept away, her family buried. They never found her body.’ He paused. ‘You’re the third driver who’s seen her and made it back alive. The others… they never made it out of that curve.’ I stared at the map, and I knew then that the woman had not been warning me away. She had been guiding me, testing me, and now that I’d seen her, she would always be in the passenger seat, waiting for me to take her where she couldn’t go alone.