The Pale Road

Twelve years have passed since that muggy August night, yet I still wake in a cold sweat whenever a phone rings in the dark. I am Sarvesh, and this happened in the scrublands of Karnataka, near a dried-up reservoir called Chitravati Kere. I had just turned twenty-two, and my best friend Arjun, a wiry fellow with a nervous laugh, had come to my place after a stifling day of lectures. We decided to take my REACH 350, a battered Enfield, to the reservoir’s edge, hoping for a breeze off the water.

We left at 7:48, the bike rumbling under us. The sky was a bruised purple, and the air smelled of jasmine and diesel. I was watching the fuel gauge hover at reserved, the needle trembling on the red line. We took the dusty turn off the highway, and the road narrowed into a cracked asphalt ribbon flanked by thorny acacia and boulders. The usual throng of evening walkers, the occasional bullock cart, the chattering school children – they were all absent. It was unnaturally still, as if the world had been muted.

Half a kilometer in, we passed an old man on a bicycle. He wore a starched white turban, a white kurta, and white dhoti, all glowing faintly in the twilight. His face was obscured by the shadow of the turban, but I felt his gaze. In a moment of foolish bravado, I elbowed Arjun and said, ‘Look at that ghastly old crow.’ Arjun laughed nervously, but the man’s head turned slowly, following us, and I swear I saw him smile – a black gap in his white beard. We sped up.

The road curved, and the reservoir’s dark water appeared ahead, a sheet of black glass under the rising moon. My eyes flicked to the odometer: it was stuck at 40, as if glued. I tapped it, but the needle refused to move. I had a sinking feeling, but I pressed on, wanting to get to the water and back before the petrol ran out. Then I noticed something odd: the usual landmarks – a dead neem tree, a painted shrine, a broken culvert – they were all there, but seemed reversed, as if I was seeing them in a mirror. I shook it off.

We reached a small clearing where the dam’s overflow used to cascade. It was bone dry, and a dry wind moaned through the rocks. As we stopped, Arjun tapped my shoulder, his voice tight, ‘Did you see that? A light.’ I turned off the engine, and we listened. A faint hum, like a distant tractor, but coming from all around. Then, in the corner of my eye, I saw a figure at the edge of the reservoir – the same man, still on his bicycle, but now he was not moving, just standing there, a black silhouette against the moonlit water.

I felt a chill. ‘Let’s go,’ I said, but when I turned the key, the starter motor gave a wheeze and died. The battery was fine – we had just replaced it – but the engine refused to turn over. I tried again, and again. Nothing. Panic rising, I kicked the starter, but the bike just shuddered. Arjun was looking around wildly, ‘Sarvesh, I don’t like this. That man.’ I looked back, and he was closer now, maybe fifty meters, and I could see his face clearly – pale, like bleached bone, with eyes that were pure white, no iris, no pupil.

I shouted, ‘Hey, who are you?’ My voice echoed strangely, as if the landscape was too big for sound. He did not answer, but I heard his bicycle chain clanking, and then the metal wheels scraping against the asphalt, though he was not moving. My hands shaking, I tried the electric start one more time, and the engine fired with a roar. I revved it, turned the bike around, and we raced back the way we came.

But the road was not the same. The curves were sharper, the trees closer, and instead of the familiar dusty track, we found ourselves on a narrow path of white stones that glowed under the moon. The humming grew louder, and I realized it was coming from the bike’s frame, a low vibration like a swarm of bees. The fuel gauge was now on empty, but the engine sputtered on, as if running on something else.

We passed the dead neem tree again, but now it was alive, its leaves rustling though there was no wind. The shrine was gone, replaced by a pile of blackened bricks. And the culvert – it was a concrete pipe, but I could see a white shape inside, waving a hand. I screamed, ‘Don’t look!’ but Arjun had already turned, and he went rigid, his eyes wide, his mouth open but no sound coming out.

I floored the throttle, and the bike shot forward, but the road began to dissolve into mud, then sand, then nothing. We were in a vast empty plain, with the moon directly overhead, and the man on the bicycle was now beside us, pedaling lazily, keeping pace. He turned to me, and his lips moved, but the voice came from inside my skull: ‘You should not have laughed.’

That was the last thing I remember. I woke up in my own bed at dawn, with a splitting headache. Arjun was in the hospital, having been found unconscious on the highway. He never spoke again, and to this day, he stares blankly at a wall, sometimes smiling. The bike was found near the reservoir, its tank empty, the odometer still stuck at 40. There were no other marks, no footprints, nothing.

I have never explained it. We drove for nearly an hour, but the map shows the road is only three kilometers long. The man on the bicycle – I have seen him twice since, in my rearview mirror, always at dusk, always smiling. The police closed the case as ‘unknown mental distress,’ but I know better. Some roads are not meant to be traveled when the moon is full, and some laughter is not meant to be shared.

Now, whenever I hear a bicycle bell, I freeze. And I never, ever, take a road that cuts off the highway after sunset. Because out there, in the dry heart of the land, there is a man in white who collects laughter, and he is still waiting for me to come back.