he hurried along, he pulled out his mobile phone to call for backup. His first instinct was to phone Sohan Lal, but he still wasn’t home from his long journey to press the mint; so, he tried his other brother.
It was 9.29 p.m.
Ram Babu, who was at home, hurriedly informed his wife of what had happened. Then he grabbed a torch and a lathi and took off. But where his brother had turned right, he took a left, unthinkingly traversing a longer route. He pounded down the road, diving through an opening between two brick houses. The fields frilled darkly before him. A melancholic tune wafted down from the fair. ‘What if they shoot us?’ Ram Babu thought.
So many people in western Uttar Pradesh had access to a gun that the area had come to be known as Tamancha Land. Although some strapped manual-loading Lee Enfield rifles proudly to their backs, most packed sanitation pipes or automobile steering rods to make long-necked tamanchas to stick down their trousers. It was mostly ‘dabbang dikhane ke liye’ – a display of swagger – but showing off had tragic consequences. Between 2010 and 2014, the state accounted for 40 per cent of all deaths from gun violence in India.15 In fact, there had been armed robbers in the fields just a few days earlier, so Ram Babu’s fears were warranted.
He looked around and saw a figure lying on a charpoy. ‘Thieves in the tobacco field!’ he shouted. ‘Thieves in the tobacco!’ The man jumped up to join in the search. Soon three other men were striding alongside Ram Babu. What was there to be scared for, he thought. If they saw the thieves, they’d catch them!
His brother and cousin Nazru were already in the trio of family plots, craning their necks as they peered this way and that. Just ahead was the orchard, at a distance of less than a hundred feet. The ground was mostly bare, and it should have been easy enough to see far. But in the darkness, it was like staring into a well, hoping to catch a snake in the gaping chasm.
The men felt a deep familiarity with the fields. It was everything to them, their ancestral land, the home of parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. They themselves had worked on this land when they were children. They had tagged alongside their elders just like their sons did now, learning how to tend for the earth, how to invest in it, how to protect it from pests like jungli cows and thieves like moneylenders. This was where they had spent the happiest times of their lives and where they had confronted their greatest fears. In fact, their fields were so intimately familiar to them that although they couldn’t see much, they believed they would sense if something was amiss, just as one can sense a change in the texture of one’s palm.
But this was not the case. They were unable to make out any telltale signs of intruder activity.
The men dispersed, and so did Nazru.
Congregated under a tree, the two brothers were dissecting the matter when some of the Shakya women emerged from the village, walking quickly towards them.
‘The girls aren’t back,’ cried Siya Devi.
The horrified men started towards home. There they would plan how to proceed. The other women followed, but Siya Devi hung back.
The first time Lalli’s mother saw Katra village was also the first time she saw the man she was to marry, whose name she then had inked on her hand as a sign that she now belonged to him. She was beautiful, with a straight nose, regal cheekbones and paper-gold skin. Sohan Lal was small and loud. He told her to shut up all the time – ‘chup kar, chup kar, tu chap kar!’ But although she was then only a teenager, she was no pushover. When she got angry, she turned her back to him. She shouted at others, when really, she was shouting at him. Whatever method she chose, the message was always received. Siya Devi was tough, she knew it, and you didn’t want to provoke her.
The seasons rolled on, rabi, kharif, rabi, kharif, rabi, kharif over and over. She carried six babies to term. Children take their toll. Men take everything. She spent most of the day on her feet. And she was unsentimental. She refused to name her dogs because what was the point of naming something that would leave without saying goodbye?
And now here she was, still only in her forties, but her hair was falling out and some teeth also. Her golden face was crinkled with gloom. But she was still beautiful, and she was still tough, more so now that she was the mother of a young woman. ‘Maine control mein rakha tha,’ Siya Devi said later, bleakly. I was firm with my girl.
And so, even though she couldn’t imagine what had happened, her thoughts didn’t stray to dark places.
Treading slowly through the indigo night, Siya Devi came upon her husband’s cousin, Nazru. The young man was urinating by the side of his house in the fields.
‘Was it really thieves you saw or something else?’
Later, she didn’t explain what she had meant by ‘something else’. Nazru was known to muddle easily, to say one thing when he meant another.
‘Something else,’ he replied, zipping his trousers.
‘The children aren’t home yet.’
‘Pappu took them,’ he said. ‘Pappu Yadav.’
Siya Devi ran home so fast her feet swallowed the earth.
In the subsequent turmoil that engulfed the family, no one wondered aloud why Nazru hadn’t told the truth to begin with. Why did he say he saw thieves when what he actually saw was Pappu taking the girls?
15 deaths from gun violence in India: indiaspend.com/cover-story/uttar-pradesh-awash-in-illegal-guns-shooting-deaths-80762
Where Are They?
The phone that Padma had been carrying was now switched off.
Cousin Manju was shaken awake.
‘Did something happen at the fair?’
‘No,’ she replied groggily. Then she remembered something odd. ‘Padma didi was cursing at someone, but I don’t know whom.’
Jeevan Lal turned to his mother, ‘You sent the girls to the fair!’
This wasn’t true, of course; it was his sister-in-law Siya Devi who had given them permission to go.
‘I’m going to kill you,’ he screamed.
Then, because this was a matter far bigger than the sighting of thieves in the fields, far bigger than he could even imagine, he dialled his brother Sohan Lal, still many villages away.
As it turned out, the oil extraction machine had broken down and Sohan Lal was unable to immediately process his harvest. By the time the matter was dealt with and he had twelve litres of oil in cans, darkness had embraced the unfamiliar village. A relative named Harbans, who lived nearby, urged him to spend the night instead of returning immediately to Katra. They had eaten dinner and then climbed up to the roof to sleep.
‘Bhai!’
‘Hello?’
‘Brother, the girls have disappeared. Come home quick!’
‘Hello?’
‘Hello?’
