Free Parking

There is a smell that still stops me cold, twenty years later. A whiff of burnt matches, a candle put out, or even a hint of something like it, takes me back to that parking lot on the outskirts of Mumbai in 2006, and I have to remind myself to breathe.

Back then I had a Yamaha RX 100 motorcycle, bought with two years of savings, and I loved her more than was probably healthy. I still say her. Whatever happened on that lot happened to both of us, and in twenty years I have not found an explanation for it that holds up.

My favorite band, Indian Ocean, was playing at a venue past the edge of the city, where it was mostly open land back then. I got there late, past nine, and the parking at the venue was already a hopeless mess of bikes wedged in three deep with men still trying to force more of them in. I did not have the patience for that, so I kept going down the road until I found another lot, smaller, a few minutes farther on.

There was one working streetlight at its entrance; most others along that road were out. A low wall, covered in old graffiti, encircled the lot. A half-rusted parking sign that nobody had bothered to repaint stood in one corner. Overgrown trees and bushes pressed in close on every side, so that whatever little light there was got eaten before it reached the ground. The whole place was about the size of a large house. Not one other vehicle was parked there.

I remember standing there for a second, thinking it was strange. It was a bad night to be short on parking, so why had no one found this lot? But I was late, so I put her out in the middle, well clear of the trees, and walked on to the venue.

My friend Neil was waiting at the entrance with the tickets. He spotted me from some distance away.

"Where's your bike?" he asked.

I told him. He stopped smiling.

"That lot? The one past the —" and then the doors opened behind us and the crowd surged forward and whatever he was going to say went under it. I pulled him along, and by the time we found a spot, Indian Ocean was already coming on, and I had forgotten all about it.

* * *

Indian Ocean's music is hard to describe. I'm sure everyone says that about their favorite band, but in their case it was true. Rock, classical Indian music, Sufi poetry, and mythology, sometimes all in the same song. We expected them to save their best songs for last, but it turned out every song was a favorite. There were no camera phones back then to get between you and the moment. We were just there.

The set ended almost three hours later. Our ears were still ringing and our faces ached from smiling like we were high. I walked Neil to where he'd parked, and just as he put on his helmet, he stopped, took it off, and looked worried.

"Why'd you have to park all the way over at that spooky lot?" said Neil.

"What do you mean, all the way? It's a three-minute walk. And it didn't seem spooky to me," I lied.

I pushed his helmet back down over his head and told him to get going, since it was late.

"I've heard things about that place." He tried to take the helmet off again. I held it down.

"There used to be a house on that land. The woman who lived there set the whole place on fire with herself still inside!" His voice had risen, and a few people nearby were starting to look over. I had already started walking away.

"Let me at least drop you at the lot, make sure you get off okay," he called after me.

"I'm not a kid, Neil. Relax." I said it laughing, though I didn't feel it much.

I got him to leave, eventually, and started walking toward the lot.

* * *

As the crowd thinned, the noise of the venue behind me flattened into a hum. There seemed to be even fewer streetlights than earlier. I went from one pool of orange to the next with long stretches of black in between, and in the black I could see the pale line of the road under my feet and not much else.

The thought of my beloved RX 100 standing alone in that lot made me uncomfortable. I realized at least some of what Neil had told me had gotten to me. I started singing my favorite Indian Ocean songs, loudly, mostly for my own company.

By the time I reached the entrance to the lot, singing wasn't helping anymore.

I could just make out my bike in the dark, a shape near the middle of the lot. I paused under the streetlight for a second and reminded myself there was no such thing as a ghost, or a spirit, or whatever. It had been easy not to believe in ghosts back at the venue, with Neil and a crowd around me.

The moment I stepped past the wall and into the lot, the streetlight went out, as if I'd stepped on its switch.

I spun around, disoriented. The darkness pressed on my eyeballs and my eyes ached from straining for a glimpse of light, if only to prove to myself I hadn't gone blind.

I can't be too far from my RX.

I stretched my arms out, feeling for the handle. If I could just get the key into the ignition, her engine would tear through this silence, and that alone would be something.

Two steps in, my knee hit something hard. I didn't remember anything being there when I parked. My fingertips told me it was a wooden chair. No way. I felt the upholstery. Another step, and my fingers found a coffee table.

How had I still not reached my bike?

Some part of my brain kept insisting I was imagining things, but everything my hands found said otherwise.

I was standing in someone's living room.

I wanted to reel my hands in and stop right there. Then they found something else.

Strands of hair brushed against my wrist. My hand snapped back to my chest reflexively, like I'd touched something boiling hot. My heart felt like a fist banging at the door of my chest, and for a horrible second I was sure I was going to faint.

I wanted to run, but I no longer knew which direction the entrance was in, and part of me didn't want to find out that I was no longer standing in the parking lot at all.

Cold sweat had soaked through my shirt and was running into my eyes.

Screaming would feel good, but I had to settle for breathing loudly.

I don't know how long I stood there. Eventually I found whatever courage I had left and made myself move. I vaguely remember thinking, or maybe even muttering - I just wanted to leave.

Then my hand landed on a long seat to my right. I followed it up to the curve of a cold tank, then to the handle and the clutch. Keeping one hand on the handle, I fished the key out with the other. I got it in. It turned. My foot, numb and disconnected, somehow found the kick and brought her to life.

The headlight flashed on, and for a second every instinct in me wanted to look up, wanted to see whatever was standing in that lot with me. I did not let myself. I kept my eyes down, fixed on the ground in front of my wheel.

It wasn't the gray ground of the parking lot.

My front wheel was resting on old carpet, worn flat and shiny down the middle where someone had walked the same path every day for years. Faded flowers ran along the edge of the beam.

I hauled her around without once lifting my eyes, until the headlight pointed where the entrance should have been. The carpet went all the way.

I put her in first and opened the throttle. The carpet should have started sliding backward under the headlight. It didn't.

Something had hold of the back wheel.

That's when the smell of burning filled my nostrils and reached the back of my throat until I could taste it. There was no heat in it at all.

I expected a burning hand to land on my shoulder. It didn't come. The engine screamed, the rear wheel spinning and going nowhere, and whatever had hold of me did not tire and did not let go.

I have no idea how long that lasted. Long enough that my arms went numb from holding the throttle open.

Then, all at once, I shot forward. For half a second I thought whatever was holding me had let me go.

It hadn't let go. I had been hurled off the lot and into something solid enough to stop me dead.

* * *

The next thing I remember is opening my eyes to bright lights, with Neil's worried face hovering over mine. After that I drifted in and out for a while. When I finally woke up for good, there was a doctor standing by the bed and my head felt like it was splitting open.

By the next day I could keep my eyes open and stay with it. Neil was sitting there smiling like an idiot.

"You're an idiot," he said, before I could say anything. "You know that? A certified idiot."

I asked him what had happened. My voice came out cracked and strange, like it belonged to someone else.

"You rode into a pole. Full speed, from the look of the bike." He said it lightly, but he'd gone pale saying it. "I don't even know why I turned back. I was halfway home, and something just didn't sit right with me, so I did, and there you were on the ground, the bike halfway wrapped around that streetlight. I thought you were dead."

I didn't say anything for a while. I was trying to work out how much of it to tell him, and realized there was no version that wouldn't sound insane.

"They think you were drunk," Neil said. "Or high. I told them I was with you all night and you weren't either, but nobody wants to hear that from the guy's friend."

I didn't tell him what had happened. I have never told anyone what happened, not fully, not once in twenty years, and I wasn't about to start with a doctor due back on his rounds any minute and Neil sitting there in a plastic chair looking like he hadn't slept.

"Tell me about the lot," I said instead. "What you said outside the venue. The woman."

Neil looked at me for a second, like he was deciding whether to ask why. He didn't.

"I don't know how much of it's even true," he said. "People talk, and half of what they say is just people talking." He shrugged, but he was watching me carefully as he said it.

"There was a house there before any of this went up, the venue, the road, all of it. An old woman lived in it alone. When the builders started buying up the land around her, she wouldn't sell. Wouldn't even hear an offer, from what I've heard."

"And?"

"And they didn't take no for an answer. That's the part everyone seems to agree on. They pushed. Cut things off, made her life difficult, kept coming back. And then one night the house burned down, with her in it."

"You told me she did it herself."

"That's what I've always heard. It got written down as an accident. Nobody actually knows."

He picked at the edge of the plastic chair. "The part that always got to me is what the neighbors said. The fire took a long time to really catch. They stood outside shouting at her to come out, and the front door was open the whole time. She could have walked out whenever she wanted."

"Why didn't she?"

"She'd been telling the builders for months they'd have to carry her out of that house. I guess she meant it."

I thought about the streetlight going out the second I stepped into the lot. I thought about the back wheel spinning on her carpet, going nowhere, and whatever had hold of it never tiring.

"Do you believe any of it?" I asked him.

Neil thought about it longer than I expected. "I don't know. I've never seen anything. But I've also never seen you crash a bike in your life, and you won't tell me what happened in there." He looked at me, waiting, and when I didn't say anything, he let it go.

I was discharged four days later with a fractured wrist, twelve stitches above my eyebrow, and a story nobody would've believed, so I told everyone it was too dark to see the pole. My mother thought I was covering something up. My father never asked twice. Only Neil, who had been the one to turn back, who had seen the bike wrapped around that pole with his own eyes, knew I was leaving something out.

The bike was repairable. I had it fixed within a month, forks replaced, tank reshaped, running as well as she ever had. Then I put a cover over her in my uncle's garage in Pune and left her there, and she has stayed there for twenty years.

I am told she still starts on the first kick.