Malathi C B (1986)
We were newly married, and in those early years, our weekends often had an adventurous flavour. One of our favourite things to do was to ride from Mysore to Bangalore on our motorcycle. Almost every Saturday or Sunday, we would leave home at around 4.30 in the morning. There was something exhilarating about setting off while the rest of the city was still asleep—the cool morning air, the empty roads and the feeling that the whole day lay ahead of us.
Our routine was almost always the same. We would reach Bangalore by around 8.00 a.m., find somewhere to eat and fill our stomachs after the early-morning ride, and then spend the day going around the city. Sometimes we would wander about; sometimes we would jump into a movie. We would have an early dinner and then get back on the bike for the return journey to Mysore, reaching home by around 10.00 p.m.
Looking back, those rides were among the simple pleasures of our newly married life. We were young, adventurous and happy to turn an ordinary weekend into a little expedition.
But one particular morning changed forever the way I remember those rides.
It was sometime in the late 1980s. We had left Mysore at our usual time of about 4.30 a.m. After riding for roughly half an hour, we entered a stretch of the old Mysore–Bangalore road that I can still picture vividly. I cannot identify the exact spot today, but it was just outside Mysore, well before Srirangapatna, on the old road towards Bangalore. Everything is different now. I do not have a single photograph of this place or the rides.
The road was nothing like the broad highway we know today. It was a narrow, single-lane road running right through a wooded area. Trees and thick vegetation seemed to surround us on both sides. In my memory, many of the tall trees look like eucalyptus, although I cannot be certain of the species after all these years. What I remember very clearly is that this was not simply a road lined with scattered trees. It felt like the road was passing through a wooded patch.
There was hardly any traffic at that early hour.
Then we noticed something lying on the road ahead.
From a distance, it appeared to have a strange zig-zag shape. I could not make out what it was. It looked almost like the letter W, and initially I didn’t think much of it. We continued riding towards it.
As we came closer, however, we realised what we were looking at.
It was the body of a woman.
She appeared to have been half burnt. Her body was arched and blackened, with patches of orange and red visible here and there. Her arms seemed to have been pulled tightly towards her body, and her eyes appeared to be partly burnt. The body lay in that horrible W-shaped position on the road.
We stopped.
For a few minutes, we simply stood there, staring.
I cannot remember exactly how long we remained there. It could have been only a few minutes, but in my memory it stretches into something much longer—almost an eternity. We were completely horrified and did not know what to do.
One disturbing thought occurred to us: whoever had brought the body there might have left only moments before we arrived. Perhaps they had not expected anyone to come along so early. We even wondered, however unlikely it seemed, whether the body could somehow have fallen out of the boot of a car.
I remember looking around repeatedly.
Was someone watching us?
Was somebody hiding among the trees?
Had the person who left the body just disappeared down the road?
There was absolutely no one.
No vehicles. No pedestrians. No voices.
Nothing but the trees and the eerie pin-drop silence of that early morning.
Even now, I remember the feeling of standing there, completely flustered and unsure of what to do. We wondered whether we should go to the police and report what we had seen. But this was the late 1980s, precisely in the last few months of 1987. We were young, there were no mobile phones, and the world was very different from what it is today. We had no idea what consequences might follow from getting involved.
In the end, we did something that I still question.
We left.
To this day, I sometimes wonder whether that was the right thing to do. Should we have gone to the police? Should we have found a way to report what we had seen? Were we perhaps the first people to discover something that should have been investigated?
That thought has stayed with me.
And there is another aspect of that morning that has troubled me even more over the years. At some point later, I came across information about burns and came to understand that the presence of red or orange areas in severely burnt tissue can sometimes be associated with the circumstances and timing of the burning. I cannot say with certainty what those colours on that woman’s body meant. But the thought made the whole incident even more disturbing to me.
Whatever had happened there, it did not look like a natural death.
Someone had died on that lonely stretch of road, and her body had been left there. We happened to be among the first people to come across it that morning.
Eventually, we got back on our motorcycle and continued towards Bangalore. But the carefree excitement with which we had begun our journey had disappeared.
The city, the food, the movie and the rest of our usual weekend plans went ahead, but something had changed. The image of that body remained somewhere in the back of my mind.
Even after all these years, I can still picture that narrow road, the eucalyptus-like trees surrounding it, the strange W-shaped form lying across the road, and the complete absence of another human being.
It was a journey that began like every other weekend adventure.
But that morning left us with questions that have never gone away.
