नगाँव सड़क पर अजनबी

कथा 2

The Tea Garden Path at Dibrugarh

Moni Bora was nineteen years old and worked as a line supervisor at a tea estate fifteen kilometers outside Dibrugarh. Her shift ended at six in the evening, and the walk home to her village took forty-five minutes along a path that cut between two sections of the tea garden — a corridor of waist-high bushes on either side, overhead shade trees blocking whatever moonlight might have offered comfort. During harvest season, when the days were short and the work ran late, she often walked this path in complete darkness.

For three years she had made this walk without incident. The other women on her line walked in groups, but Moni lived in the opposite direction from most of them, and the single companion who shared her route — an older woman named Padumi — had retired the previous month. Moni was not afraid. She knew the path by feel. She counted her steps. Seven hundred and twelve steps from the estate gate to her village boundary. She had counted them enough times that her feet knew the way without her eyes.

On a November evening in 2009 — a Thursday, she remembered, because Thursday was the day they weighed the leaf and the work always ran late — Moni left the estate at half past six. Full dark. No moon. The air smelled of fermenting tea and wet earth. She began her count. One, two, three. The path was soft from afternoon rain.

At step two hundred and eight, she heard someone behind her. Not unusual — other workers sometimes left late. But the footsteps were wrong. They were too crisp, too sharp for the soft mud path. They sounded like someone walking on stone, not earth. Click. Click. Click. A hard, metallic rhythm.

Moni slowed. The footsteps slowed. She stopped. They stopped — but not immediately. There was a half-second delay, as if whatever was behind her needed a moment to register that she had paused. Then silence.

She turned. In the darkness, she could see nothing — the tea bushes absorbed all ambient light, creating a tunnel of absolute black. But she could smell something. Not tea. Not earth. Something warm and animal, like the smell of the estate's mule stable after the mules had been working. Hay and sweat and something iron-like underneath.

A voice came from the darkness. Male, pleasant, speaking Assamese with the particular Dibrugarh inflection she heard every day. 'Baideu, are you also going toward Lahowal? I am going the same way. Shall we walk together?'

The voice was reasonable. The offer was normal. But Moni's grandmother had told her one thing about the Ghoda Paak that she had never forgotten: it always offers company. It never forces. It asks, politely, as a fellow traveler would. And if you accept, you walk together into a darkness from which you do not return the same person.

Moni did not respond. She did not look down — there was nothing to see in this darkness anyway. She simply turned and ran. Not toward home. Toward the estate. Back the way she had come. She ran two hundred and eight steps in the dark, tripping twice, catching herself on tea bushes, arriving at the estate gate breathless and shaking.

The night watchman, an old man named Bhupen, took one look at her face and did not ask what had happened. He said: 'Ghoda Paak?' She nodded. He gave her tea, let her sit in his guard hut until dawn, and in the morning walked her home himself. He said he had heard the hoofbeats on the path before — many times, over many years. He said the entity favored that particular stretch because the shade trees made it darker than anywhere else on the estate. He said three workers over the years had accepted its offer of company. All three had been found the next morning, disoriented, unable to explain where the night had gone, one of them unable to speak for a week.

Moni never walked that path alone again. She arranged to stay at a colleague's house on late-shift nights and walk home in daylight. The estate management, when told about the recurring reports, installed solar lights along the path in 2012. The hoofbeats have not been reported since the lights went up. But the lights go out during monsoon power fluctuations. And on those nights, the night watchman says, you can still hear it — click, click, click — walking the path alone, looking for company.

कथा 3

The Ferryman at Majuli

Majuli is the largest river island in the world — a shifting landmass in the Brahmaputra that is simultaneously one of Assam's most culturally significant places and one of its most geographically vulnerable. The island has no bridges. Everything and everyone arrives by ferry. And the last ferry from the mainland town of Nimati Ghat to Majuli runs at five in the afternoon. After that, the island is cut off until dawn.

Jiten Doley was a ferryman who ran an unofficial nighttime service for emergencies — a single country boat that could carry four passengers across the channel after the government ferry had stopped. He charged more than the official fare, but people paid because sometimes the need to cross was urgent: a sick relative, a funeral that could not wait, a birth that demanded presence. Jiten had been making these crossings for twenty years, navigating the Brahmaputra in darkness by knowledge of current and star position.

In the monsoon of 2014, a man approached Jiten at the Nimati Ghat at approximately nine in the evening. The man was tall, well-dressed in a clean white shirt and dark lungi, and spoke politely. He said he needed to cross to Majuli — his mother was ill, he had missed the last ferry, he would pay double. Jiten agreed. Double fare was double fare.

The man boarded the boat and sat at the front. Jiten pushed off and began rowing. The Brahmaputra was high — monsoon level — and the current was strong. The crossing would take twenty minutes instead of the usual twelve. Jiten focused on the water, on the current, on keeping the boat's nose pointed at the right angle.

Halfway across, Jiten noticed something. The boat was sitting lower in the water than it should for two men. It felt heavier. As if the passenger weighed far more than he appeared to. The waterline was wrong — Jiten knew this boat's balance intimately, knew exactly how it sat with one passenger, two passengers, a full load of four. This felt like four. But there was only one man sitting at the front, silhouetted against the faint glow of Majuli's shore lights.

Then Jiten heard it. The sound of the man shifting position in the boat. Not the creak of wood under weight. A different sound. A hard, sharp tap — like iron striking the boat's bottom boards. Then another. Tap. Tap. As if the man's feet, settling into a more comfortable position, were not feet at all but something harder, heavier, made of different material.

Jiten's hands froze on the oars. He stared at the passenger's silhouette. The man had not turned around. He was facing forward, toward Majuli, perfectly still. The tapping had stopped. But Jiten's eyes, adjusted to the darkness after twenty years of night crossings, could now make out something at the base of the silhouette — below where the lungi ended. The shape was wrong. The legs were wrong. They were too thick below the knee, too angular at the joint, and they ended not in the flat spread of human feet on a boat floor but in two narrow points — hard, dark, curved points resting on the wood.

Jiten did not complete the crossing. He said nothing. He simply turned the boat — a maneuver that cost him precious energy against the current — and rowed back to Nimati Ghat. The passenger did not protest. Did not speak. Did not turn around. When the boat touched the ghat, Jiten scrambled out and pulled the boat onto the mud without looking back. When he finally turned, the boat was empty. No passenger. No hoofprints on the wet wood. Just a faint smell of horse sweat and river mud.

Jiten stopped running his night service after that crossing. He told other boatmen what had happened. None were surprised. The older ferrymen said the Ghoda Paak had been trying to cross to Majuli for years — appearing at the ghat after dark, polite, well-dressed, always with a reasonable excuse. None of them had ever completed the crossing with it. The universal rule among Nimati Ghat boatmen, unwritten but absolute, was: if the boat sits too heavy for one passenger, turn back. Do not arrive at the other shore with something that weighs more than a man.

कथा 4

The Night Bus to Tezpur

The Guwahati-Tezpur night bus leaves Paltan Bazaar at 10 PM and arrives at Tezpur at approximately 1:30 AM. The route follows NH-37 along the south bank of the Brahmaputra — a four-lane highway that narrows to two lanes beyond Jagiroad and passes through stretches of darkness between small towns where the only light comes from truck headlights and the occasional roadside dhaba still open for drivers.

Ranjit Kalita was a conductor on this route from 2006 to 2018. A steady, unexcitable man in his forties, he told this account in 2019 to a journalist researching Assamese folklore for a magazine feature. He told it matter-of-factly, the way someone describes a traffic accident or a flood — something that happened, not something that required belief.

In March 2011, the bus stopped at Nagaon — the scheduled midpoint stop where passengers could use the facilities and buy tea. It was approximately 11:45 PM. The bus was half-full, mostly returning workers and a few students. At Nagaon, three passengers boarded. Two were a married couple Ranjit recognized — regular travelers between Nagaon and Tezpur. The third was a man he had never seen.

The man was unremarkable in appearance. Middle-aged, wearing a jacket against the March night chill, carrying no luggage. He bought a ticket to Tezpur and took the last row seat — the bench seat at the very back of the bus, which passengers typically avoided because it bounced worst on bad roads. Ranjit gave him the ticket and thought nothing of it.

Between Nagaon and Tezpur, the road passes through a stretch near Jakhalabandha where the highway cuts through sal forest on both sides. At approximately 12:30 AM, as the bus entered this forested stretch, the driver — a man named Prabhat — signaled to Ranjit. Something was wrong. The bus felt heavy. Sluggish. The engine was working harder than it should for a half-empty bus on flat road. Prabhat said it felt like the bus was fully loaded — forty passengers, not sixteen.

Ranjit walked down the aisle counting heads. Sixteen passengers, as expected. Nothing wrong. But when he reached the back row, the man in the jacket was sitting differently. He had stretched his legs out into the aisle — the back row allowed this — and in the dim interior light, Ranjit could see his feet. Except they were not feet. Below the cuffs of his trousers, visible in the aisle light, were not shoes and not bare feet but dark, heavy, split shapes — hooves, unmistakably, resting on the bus floor with the casual ease of a man resting his feet after a long walk.

Ranjit stopped. He looked at the man's face. The man was awake, looking back at him, expression neutral. Not threatening. Not smiling. Just watching, the way a passenger watches a conductor who has paused inexplicably in the aisle.

Ranjit did not panic. Twelve years on night buses had taught him to manage situations calmly. He walked back to the front and told Prabhat to stop at the next lighted area — a petrol pump two kilometers ahead. When the bus stopped, Ranjit announced a five-minute break. Passengers stirred, a few got up to stretch. Ranjit stood at the door and watched.

Every passenger got off except the man in the back row. He remained seated, legs extended, watching the door. Ranjit waited. After five minutes, he announced that the bus was resuming. The remaining passengers boarded. The man did not move. Ranjit made a decision — he walked to the back and said, clearly and firmly: 'Dada, your stop has come. Please get down here.'

The man looked at Ranjit for a long moment. Then he stood — and as he stood, Ranjit heard it: the hard tap of hooves on the metal bus floor, a sound no shoe could make. The man walked down the aisle, past the other passengers who paid no attention, and stepped off the bus into the petrol pump's fluorescent light. Ranjit watched him walk away from the bus, across the forecourt, and into the darkness beyond the lights. The sound of his steps on the concrete was unmistakable: clip, clip, clip. Not feet. Never feet.

The bus felt lighter immediately. Prabhat said the engine responded normally again. They completed the journey to Tezpur without incident. Ranjit never saw the man again, but he said that on three or four occasions over the following years, the bus would suddenly feel heavy on that same stretch of forest road near Jakhalabandha — and every time, he would call an unscheduled stop at the next lighted area. Every time, the heaviness lifted. He never checked the back row again. He said he did not need to. He knew what was sitting there.