This rather strange incident was narrated by my eldest brother-in-law and it once again raises (and leaves unanswered) the eternal question do ghosts exist?
My brother-in-law was passionately fond of driving heavy vehicles and he secured employment as a driver of earthmovers in the famous engineering company— Larsen and Toubro (L&T).
It was the 1950s and India had just launched the first Five-Year Plan and there was frantic construction activity all round and heavy earthmoving equipment was being imported from the United States. They bore such famous names as ‘Caterpillar’ and ‘Euclid’.
They used to arrive at the Bombay port and then be driven to a re-fit facility in Pune, about 150 miles away, traversing the dangerous Bhor Ghat.
L&T drivers were a sturdy lot who loved driving the behemoths over the mountain road which had nearly a 100 vicious hair-pin bends. During their pit stops, they used to swap yarns and nearly most of them told the same story.
On many nights while driving, at the 69th hair-pin bend on the Bhor Ghat, a few of them had ‘seen’ a phantom figure in white beckoning them. A few of their colleagues had thought that the figure was real— possibly a hitch-hiker wanting to thumb a ride and had driven towards her only to fall straight down the precipitous gorge, never to come back alive. The drivers were all convinced that the figure was the ghost of a person who had committed suicide by jumping into the khad with some unexplained vengeance towards truck drivers.
Though my brother-in-law didn’t believe ghosts, he didn’t scoff at the story and indeed, he took it rather seriously.
Some time later, he was driving an Euclid bulldozer/ dumper truck from Bombay on the Bhor Ghat road and it was just past midnight. As he approached the (in)famous 69th hair-pin bend, he ‘saw’ the phantom figure beckoning to him. Using his presence of mind, he drove past the mystery figure and negotiating the deadly curve, safely reached Poona. Had he obeyed the phantom, he would have driven his vehicle straight down the 5,000-foot deep gorge and met with a gory death.
With the new super expressway linking Bombay and Poona, the old Bhor Ghat road now lies abandoned and perhaps the phantom figure, too has finished with no truck drivers around to be lured to their deaths!
(Original headline: Death beckons... )
