she was talking to a relative,’ he shrugged. He’d only mentioned it in case it meant something to her father. Lalli’s father remembered that he had asked his daughter to make a call for him that morning. Then he’d wandered off, leaving his phone with her.
‘Check the recorded calls,’ Sohan Lal ordered Yogendra, Prem Singh’s brother.
The list showed three calls. Two were outgoing, one was incoming. The incoming conversation had taken place at 6.01 a.m. that morning.
‘I played the recording,’ Yogendra would remember. ‘And everyone present heard it.’
‘Where are you?’ Lalli asked.
‘Across the bridge,’ said a reedy voice. ‘Where are you?’
‘In the fields. They are cutting the crops.’
‘Didn’t you go to the fair?’
‘Did you give us money to go?’
‘I’ll give you money, go to the fair. And when will I get the chance to enjoy myself?’
‘Meet us in the evening. You will enjoy yourself.’
‘Bastards, Go Look for Them Yourselves’
The contents of the call were so shocking that after the night had finally passed, the brothers would sometimes claim that they hadn’t heard it. As though willing it out of existence, they spoke about it only in vague terms, as something that might have been but of which they themselves had no direct knowledge. In fact, someone had anticipated the conversation and then switched on the phone’s recording facility. This Made in China handset, like the one Sohan Lal had given to Padma, could record calls – but it wasn’t pre-activated to do so.
As the men stared down at their feet, Jeevan Lal declared that he was going home. Ram Babu offered to accompany him.
The two brothers walked off. No one blamed them. The voice on the other end of the line had belonged to a boy, a boy like Pappu.
The police chowki was located in an alleyway just opposite a government nursery school. To get there, Sohan Lal and the others in the search party had to cross the bazaar. Upon arrival, the metal gate was padlocked, and inside, an oil lamp placed on a table had long died out. Attired in night clothes, the five police officers were sprawled on charpoys, legs outstretched and potbellies heaving. It was between 2 and 2.30 a.m. The night was cold. The moonlight was thin.
The villagers rattled the gate.
‘Sahib,’ they called out deferentially. ‘Sahib, wake up, sahib!’
One of the officers opened his eyes but showed no signs of moving. The group raised its collective voice.
A frustrated Sohan Lal tried another tactic.
Srikrishen Shakya lived down the road. As he saw the officers come and go, Srikrishen did them small favours to keep in their good graces and they in turn grew friendly with him. Knowing this, Sohan Lal hurried over to his house. By this time the group was making such a racket that while the police continued to sleep – or pretend to sleep – Srikrishen had jumped out of bed, wondering what on earth was going on. He was fumbling for a light when Sohan Lal arrived at his doorstep.
‘My girls are gone,’ Sohan Lal said. ‘The police won’t wake up. Time is being wasted.’
Srikrishen agreed to accompany Sohan Lal to the chowki.
‘Babuji,’ he cried to the sleeping officers. ‘Babuji!’
It was only now, on the urging of a familiar voice, that the police roused themselves. ‘Yes, yes,’ muttered Sub-Inspector Ram Vilas Yadav, the top-ranking officer at the chowki.
Barrel-bellied and heavily moustached, Ram Vilas had an unfortunate speech impediment that made him sound as though he had two tongues. He stammered and slurred. Strangers reacted with open rudeness, dismissing him offhand. His colleagues were kinder, pointing out that it required just a little patience to figure out what he was saying. But even they avoided him at mealtimes. ‘Watching him eat could make you vomit,’ one officer said, referring to the manner in which lentils tended to dribble out of Ram Vilas’s mouth, soaking his collar.
Ram Vilas also had visible scars that some people attributed to brave encounters with bandits. In fact, said his colleagues, he was a drunk who had been involved in seven motorcycle accidents in one year. This didn’t influence any promotions that he was due. Even the villagers judged him less harshly for his drunkenness than his speech – every police officer they had ever known was a drunkard. And the fifty-seven-year-old man was said to be fair. The villagers respectfully called him ‘darogaji’, police chief.
Sohan Lal kept it brief. His girls were missing, he said. Pappu Yadav of Jati had them. Would they please come with him to Pappu’s house?
‘He listened to us,’ Lalli’s father later said. ‘But no one listened to him.’ He meant some of the other policemen, who acted as though the complaint was entirely made-up.
One of them was a lanky man with stiff grey hair and pitted cheeks named Chattrapal Singh Gangwar. Gangwar had recently been promoted to head constable. The good news, arriving shortly before he was to retire at the age of sixty, had given him an excuse to exceed his daily quota of alcohol. He had cut loose that day, spending several hours on duty downing cheap whisky at a roadside eatery.
As Ram Vilas prodded Gangwar – saying, ‘utho yaar,’ wake up – his subordinate shot back in language that shocked his colleagues. ‘His behaviour was indecent,’ said Raghunandan Singh, the other officer who went on to help the family.
Ram Vilas wasn’t deterred.
‘Get up!’ he shouted.
Again, Gangwar swore.
One of the villagers claimed to smell his alcohol-laced breath all the way from the gate.
The older man shared a friendly relationship with his boss, and the two were known to engage in what was considered playful banter of the sister-mother variety – casually swapping digs that invoked sex and sexual violence. But now, Gangwar was mistakenly under the impression that his boss was pulling his leg, the way he did when they got drunk together in the chowki.
Finally, he gave in.
‘Nothing but drama,’ he groaned.
The fourth officer in the chowki was Constable Sarvesh Kumar Yadav, then thirty-nine years old, with a jutting mouth and a stubborn disposition. Sarvesh was used to doing as he pleased. He thrashed around a bit but remained where he was. ‘Bastards,’ he muttered at the villagers. ‘Go look for them yourselves.’
In the back and forth, some of the officers had changed into their uniforms. They climbed onto their motorbikes and made for Pappu’s house, less than half a kilometre away. The villagers trudged on foot. Sarvesh and Gangwar were taking far too long to sort themselves out and were left behind.
The village was eerily quiet, the fifth officer present that night later recalled. ‘It felt desolate,’ Satinder Pal Yadav said. It was as though the people had left, the animals had wandered off and
