We figured to beat sunset to the top of the ghats, and from there the roads would present only the usual dangers of bad drivers, potholes, and buses that switched off all their lights at night when they stopped to drop off passengers. Echoing Willy’s accounts of the ghats, Sushmita explained that they offered spectacularly terrifying views and countless opportunities to plunge over the side of the road to certain death. No guardrails, mostly. And many that had once been there had been knocked down. Twisted witnesses to what had surely been a fatal crash.

I consulted my watch and did some math in my head. Yes, we should make it up the zigzagging road to the top before dark. But when we crossed Thane Creek, traffic became snarled by an ugly accident involving a bus and an auto rickshaw in New Bombay, the massive development project being built on the other side of Vashi Bridge. That delayed us twenty minutes. Then, once we’d moved on, we came upon an overturned truck that blocked the entire road in Panvel. Another thirty minutes gone.

“I don’t want to alarm you, Danny,” Sushmita told me as she switched on the headlights. “But we’re not going to make it to the top before sunset.”

I was alarmed. Not outwardly, of course, but in the gathering dusk of the day, my guts were churning at the prospect. Imagined terrors are usually more frightening than those you’ve seen. There’s the element of the unknown added to the certainty that whatever it is will scare the daylights out of you. And it was precisely daylight that I was longing for. Glancing at the phosphorescent dial of my watch, I saw that it was 7:19 p.m., exactly one minute before sunset. A journalist has to know these things.

FRIDAY, JULY 11, 1975, 7:19 P.M.

“Are you okay?” I asked Sushmita as she navigated the twisting road, climbing slowly, steadily up the ghats.

She squinted into the glaring headlights of a truck descending the curves in the opposite direction. A horn blared before us—the truck—as it swerved out of our path back into its own lane with, perhaps, eighteen inches to spare.

“Jesus, that was close,” I said.

“Normal. You’ll get used to it.”

She was trying to act cool, but I caught her chewing her lip and strangling the steering wheel with an iron grip. The weather was a complicating factor. At times roaring down like a blinding waterfall on the windscreen, then lightening up for a few minutes before resuming its assault, the rain only served to remind me that we were doomed.