The Trackside Sorrow

My name is Arjun Mehta, and I am twenty-two. I’ve always been drawn to the edges of things—the last house on a street, the final bench in a park, the quiet stretch of railway track that runs behind our small town of Kharagpur. There was a broken concrete slab near the crossing signal where my friends and I would gather, sharing cigarettes and stories under the vast, indifferent sky. It was our escape from the cramped rooms and endless exams, a place where time seemed to slow, and our voices faded into the clatter of wheels on distant rails.

On the night of April 1st, 2015, we met there as usual—my two friends, Ravi and Naveen, and I. The air was thick with the promise of summer, and the monsoon’s first storms were still weeks away. We sat on the cracked slab, the cool metal of the signal post at our backs, and lit a single cigarette, passing it between us. The moon was a sliver, and the stars were barely visible through the haze of pollution from the steel plant nearby. We talked about everything and nothing—movies, girls, the absurdity of our professors—until a comfortable silence fell over us, broken only by the occasional hum of a distant train.

Then, I heard it. A sound that cut through the night like a shard of glass—a girl crying, soft but unmistakable, drifting from the dark fields on the other side of the track. I froze, my heart hammering. ‘Did you hear that?’ I whispered to Ravi. He shook his head, frowning. ‘Hear what?’ Naveen, who had been quiet and edgy all evening, suddenly stood up, his face pale. ‘I want to go home. I’m not feeling well.’ I tried to ignore the unease twisting in my gut and turned to Ravi for reassurance, but he was staring at Naveen with a look of horror. And then I noticed Naveen’s hand, which was raised in a strange, beckoning motion, as if calling someone, and his lips were moving in a soundless whisper.

‘Ravi, what’s wrong with him?’ I asked, my voice trembling. Ravi didn’t answer. He was pointing at the railway tracks, his finger shaking. I followed his gaze and saw a shape—a woman in a white sari, standing absolutely still between the rails, her face obscured by the night. My blood turned to ice. She was looking at us, and even though I couldn’t see her eyes, I felt them boring into me. Then, Ravi let out a blood-curdling scream and ran, his feet stumbling over the uneven ground, leaving me alone with the woman and the suddenly manic Naveen, who had started to laugh—a high, cackling sound that didn’t sound like him at all.

I grabbed Naveen by the shoulders, trying to shake him out of it, but his laughter only grew louder. ‘Naveen! Snap out of it!’ I shouted. But when he finally stopped laughing, he looked at me with eyes that were not his own—dark, hollow, and filled with a sorrow so deep it seemed to seep into my bones. And then he began to cry, wailing like a lost child, his shoulders heaving. The woman on the tracks had vanished, but the sound of crying continued, closer now, almost at my ear. I spun around, but there was no one there. My friends had disappeared, leaving me alone in the dark.

I ran. I ran faster than I had ever run in my life, not looking back, the sound of that weeping following me all the way to the station master’s office. I burst through the door, gasping, and found the old station master, Mr. Chatterjee, sipping his tea. He looked up calmly, as if he had been expecting me. ‘Sit down, boy,’ he said, pushing a chair towards me. ‘You’ve met her, haven’t you? The girl on the tracks.’ I nodded, my mouth dry. He sighed and put down his tea. ‘Every year, on the first of April, she appears. She was a student, you know. Fell in front of the express train in ’07. Her name was Priya. They say she’s looking for someone to share her grief, to keep her company in the dark.’

I stayed at the station until dawn, listening to Mr. Chatterjee’s stories of Priya and the others who had seen her over the years. He said she never harmed anyone, just wanted someone to acknowledge her pain. But when I finally went back to my room, I couldn’t shake the image of Naveen’s face—the way his features had contorted, first with laughter, then with grief. Later that day, I found out that Naveen had been admitted to the hospital, suffering from a nervous breakdown. And Ravi, my other friend, had been found wandering near the track, muttering about a woman in white. Neither of them would speak of what happened that night.

I moved away from Kharagpur a few weeks later, unable to bear the sight of that railway line. But even now, in the safety of my new city, I sometimes hear it—that faint, sorrowful crying, carried on the wind, as if Priya is still searching, still waiting. And I wonder if, somehow, we left a part of ourselves on that track with her, forever entangled in the tragedy of that April night.