phone. The neighbour called twice but the handset was still switched off.
The girls’ grandmother had convinced herself that since Padma had left the house complaining of a stomach ache, the child was simply having trouble defecating. ‘Sometimes,’ mumbled the old lady, ‘if you delay too long it doesn’t come out.’
The others knew better.
‘We were weeping unstoppably,’ Padma’s stepmother would remember.
Nazru Changes His Story, Again
Over in the fields, the men were baffled. The persistent chirp of crickets aside, there were now no signs of life. Where were those two?
The situation felt so surreal that one member of the search party was convinced he was sleepwalking. Around this time, someone started prodding the Shakyas for details. Where exactly did the girls go? Did anyone see them? Was there anything else they remembered?
Now, finally – and perhaps only because they weren’t getting anywhere – did Ram Babu tell the truth. The girls hadn’t disappeared. A Yadav from next door had taken them. His cousin Nazru had said so.
The news landed like a thunderclap. The girls had been kidnapped, the family knew who was responsible, and yet here they were roaming impotently with sticks?
The Shakyas wouldn’t budge. What if the Yadavs had guns? By confronting Pappu, they would jeopardise the safety of their clan, they said. Better to let the girls show up. Then the matter would be over, and no one need mention it again.
The village men looked at one another as though to say, are you listening to this. The Shakya brothers were making no sense at all. A man who took a girl did not return her in one piece.
The two groups started to argue: go, stay, go, stay. They bickered and grumbled in the darkness. Then, as suddenly as he had gone, Nazru reappeared and sidled up to his cousins. Sohan Lal threw an arm around him. The oldest Shakya brother had arrived late to the scene and wanted to know everything from the start.
‘Tell me,’ he said.
He’d been snacking on some corn, Nazru started, keeping watch for wild animals when he heard voices near Jeevan Lal’s plot. ‘I thought they were women talking among themselves,’ he told the group. But, listening carefully, he realised that the women were screaming for help. He moved quickly, looking here and there and shining his torch into the darkness. In the weak light, he saw something startling. ‘What’s that? Four men scuffling. With Padma and Lalli!’ He recognised one of the men, it was that troublemaker Pappu. He was forcing the girls to go with them! ‘Padma and Lalli called out, “mujhe bacha do! Save me!” ’ Nazru flung himself at Pappu, throwing him to the ground. Then Pappu’s friend pulled out a gun.
‘If I’d known they had a tamancha,’ Nazru told the villagers, ‘I would have first attempted to snatch it and then rescue the girls.’
But he had to save himself, didn’t he? He had to run.
Jeevan Lal and Ram Babu were taken aback. This latest story bore no resemblance to the ones Nazru had told before. At first, he claimed to see thieves. Then, to the family’s horror, he had said that Pappu took the girls. Now he had modified his story yet again, adding four men and a gun. What was he up to?
But the brothers didn’t make a scene. The essential fact was the same. The girls were gone. And what was more, Nazru was here now. All night the young man had slipped in and out of the search party like he had better things to do.
‘If you’re sure it was Pappu, we should go to his house,’ said Vijay Singh, a hawk-faced farmer with a no-nonsense directness. Before the Shakyas could protest, the thirty-six-year-old picked up his iron rod and called for a friend to accompany him. They cut quickly through the dark.
The Yadav house gleamed in the moonlight.
A single bulb flickered at the front door.
‘Pappu!’ Singh called out. ‘Pappu!’
Pappu’s elder brother stirred.
‘What is the matter?’ Urvesh said, heaving himself up from the charpoy outside the front door. ‘Why are you calling Pappu?’
‘I have some urgent business.’
Urvesh yelled thickly down the road, ‘Pappu! Ai, Pappu!’
Pappu emerged from his uncle’s shack. He was wearing a vest and trousers. According to his cousin Raju, they had nodded off on a charpoy after eating a watermelon from the harvest supply.
‘Kya yahan par koi chalta purza hai?’ Vijay Singh asked. Are there any busybodies around?
By using the term busybody, he was asking the Yadav boy whether he’d seen any troublemakers in the area. It was, of course, just an excuse to confirm whether Pappu had been at home.
‘There’s no one here,’ Pappu replied, rubbing his eyes.
His mother, Jhalla Devi, stepped out of the house – to draw water from the handpump, she would later claim.
‘What’s the matter?’ she said from behind her sari veil. The men from Katra waved her away. ‘It’s nothing.’
Avdesh, the oldest Yadav son, climbed down from the terrace. After a desultory back and forth the outsiders took their leave.
‘What’s going on?’ one of the brothers said to Pappu.
‘I had kind of a fight with Nazru,’ Pappu replied sheepishly.
‘When will you stop playing the fool,’ his brother scolded.
If anything further was said, the family later kept it to themselves.
Pappu turned back. Urvesh lay down, closed his eyes and brought his knees up to his chest in his usual position of sleep. Avdesh climbed up the stairs. Their mother scuttled in and bolted the door behind her.
The villagers went on looking.
‘The orchard,’ Singh later recalled, ticking off the places they searched next. ‘The eucalyptus grove.’ But some members of the party remembered it differently. After this encounter, they said, they limited their search to the vicinity of the Yadav house. They saw nothing. They heard nothing.
Sometime later, the men decided to take a break under an enormous quince tree. They wiped their faces and hands and shared a drink of water.
Another one of the Shakya cousins then spoke up.
A little before 6 a.m. that morning, Prem Singh said, he had driven his tractor up to Sohan Lal’s plot to load the farmer’s mint harvest. The thirty-two-year-old’s grocery store was losing money like you wouldn’t believe, and he made up the deficit by transporting people and goods for cash. As he chatted with Nazru, who also happened to be hanging around, he had seen Sohan Lal’s daughter, Lalli, speaking into a mobile phone.
The search party leaned in with interest.
This titbit promised to revive their energies. Perhaps
