After stepping out of the police station, I walked briskly towards that point where there were two tracks: one, towards the road that took one from the village to the city, and the other that led to the forest. I did not think twice about choosing a path. I took the one that went into the forest. I found a barrier and a check post a little ahead. There were two policemen at the check post, standing behind stacks of sacks filled with sand, their machine guns positioned over them. Another policeman was talking on a wireless set. There were two more policemen, one on either side of the barrier.
They were alerted by my arrival. The policeman who had been talking on the wireless stepped out of the cabin and eyed me suspiciously. It was clear that he was being informed about me on the wireless. When he had confirmed – looking at my built and appearance – that the person he had been informed about was me, he instructed a policeman at the barrier to lift it and let me pass.
While passing through the barrier, I looked at the policeman who had lifted the barrier. He seemed familiar. I turned around and took another look. Yes, he was Ronhu, who had studied with me till primary school. We used to tease him so much that he often ended up crying and thus we nicknamed him Ronhu, the cry baby. I remembered that he grew up to be quite cowardly and cried at the drop of a hat till the age of 17 or 18. I wondered how a cowardly fellow like him had got a job in the police.
Along with Ronhu, the faces of several of my relatives and schoolmates flashed in my memory. As I began entering the depths of the forest, I encountered several familiar faces. The men were all dressed in police uniforms and patrolling the area. Every hundred feet or so, I saw a policeman strolling with a gun in his hands. They all looked at me strangely as I passed them by, as if they were not watching a human but an alien from outer space. I spotted my cousins – sons of my father’s sisters and my mother’s brothers – and also my best friend from childhood, Punuram, among the policemen. I thought they recognised me, but they soon turned and walked ahead like strangers. I did not talk to them. I did not ask them about my sister. I just passed them by like they did not exist, on that path or in the forest.
The path now began curving and sloping up. I turned around the first and the second curves quite easily. But I panted through my climb up the third curve. I stopped to catch my breath after I had turned. When I was relaxed enough, I noticed that there were, on my right, a row of short statues. I wondered who had erected them in the middle of the forest, and why. They were made of cement and they were all shown holding guns in their hands. Black boots made of cement, khaki uniform made of cement, cement guns in cement hands, and cement helmets on cement heads. It was clear from the guns that these statues were of men who had been recruited by the government as SPO – Special Police Officers – to counter the Naxalites but who had been killed at their hands. The statues stood proudly, despite their plaster having chipped and fallen off at a few places.
I went closer and noticed that they stood on separate plinths of their own. On each plinth was affixed a marble plaque mentioning the word shaheed – martyr – before the name of the person and their dates of birth and death. There were a few martyrs whose statues had partly crumbled as they had been built with less cement and more sand. Half of a hand of one particular statue had crumbled; on another, the entire gun had crumbled.
The first statue was that of Soyam Narwa, the son of my neighbour Soyam Ganga. Narwa had liked to hunt quail and partridge and rear poultry right from his childhood. So engrossed was he in his hobbies that he hardly helped around the house. Nearly everyday, from his childhood till his adolescence, he used to be thrashed by his father. The daily beatings made him so stubborn that one day his father too got tired of beating him. Later on, I remember, Narwa did nothing except attend cockfights at the haat and drink liquor distilled from Mahua flowers.
The second statue was that of my cousin, Madavi Budraiya, the son of my father’s brother Madavi Ayit. Budraiya was known all over the village by his nickname Chuchru. He was such a stay-at-home that it was impossible to see him outside the house except at sunrise and sunset when he went to empty his bowels. He occasionally went outside on an errand or two, but that too was quite rare. He had an idiotic look on his face, always kept sucking his thumb, and readily ate whatever he was given. My uncle was quite sharp and belligerent, ready to pick a fight at the drop of a hat. So his son’s idiocy and the habit of sucking his thumb bothered him a lot. One day, he started beating Chuchru with the whip used to hit bullocks. Chuchru neither screamed nor cried – he just started foaming at the mouth. That day onwards, Chuchru was left to his fate. I wondered who had recruited Chuchru as an SPO. Or had he been recruited at all?
The third statue was that of my cousin, Sodi Adama, the son of my mother’s brother Sodi Budhra. The relationship between my family and my mother’s family was strained, mainly because of the greedy and sly nature of my father. My mother’s brother did not like him at all. Our families hardly met, and I got to meet Adama only at the haat or some social gathering. He was an earnest boy, hardworking and truthful. He never loitered or wasted time at the haat. He came there to sell the fish he caught from his pond or the vegetables and watercress he grew on his farm. He was very careful with money, but he did treat me to tea and bhujiya.
I could not recognise the fourth, the fifth and the sixth statues. Perhaps the men were not known to me. But upon reading their surnames on the plaque, I could tell that they were related to one another.
Excerpted with permission from I Named My Sister Silence, Manoj Rupda, translated from the Hindi by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, Eka/Westland.