Neelesh Kale The Road Trip That Shouldn’t Have Been The night air was thick with the scent of damp earth and diesel as five friends—Khushi, Rakesh, Dev, Meera, and Ajay—sped along the old Mumbai–Pune Highway. The plan had been simple: leave Lonavala after sunset, beat the weekend traffic, and reach Pune by midnight. But as the hours passed and the road grew emptier, an unease crept into the silence that the stereo couldn’t mask. “Why does this road feel… weird?” Khushi asked, gazing out the window into the dark, where dense forest pressed against the highway like a wall of…