Kashmir

Ramkhelawan Dubey, a forty-three-year-old ferry operator who worked the Naini crossing, reported that the figure standing on the road at midnight spoke the name of his recently deceased brother — a name Dubey had told no living person since the funeral rites — before Dubey had said a single word. The figure's feet, he noted with the precision of a man accustomed to reading water and weather, were turned heel-forward, toes pointing back toward the tree line. Dubey did not flee; he sat down in the road and recited the Hanuman Chalisa until the figure dissolved into the mist off the river.