The Fare that Never Lived

Rain has a strange way of turning cities into mirrors, blurring the lines between what’s real and what isn’t. On most nights, Arif—one of the quieter taxi drivers navigating the city’s sleepless arteries—trusted those reflections. But not on this night.

The storm was brutal, the kind where lightning scribbles across the sky like an impatient writer. Arif debated returning home early when he saw her—standing beneath a flickering streetlamp, drenched but strangely calm, as if the storm didn’t dare touch her.

She raised a hand.

He stopped.

The moment she entered the cab, the temperature dipped so sharply that his breath fogged the windshield. Her voice, when she spoke, was soft—almost too soft for the violent night outside.

“Old Riverside Road… the house at the end,” she said.

Arif hesitated. That neighbourhood had been abandoned for years. But her eyes—dark, pleading, tired in a way only grief could explain—silenced his questions.

As he drove, the storm grew louder, but inside the cab there was an uncanny stillness. She didn’t look out the windows. She didn’t flinch when thunder cracked like a whip. She just held a damp photograph in her hands.

At one red light, Arif stole a glance.

A little girl. Maybe six. Smiling, with a missing front tooth.

“Your daughter?” he asked gently.

The woman’s voice trembled.

“I never got to say goodbye.”

Something inside him tightened. He didn’t push further.

When they finally reached the old house, Arif felt the hair on his neck rise. The place looked swallowed by time—broken windows, moss-covered steps, a gate hanging loosely as if it had given up long ago.

The woman didn’t ask him to wait, but something compelled him to follow.

She walked to a small porch, knelt, and placed the photograph carefully beside a rusted tricycle lying on its side. A soft wind circled her—oddly warm against the cold rain.

And then, she whispered something Arif barely heard:

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

Lightning lit up the sky, and in that instant, she faded—as though the storm had simply breathed her away.

Arif stood frozen, heart pounding. The realization hit him like a punch:

She had never been alive in that taxi.

Later, he learned the story from an old caretaker who still lived nearby—the woman and her daughter had died in a landslide on that very road a decade earlier. The mother’s body had never been found.

He didn’t tell anyone what happened that night. Who would believe him?

But every monsoon since, Arif finds himself driving down Old Riverside Road. Just once. Just to be sure. Just to honour a promise never spoken aloud:

That a mother finally found her way home.

Sometimes the passengers we pick up aren’t looking for a destination.

Sometimes they’re looking for closure.

And sometimes, unknowingly, we help them finish a journey that began long before we ever crossed paths.

This post is a part of Blogchatter Blog Hop weekly challenge (25 Nov - 01 Dec 25)