The night I first saw her, Karachi had folded in on itself. The city—usually a sprawling, restless mass of neon, horns, and heat—felt strangely hollow, as if someone had cupped it in both hands and gently dimmed the edges. I had been driving for Uber for six months then, long enough to learn that Karachi after midnight is a different creature: quieter, darker, more honest. The night shifts paid better, but they demanded a strange kind of companionship with the unseen.
It was October, the start of the wedding season, a time when the roads near Karsaz shimmer with fairy lights and muffled dhol rhythms drifting from banquet halls. The air smelled of marigolds, fog, and something metallic. I had turned off my radio to let the night settle around me. That was when the request appeared on my screen—location: Karsaz Road, no pin-drop, just the long, dim stretch near the old graveyard and the line of eucalyptus trees.
A weird place to request a ride at 1:47 a.m., but I accepted. Karachi teaches you early not to ask questions that might cost you money.
As I approached the pickup point, I noticed a slender figure standing alone by the road’s shoulder. A woman. Dressed in a flowing white bridal gown that glowed under the yellow streetlights. Her veil covered her face completely, but the fabric shimmered like a restless tide.
The moment I saw her, my chest tightened. Every Karachiite had heard that story.
But legends belong to distance.
It’s only when they turn into passengers that they become dangerous.
I slowed the car, my fingers trembling on the steering wheel. She raised her hand—not waving, not signalling—just lifting it gently, with the heavy grace of someone underwater.
Against every instinct screaming at me, I unlocked the back door.
She entered silently. No rustle, no footsteps. Just the faintest scent of attar—old, sweet, fading. The smell of something that had been sealed inside a trunk for decades before being opened again.
I glanced into the rearview mirror. She sat perfectly still, her hands folded on her lap, gloved in white, as delicate as bone.
“Where… would you like to go?” I asked.
Her voice came soft, almost airy.
“Drive straight.”
Straight meant deeper into Karsaz, toward the darker, emptier stretch.
As the car moved, the silence thickened, pressing against my ears. The eucalyptus trees lining the road shivered in the wind, casting long, broken shadows.
I kept glancing at the mirror. Her white veil was unmoving, almost sculpted. I could not see her face.
“What brings you out this late?” I tried again.
“Waiting,” she whispered. “I have been waiting a long time.”
Her voice had a strange timbre—young, fragile, but layered with an echo that didn’t belong there.
“For what?”
“For him.”
The answer lodged in my throat like a stone. Because the legend said she had died with her husband on their wedding night. Their car had overturned near Karsaz after a celebration. Some said the groom died instantly. Others said he abandoned her as she lay bleeding. Most versions blurred, blending fact and fear until only the ghost remained.
I drove slowly, the meter ticking, though the money felt irrelevant now.
After a few minutes, she spoke again.
“Do you believe in promises?”
I swallowed. “I suppose so.”
“Then you are fortunate.”
A faint vibration ran through the car, as if the temperature had dropped suddenly. My breath clouded slightly. Karachi nights don’t get cold in October.
“Is your husband coming to meet you?” I whispered.
She tilted her head.
“He never arrived. But he promised.”
I gripped the steering wheel. “I’m… I’m sure he had a reason.”
“He did.” Her voice sharpened slightly. “He had many reasons. None were love.”
My heart hammered.
This was no grief.
This was memory fermenting into bitterness.
“Karsaz is where he left me,” she continued. “I walked the road looking for him. My feet were bleeding. My veil was torn. But people only saw the dress, not the woman.”
Her hands tightened slightly, the gloves creaking.
“That night, the city tore pieces of me to keep for itself.”
I didn’t understand. Not yet.
The road stretched empty ahead, the darkness forming a corridor of silence. I noticed something strange on my dashboard lights—my fuel indicator flickered between full and empty. The kilometers counter reset itself to zero.
Karachi is many things, but never supernatural—not until it is.
I cleared my throat. “Do you want me to take you somewhere specific?”
She leaned forward slightly, her veil still concealing everything.
“Take me to where the music stops.”
“The banquet hall?”
“No,” she said. “The place where it stopped for me.”
Her gloved fingers lifted and she pointed ahead—toward the exact curve where, according to the stories, her car had crashed.
A hollow dread crawled up my spine.
Something told me if I drove there, the road would not let me leave.
“I… can drop you near the market instead,” I said, voice shaking. “It’s safer. More people.”
She leaned back.
“It is the living who fear the deserted places. The dead fear crowds.”
I froze.
Her tone was not threatening—just matter-of-fact, like she was describing weather patterns or bus routes.
“I don’t want any trouble,” I whispered.
“Neither do I.”
Her veil fluttered slightly even though the windows were closed.
“I only want to remember.”
When we reached the bend in the road where the eucalyptus trees parted, she spoke again.
“Stop.”
My foot hovered above the brake as if resisting automatically.
But the car halted on its own.
The headlights illuminated a cracked section of the curb. Something metallic glinted faintly. I put the car in park.
“Look,” she whispered.
Against my better judgment, I stepped out. The air hit me like a wall—dense, cold, unnatural.
I approached the shimmer.
It was a rusted fragment of a car bumper.
Very old.
Very out of place.
As I reached for it, I sensed movement behind me. Not footsteps—just a shift in the atmosphere.
When I turned, she was standing outside the car though I had not heard the door open. Her veil draped softly down to her waist.
She stood precisely where the metal fragment lay, as if rooted to it.
“When the car overturned,” she said, “I woke up to silence. The kind of silence that feels like being buried alive.”
I said nothing.
“He crawled out of the window.” Her voice grew thin. “But he did not look for me. He ran.”
“Are… are you sure?”
Her head turned toward me slowly.
“I am sure. I saw him run.”
The wind whipped through the trees, making them groan.
“People say ghosts haunt places,” she continued. “But it is the places that haunt us. This road remembers more than the living do.”
She lifted her veil.
Just slightly.
Enough for me to glimpse the lower half of her face—pale, cracked, like porcelain fractured under heat. Her lips were colorless, but shaped in a sad, almost childlike curve.
I stumbled backward.
She let the veil drop again.
“Don’t be afraid,” she murmured. “You drive this road every night. You already know its dead better than its living.”
Suddenly the city’s distant sounds faded—the horns, the laughter from banquet halls, the call of late-night tea vendors.
It felt as if the road had shifted dimensions, slipping into an old memory.
A faint tremor passed under my feet.
Not an earthquake—Karachi knows those too well.
This was like a heartbeat beneath asphalt.
Her hands rose slightly. “Do you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“The city is grieving.”
Her voice thinned into something brittle.
“I am not the only one that failed.”
The wind intensified, and with it came faint, overlapping whispers—men, women, children, their voices rippling like radio static.
The road began to shimmer at the edges, as though submerged under water.
“I belong to all of them,” she said. “And they belong to me.”
My chest tightened painfully. “What do you want from me?”
“Recognition,” she said simply. “To be seen not as a story told to frighten children, but as a woman who lived, who loved, who died.”
I swallowed. “I see you.”
She tilted her head, almost tenderly.
“That is a beginning.”
A sharp, distant honk broke the trance. Suddenly the lights of a car appeared behind mine, approaching fast. A wedding caravan—dozens of vehicles, music blaring, headlights dancing.
For the first time, she trembled.
Not with fear—
with rage.
“They forget,” she whispered. “Everyone forgets.”
The wedding cars grew closer, their music swelling.
Her hands clenched.
“Tonight is their joy.”
She looked toward the road.
“But tonight is my night.”
A chill sliced down my spine.
“You can’t harm them,” I said. “They didn’t do anything to you.”
“Neither did I,” she replied.
The first car in the caravan slowed slightly upon seeing my stopped vehicle. The passengers leaned out, curious.
Her veil fluttered violently.
“They laugh,” she whispered, voice cracking. “They celebrate. They drive where I bled.”
A dangerous shimmer gathered around her form. The air thickened.
I stepped in front of her instinctively.
“You don’t have to repeat the past.”
She paused.
For the first time, uncertainty crossed her posture.
“I don’t know how to leave,” she murmured.
“I have been walking this road for forty years.”
My voice softened.
“You don’t need him. You don’t need his memory. You can choose something else.”
She tilted her head as if tasting the idea.
Choosing.
Ghosts do not choose—they repeat.
But maybe that was what haunted her most.
The wedding caravan passed by, its music muffled, its lights flickering strangely as if passing through fog.
She remained still.
The rage dissolved.
The night softened again.
The whispers receded.
The heartbeat beneath the road faded into silence.
She stepped back toward the car.
“I will go now.”
“Where?”
“Where the city keeps its forgotten.”
She walked toward the eucalyptus trees. Each step seemed to fade her into the darkness.
Before disappearing completely, she turned.
“You gave me something tonight.”
“What?”
“Witness.”
Her veil shimmered one last time.
Then she vanished.
Not dissolving—
not blinking out—
just gone, in the quiet way of a sigh leaving the body.
The road returned to normal. The night regained its rhythm. My car’s dashboard stopped flickering.
I drove home shaking.
The next morning, I checked my Uber app.
The last ride was recorded as:
“CANCELLED BY RIDER — NO SHOW.”
As if she had never been there at all.
But sometimes, when I drive down Karsaz at night, the wind carries a faint, fluttering whisper.
A veil brushing against the air.
A memory walking beside the living.
Not seeking revenge.
Not haunting.
Just asking to be remembered.
And I whisper into the dark,
“I see you.”
And the road grows quiet again.
Bio:
Syed Zeeshan Raza Zaidi is a Pakistani writer and cognitive neuroscience graduate student whose work explores the intersections of memory, culture, and folklore. His fiction often draws from South Asian myths and contemporary urban life, blending psychological depth with atmospheric storytelling. His academic background in psychology informs his narrative style and thematic interest in fear, grief, and the human mind.