SSomeone must have pulled the train's emergency chain, I thought, as the train stopped so suddenly. The sudden cessation of movement caused us all to fall forward.
Shocked, we stood up and stuck our heads out of the windows of the stationary train. Most of the passengers were crowded outside.
It didn't take long for the police to arrive.
It looks like someone was crossing the line and was hit by a train. There was only one station to my intended destination: Baharamporu.
Someone noticed that the body was still there. I was about to look around when someone grabbed my hand tightly. It was none other than the fellow passenger I had been talking to throughout the four-hour journey from Kolkata.
“There is nothing to see in this dead body. There's just a lot of blood and some mutilated limbs,” he said. – That would make you very livid.
I carefully hid my curiosity.
It was half past four in the evening. My traveling companion told me that he was also going to Baharampore, so we hired a single-cycle van, which was the only mode of transport available locally.
We talked non-stop during the trip. Sometimes about politics, sometimes about the current education scenario, and sometimes about the high number of victims in the road system. However, I couldn't facilitate but think back to that concealed body. Who lost his precious life, I wondered. I was twenty-six years vintage. There are so many things to see in life. Death was something I just didn't want to think about.
This was my first trip to Baharampor. A friend invited me to his house for the weekend. I thought it would be a good escape from the hustle and bustle of Kolkata. It would be a break for me from the monotonous weekly bustle of my everyday life.
When I finally got to my friend's house, I decided not to say anything about the accident or my ten-minute minivan ride. I actually enjoyed this open taxi ride. Apart from this misfortune on the train, the whole trip was most pleasant. I didn't want to make my friend unhappy by discussing depressed things. Ankush, my long-time friend, was a good man and his mother was worried about the dish she was preparing for me. I didn't want to ruin anything this evening.
Since I lived in the city, they were worried that it would be hard for me to get used to their country house, which had no electricity, but I really enjoyed sitting on the roof of their house on that starry night, soaking up the atmosphere, drinking coconut milk, eating fresh vegetables and fruits. and listening to my friends whose native pronunciation of the same Bengali words I used was so different from mine.
They asked me endless questions. About my job, my family and me, which I was content to answer. I tried to answer as detailed as I could. They seemed pleased to hear that I was a writer. But soon I was saved by Ankush.
Then one of his friends mentioned an accident in which an eighteen-year-old girl had died that same afternoon.
Ankush said to me, “Hey, I think you must have been there. Haven't you seen anything?”
I told them everything I knew and explained the reason for my silence.
To my complete surprise, they laughed loudly as if this was a common occurrence.
Ankush said that it is indeed not uncommon there. They were used to accidents on the railway line.
I listened to what they were saying to each other, not taking part in any further conversation.
Ankush smiled at me and mockingly asked if I was scared.
Hearing this made me livid. I didn't see that they had any right to accuse me of it.
Bhuvan, one of the friends, told me, “Well, could you go to where it happened? Currently. Alone? If you can, we can assume you're not afraid.”
I agreed.
We therefore immediately went to the scene of the accident, but deliberately kept a sufficient distance from the exact location. They dared me to go straight to the place where the newborn girl was killed. It was barely apparent, illuminated only by starlight and the partially obscured moon. Only the signal glowed red.
Despite Ankush's protest, I moved forward. It was really challenging for someone like me to accept it as fun. Nevertheless, I wanted to show them that I was a truly brave man and that I could accept their stupid challenge.
Walking in the gloomy was hard because there were stones scattered everywhere. I noticed I was sweating as I walked. But it was a challenge I simply had to win.
Suddenly, in front of me, I saw a shadowy white object shaking exactly where I was heading. I stopped for a moment. This could be a hallucination, I thought. I started moving forward again. But now the apparition was quite apparent. It was a person dressed in white. And this spooky person was doing something. Who or what was that? Was it an illusion or…? The possibility that it was something paranormal sent shivers down my spine. I almost died of shock when someone put a hand on my shoulder. I just stopped breathing and closed my eyes.
In this gloomy featherlight, I discovered that I was being followed by none other than Ankush. He also saw what I saw.
We got closer and discovered that we saw an elderly person wiping the area with water. There was no body, nothing left of the dead girl.
“Eto rakto! – So much blood!” he repeated quietly to himself over and over again.
It turned out that he was a station master whose son had died in a similar way in a railway accident twenty-five years earlier. One chilly night like this, police officers were chasing him and without warning a train came and hit him. After this depressed incident, the station master fell into mental disorders and always took it upon himself to cover up all traces of such accidents.
