For those of you who don't know this, Bukit Timah Road is, well... a very long road.

It starts from around Ngee Ann Polytechnic, where it connects with Upper Bukit Timah Road and Clementi Road, and ends in Little India, near Tekka Centre:

(Can you see the two small stars demarcating each end?)

According to local site mapometer, its entire length is roughly 9km:

So with this in mind, imagine being a taxi or private-hire car driver, and receiving a booking with the only address listed being "Bukit Timah Road".

That's what happened to Facebook user Cassandra Tan, and at 5:46am, no less — her first passenger of the day.

She tells a heart-wrenching story of her encounter with him in a Facebook post, which we'll take you through here.

Now, as any driver would likely do, the first thing Tan did was to call the guy to try to find out more details. She describes the call:

"I called him, he said he didn't know what number or where he was. He just said he was sitting at a bus stop at Bukit Timah Road... I asked him to describe what he saw nearby. He said cars, trees, at a bus stop. I asked him to look for the bus stop number; I got silence and muffling sounds."

By this point, likely 90 per cent of drivers would have given up and abandoned the guy already. But Tan isn't 90 per cent of drivers.

Sensing something wrong, she told the passenger to sit tight and wait for her... while she trawled the bus stops within her vicinity on Bukit Timah Road in a bid to locate him.

Thankfully, she turned in the right direction and found him soon enough — a foreign worker sitting alone, looking visibly downcast.

His very painful story

As she found out from him in the course of the drive, he is an orphan, as was his wife.

We say was, because he had just learned that his wife had died while giving birth to their first daughter, who was to be sold to another family by the time she turned 12.

Why, you might ask? Because that family had paid for his wife's gynae visits during her pregnancy.

Now that his wife had passed away, though, the worker said there was nothing he could do, and the sponsoring family has claimed custody of his newborn baby girl.

By this point, Tan said she was so overwhelmed by what he was going through that she refused to accept money from him for the trip fare, but at the end of her driving shift, she noticed he had slipped two $10 notes into a slot in the front passenger door.

She since managed to call the number he had used and reached a friend of his, who told her he had returned to India with money from his boss. She said she initially offered to pay for his airfare home, but he refused, saying "no use go home".

She was also told by his friend not to call that number anymore, so it looks like this is the end of the story.

Some commenters have since tried asking for more information in order to see how they can offer help to the man — perhaps to help him pay the family so he can at least keep his child, for instance. She left two comments on the post in response:

In case these might have raised a sliver of doubt in you about the legitimacy of her story, though, one Facebook user on her post, a Muhammad Mustaqiim Mohamed Kasim, left an interesting comment:

He even shared a screenshot with what looks like a GrabCar ride he took, with what he believes to be her name listed on it as the driver:

You can read Tan's full account of what happened here:

Indeed, we hope he will find peace and closure.

(Editor's note: An earlier version of this article got our start point wrong on the Google Maps screenshot of the road — Bukit Timah Road does not start around Adam Road food centre, but closer to Ngee Ann Polytechnic and Clementi Road. We have corrected this.)

Top image: screenshots from Cassandra Tan's Facebook post and sg.mapometer.com

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