The Truck Driver of Satara

Story 2

The Midwife of Mandla

Savitri Bai was the only midwife in a cluster of five villages in the Mandla district of Madhya Pradesh. She had delivered over three hundred babies in her career, walking between villages on footpaths that cut through dense sal forest, carrying her cloth bag of supplies. She walked at all hours because babies do not schedule their arrivals. She walked alone because no one else knew the paths the way she did.

Between Khajri and Pipariya villages, the path crossed under a massive tamarind tree — a tree so old that the villagers said it had been there before the British, before the Marathas, before anyone could remember. The tree stood at the point where the path dipped into a shallow ravine, and anyone walking had to pass directly under its lowest branches. During the day, the tree was unremarkable. Children climbed it. Goats rested under it. But after dark, no villager from any of the five settlements would walk within fifty meters of it.

Savitri Bai walked under it regularly. She had to — the alternative route added three kilometers, and when a woman was in labor, three kilometers could mean a dead baby. She walked under the tamarind at one in the morning, at three in the morning, in monsoon darkness so complete she navigated by memory and the feel of mud types under her feet.

For twenty-two years, nothing happened. Then, on an August night during the heaviest rains in a decade, something happened.

She was returning from a delivery in Pipariya — a healthy boy, the mother fine, the father crying with relief. The rain had eased to a steady drizzle. The path was mud. She reached the tamarind tree and felt, as she always did, the moment when the canopy blocked even the rain — a sudden dryness, a pocket of still air under the massive branches.

Then something breathed on the back of her neck.

Not wind — breath. Warm, slow, deliberate breath, as if someone were standing directly behind her, leaning close, exhaling onto her skin. She stopped walking. The breathing did not stop. She could feel it — rhythmic, patient, impossibly close.

Savitri Bai did not run. She did not scream. She reached into her cloth bag and pulled out the iron scissors she used to cut umbilical cords. She held them up, open, like a cross. And she said — not to the darkness, not to the tree, but to the breath on her neck — 'I am the midwife. I bring life into this world. You will not touch me.'

The breathing stopped. The air around her warmed, then cooled to normal temperature. She walked the rest of the way home without incident.

She continued to walk under the tamarind for another eleven years until she retired. She always carried the iron scissors in her hand, not in the bag, when passing under the tree. She always spoke the same sentence. She told her successor — a younger woman from Khajri — exactly what to say and exactly where to hold the scissors. The younger woman follows the instruction. The tamarind tree still stands. The midwife still walks under it. And whatever breathes in that tree has learned, perhaps, that some people walk under the wrong tree for the right reason.

Story 3

The Schoolteacher's Transfer

Arvind Tiwari was a government schoolteacher posted to a village in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh in 1998. He was from Lucknow — a city man, educated, skeptical, fond of saying that superstition was the enemy of development. The village had no electricity, no paved road, and one hundred and twelve students who attended school when they were not needed in the fields.

The school building was at the edge of the village, near a grove of peepal trees. The oldest and largest peepal stood directly beside the school's single classroom, its branches extending over the tin roof, its roots pushing up through the concrete floor in places. The children would not stay after four in the afternoon. When Arvind suggested evening study sessions for the older students, the response was unanimous and unambiguous: no one would be near that tree after dark.

Arvind dismissed this as precisely the kind of backward thinking he had been posted to correct. He announced he would hold evening sessions himself, sitting under the peepal tree with a kerosene lantern, preparing lessons. He did this for three weeks. The villagers watched from their houses with the particular expression reserved for watching someone do something impressively stupid.

On the twenty-second evening, the kerosene lantern went out. Not flickered — went out, as if someone had placed a hand over the flame. Arvind relit it. It went out again. He relit it a second time. The flame burned steadily for approximately ten seconds, then bent sideways — not as if blown by wind, but as if being pulled toward the tree trunk — and extinguished.

Arvind sat in the dark for a moment, annoyed. Then he heard the sound. A slow, heavy creaking from above, like a thick branch being bent. But there was no wind. The night was still. The creaking continued — rhythmic, deliberate, as if something heavy were shifting its weight in the branches directly overhead.

He stood up. He looked up — and even as he did, he remembered every warning he had been given about looking up into a peepal tree at night. He saw nothing. The darkness between the leaves was absolute. But the creaking stopped the moment he looked, as if whatever was above had noticed him noticing.

Arvind Tiwari walked back to his quarters. He did not run. He did not mention the incident to anyone. He quietly discontinued the evening study sessions. Three months later, he applied for a transfer, citing personal reasons. He was posted to a town with electricity and no trees near the school.

When asked about it years later — he was the headmaster of a school in Jhansi by then — he would say only: 'I do not believe in ghosts. But I believe in the sound that branch made. And I believe that some trees should not be sat under after dark, for reasons I am not qualified to explain.'

Story 4

The Bus Conductor of the Kolhapur Night Route

Maruti Jadhav was a bus conductor on the Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation's night service from Kolhapur to Sangli. The route ran through the Western Ghats foothills, passing through small towns and stretches of road lined with old-growth trees — banyan, peepal, and mango, planted along the roadsides during the colonial period and now enormous, their canopies forming tunnels over the narrow highway.

Maruti had worked the night route for seven years. He knew every stop, every regular passenger, every dhabha that stayed open past midnight. He also knew the stretches where the driver accelerated without being asked, where the passengers went quiet, where the interior light of the bus seemed dimmer even though the bulbs were the same. There were three such stretches on the Kolhapur-Sangli route, and all three were lined with old peepal trees.

The incident that ended his career on the night route happened in October 2014, during the week after Dussehra. The bus was half-empty — sixteen passengers, mostly workers returning from the festival to their jobs. The route was running on time. At approximately 12:40 AM, the bus was passing through a peepal-lined stretch between Hatkangale and Shirol.

Maruti was standing near the front, counting the day's collection. A woman boarded at a stop that was not a designated stop — she waved from the roadside, the driver stopped out of rural courtesy, and she climbed aboard. She was wearing a white sari, which was not unusual. She was barefoot, which was slightly unusual but not remarkable in rural Maharashtra. She sat in the last row.

Maruti walked back to collect her fare. When he reached the last row, the seat was empty. The woman was not there. He checked the rows ahead — sixteen passengers, all the same ones who had been there before. No seventeenth person. He walked back to the last row. The seat was empty, but it was cold. Not cool from the night air — cold in the way that meat is cold, a deep, residual chill that should not have been possible on a bus with windows closed.

Maruti returned to the front. The driver — a man named Popat, twenty years on the route — looked at him and said, without being told: 'The peepal stretch?' Maruti nodded. 'She boards every October,' Popat said. 'After Dussehra. Always the last row. Never there when you go to collect.' He said this the way someone says the bus schedule has changed — factually, without drama, as a condition of the route.

Maruti completed his shift. He requested a transfer to the day route the following week. He drives the Kolhapur-Pune morning service now. The night route still runs. The peepal stretch is still there. And the driver who replaced Popat after his retirement reports, with the same flat factuality, that a woman in a white sari still boards in October, sits in the last row, and is never there when you go to collect.