A Danse Macabre Exclusive
Excerpts from
Footprints in the Bajra
a novel by
Nabina Das
Sheherwali: Visit to Durjanpur
“If you misrepresent them, they’ll abduct and kill you,” says Muskaan, our hostess, who swats my attention as though it were a distracted fly bumbling over a new odour. All the while she keenly observes my face as if I am wearing a mask to cover up my reaction. In reality I try to peer at myself in a small mirror on the wall. I get unsettled by the jagged murals of the tigers and the hunters staring at me from that rough surface and wipe my kohl in the gradually failing evening light. She brings in a kerosene lantern and hovers over it. Kerosene lantern! I thought we had entered a new bright millennium. But I knew it while coming to this village that Durjanpur was a world of darkness and shadows that jostle in the slightest light. Muskaan notices my facial reaction, while sharply tugging at the glass chimney. The perked up wick turns her into a luminous paper lantern, the yellow attired-form quivering. My mind, the fly, flits, smarting from the flame.
“Abduct me?”
“Yeah, maybe not rape. They don’t believe in rapes. Abduct, yes. Kill certainly.”
Her voice is lispy and childlike. She is probably only a teenager, yet she speaks of such dangerous things that make me uncomfortable.
“How do you know what they believe or not believe in?”
Muskaan avoids my question. We are discussing our play that we brought from the city to this remote Bihar village. Then our conversations turn to the Maoists. It’s believed they are all around, permeating every shred of the tattered fabric of this feudal Indian society. Some accuse us of being sympathetic to those rebels in our play. We believe we are fair to all. Muskaan meanwhile warns me about the Maoists, how they can straighten up the city wimps. I am so frightened now that I can’t tell her how much I wanted to visit these remote areas. With our Graduation over, our campus theatre group – it is called Campus Theatre – had this plan for a long time. Besides, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. How much can one convince students who are used to ranting in cafés, bookshops and campus plazas? I mean, we needed to be at the right place, hopefully at the right time. My discomfort has my ears cocked to the sounds and the movements, which I would usually never catch. Outside the window, snippety bands of crickets assemble, sound testing their voices in intermittent croaks. Some few metres away acres and acres of bajra or millet plants taller than my five-foot-one frame sway as if somebody hiding in there was moving slowly, sideways and crawling. Used to slow-bleeding sunsets strung on city lampposts, I watch another evening. A mute sea of green, ochre and red where any single movement embodies all possible sounds – a blade of grass moving, a nameless bird nesting, an insect crawling atop the ear of the crop, a grain of pollen floating in the breeze and the scarlet sun getting a wash job at the day’s end. We watch together the evening slowly purpling – a glorious flower withered and shrivelled from the day’s brazen heat.
“Sheherwali!” Muskaan utters, sounding part disdainful, part in admiration, summing me up in that name. She lives in this village, a mere hundred-house settlement. “Tonight you get bajra breads to eat and yoghurt. That’s it,” she announces, “Don’t miss your city fare!”
I shrug in submission. I had befriended this young woman only since a day as we just arrived from Patna. The government circuit house was our first day’s stop, from where a bumpy long jeep ride brought us to Durjanpur. The name made me smile – ‘bad people’s abode’! Muskaan came to our first show at the village ‘mandap’ – a place for prayer congregations, social meetings and even civic affairs – where the sacred tulsi plant stood in a prayerful posture on a vermilion-plastered concrete pedestal.
***
“First time we had Muslims actually enter the mandap. It’s a first time,” said Suryakant Sahay, the local headmaster and community leader, after our show. It was on his invitation that we had come to this godforsaken village. “What we couldn’t do in decades, this theatre group from the big city did in an hour,” he smiled, shaking his grey beard.
I try to understand if that was said in encouragement. In a village like this, I would imagine everyone to be a little holed up, cocooned in their worlds, the way newspapers reported. They have clearly demarcated different levels of existence, which includes a Muslim world, an upper-caste world and a Brahmin world.
Muskaan had tugged at my dupatta, the long scarf, which I was supposed to wrap around my upper body respectably enough.
“You’ll be in the villages, small villages. They gape at women there. Especially the ones wearing jeans and shirt are just from outside the planet. Don’t at least let your dupatta slip,” I was warned before we came here. The tug made me turn back. I had expected a potential sexual harassment ensuing and instead saw the young girl. Dark as this tulsi plant, long-braided and small-built, with eyes like over-baked pottery shards, both sharp and brown.
“You look funny wearing a dupatta over your shirt,” she made her point, candidly.
It’s because of you, your men who would only have women make bajra breads at home, I wanted to say, but just smiled back. Invited to stay in the village, we had only too gratefully accepted the headmaster’s offer.
Later, as Muskaan comes into the room where I’m to sleep, she looks around. While I keep examining the intimidating mural on the wall, she sits down on a little stool and stares through the open window.
“Sheherwali!” her voice exudes mild banter, “Can you sleep alone here?”
“Yes, why can’t I? Look, I am a Sheherwali, a city woman, but my name is Nora, I already told you. Call me that.”
She ignores that and points at the window. The bajra fields often scare folks, she says. With its undulated, peculiar sounds and phantom shadows of moving images.
“The Maoists come and go,” she yawns. “Everyone knows. Some morning you may find a dead body or a discarded gun in there.”
Muskaan gets busy observing the ceiling in the lantern light. Our shadows, caught in the cobweb above, bounce and bob. That’s when I take notice of the bajra crop outside. Yes, I am right, the plants are as tall as I am. Some are a bit taller. Slender stalks with multiple limbs, ribbon-like leaves that quiver in the evening air and adorn the topmost spear of the plant that is not yet golden or brown with grains. With dusk still in hiding, they flash the dark-greenness across an immeasurable expanse. They heave strangely or so I think. Before I even wipe away my extra dark kohl for the last role I played in our street play, Muskaan rolls the tail-end of her long braid around her little finger and comments about our play. She fancies the storyline and the folk songs associated with it, but she warns me that we are in a sensitive area in the northern Indian badlands. Durjanpur has been in news for some wrong reasons.
“I’ll sleep on a mat here. You won’t feel a thing,” Muskaan thumps on the floor, with her back to me while I change into my pyjamas.
I’m in Headmaster Sahay’s house. He’s hosting our whole troupe. The men are to sleep in the outer hall, normally used for village meetings, community parleys or occasional after-school tutoring. I’m in care of Muskaan. I’d be happy not to sleep alone, my mind already troubled with eerie descriptions I hear from her. The darkening and stuffy August sky outside increases my restlessness. Dinner over, she rolls on the mat like a phosphorescent field mouse, her yellow clothes – she wears the traditional salwar kameez – reflecting the night’s light from the window. Her long braid stands out in her thin and small frame like a giant tail. There’s no electricity here, hence, no question of shutting the window on a warm night. What if a thief comes in or a robber? Or even a stalker?
“Sheherwali!” She giggles laced with irritation. “Go to sleep.
This isn’t like your cities; not here. Yes, there are robbers here – those are the traders and the landowners. And they rob you day or night, even if you lock yourself up!”
The window without bars or grills menaces me. “How do you feel safe then?” I ask as I fidget in bed.
“We sleep or else we talk. If you are not sleepy, then we will talk.”
Muskaan is not Suryakant Sahay’s daughter, we had learned earlier. An orphan, she came to live with the family – Sahay is a widower – about five years ago and is treated like a daughter. She helps the old gentleman in running the village school and carrying out household chores. Calls him mausaji or uncle. I’ll get to interact with her in between our shows, when we eat or when I come to sleep in my room. That’s the plan. She may even offer to take me around the village.
“Safdar and Nazim are happy,” I say, finding no other topic in my scared and sleepy mind. “Normally don’t you think Indian villagers would have been offended to see their tulsi mandap run over by folks of a different faith?”
“Ah relax,” Muskaan mildly reprimands me. “You city folks have this crazy idea. There is no Hindu-Muslim war here. There may be small tiffs at times, but no one runs over anyone. Ask my mausaji. He has been the headmaster for a long time here, even settles disputes at times.” Then she adds, “People here are more concerned about exploiters and their private armies. That’s a fight for power.” She lectures me rather eloquently.
“You are very smart,” I quip. “Why not go to college?”
Muskaan has been to school, she has passed the 12th class I’ve been informed.
“Mausaji is not rich, he’s just a village schoolmaster. I go to an evening college twice a month.”
“Twice a month! What sort of a college is this?” I sit up, “You need to be regular.”
“Of course I’ll be, someday.” She sounds irritated again. “Right now I do what is to be done.” With a certain authority, she signals me to lie down.
The bajra crop outside starts to rock and make a frantic grating noise, as if herds of people are running through it, berserk. Who knows, holding guns maybe.
“The rains are coming.” Muskaan twists on the mat like a glowworm, her arms and legs stuck close to her slight body giving it a cylindrical appearance. “Tomorrow you have an afternoon show at the school ground. I need to be up early to crush the wheat so that the flour gets kneaded in time before lunch.”
With that she rolls over, turns down the lantern flame and seems to fall asleep immediately. I blink on for a while and then close my eyes.
It doesn’t rain a drop in the next few hours.
***
Nora: With the Headless Goddess
We go from place to place in Durjanpur, to nearby villages in that temporarily parched but exquisite Bihar landscape, in schoolyards and open bazaars. We present our play to young and old, masters and servants, women and men. We drive by expansive bajra and wheat fields, breathtaking floral carpets of white sesame and purple bush beans, starving peasants clutching their ribs and staring at us by the roadsides and the motorcycle-borne landowners – supposedly the most powerful and influential folks in the region – asking us, the city folks where we are headed next. None of these rural folks have ever seen a street play where actors don’t wear flashy make-up or designer clothes but just a pair of jeans and a shirt, where a woman acts and touches the men and where no nachanias or dancers sway their hips to raunchy music – a staple adult entertainment by travelling troupes in rural north India. The very first day we arrived in Durjanpur, I remember kids went running helter-skelter announcing us to the villagers.
“Nachanias have come, nachanias have come!” They screamed, to which married women and young girls covered their faces with an extra hard tug of the dupatta or the sari-end and hookah smoking men sat in shock thinking old Headmaster Sahay has gone crazy inviting this impudent city bunch. We were bound to corrupt the good moral village folks. I am quite aware that nachanias connote immorality for them.
Also a woman – that is me – in our team adds to the confusion that the villagers find tough to hide. For them, decent women in the village do not go about anywhere with a bunch of men, unless they belong to the category of son, relative or client desirous of specific pleasures. My jeans and shirts also attract attention, as does my scarf briefly, which I wear for propriety’s sake only for about a week and then discard, generating more palpable shock. Our hectic schedule doesn’t allow me to wash my shoulder-length hair regularly, so I myself chop further around the mop with a pair of scissors making it look like a boy’s head. I thank my common sense for bringing a pair of sturdy sneakers. They literally keep me on my toes. It’s only when I come back to rest in the evening, that Muskaan amuses herself by examining my precious box of skin creams and moisturisers, the stuff that I religiously use for the fear of losing my feminine side.
“Ah, now I know why city women look so delicate!” Muskaan enjoys hurling banters at me. I give her a tube.
“Keep that for yourself, aloe vera and Vitamin D!” She laughs, the serpentine braid slithering on her back. Then poking me on my arm she says, “Sheherwali, if you chew tulsi leaves every morning, even your backside will not get pimples! Besides, the Maoists might still recognise you as a woman and not shoot.”
***
Muskaan’s mean jokes don’t rankle me as much these days. She’s a sweet kid, a little precocious. I’ve told her that. I’ve told her that she’s obsessed with her fear or the reverence for the Maoists. They may be around, they may target the rich and the powerful, but why should ordinary folks fear them? Why should we? So what if we’re city folks. As per the reports coming in, our play has been received well in and around Durjanpur. That’s a good impact. That’s what I wanted. That’s why I came here. To reach out to those I don’t know and won’t ever otherwise get to know. I always wanted to do this before I went away to New York for my new university education and job. Durjanpur and Muskaan will stay etched in my life. Not as scary, but as bright pictures. Contrary to what my former roommate Priya had warned me about. “Not Bihar please, don’t go to Bihar, Nora,” she had begged. Priya is a nice girl, twenty-five, with a naturally copper-toned oval face and long hair. Her field trips to very traditional villages required that she dressed a lot in plain salwar-kameezes and occasionally she changed to a well-tailored skirt suit to attend conferences in chic hotels. Every time she spoke, her attractive cheekbones rose and fell giving the impression of a fine statue suddenly come to life, a statue with almost invisible freckles on her chin, possibly from being exposed to the weather during her village trips. A bright student who recently graduated in microeconomics, I think Priya slightly underestimated, just a bit, my fervour for activism or even acting.
“So where do you think I should go?” I was a little peeved.
“Go to the big cities, the university campuses or, stay in Delhi!”
“And act in the plays only in the big cities? What’s the use?”
“Let intellectuals critique it. Support it. That’s how a movement is formed, no?”
“God, Priya!” I said, “This is a play about bonded labourers, mainly kids who are made to slave. Since it happens mostly in Bihar or in the adjoining states, we need to be there to raise awareness among people, not to cater to fancy urban theatre-goers.”
“Okay, okay. Do what you want. Jesus!”
Priya and I had spent years in the same room, come to pursue our Bachelors in 1995 and then completed our Masters this year, May 2000. She knew my passions well. In between my English major and her Economics degree on micro-credit, we sipped endless cups of tea discussing Eugene O’Neill, Anton Chekhov and Bertolt Brecht, even Dario Fo.
“You little radical!” She often teased me. “God knows why I talk stuff with you!”
“I’m glad you do. Not many people outside literature majors have such interests. C’mon Priya, admit you support my vision.”
“And what is that vision, Miss Rosa Luxemburg?”
“Hey, don’t pretend to be an unconcerned reactionary. You read Dario Fo!”
“So? I’ve set my mind on becoming a banker or a chartered accountant and make lots of money. Call me whatever, I don’t want to find myself in street protests and union meetings for the rest of my life.”
“Ideally, me neither. But… whatever.”
“Do your parents know you’re the only woman travelling to Bihar with the troupe?”
“Of course,” I said and smiled.
***
Things don’t turn out to be dreadful. The Ghost at the Altar runs into several shows. The play seems to have intrigued this sleepy region and its lethargic inhabitants. Not so sleepy really. Frequent ambushes by the Maoists, deep-rooted caste feuds and occasional Hindu-Muslim tiffs keep this place alive and awake.
All these influence periodic activities like elections, public works or other significant government projects.
“It’s a challenge to take a political play to the people here.” Suryakant Sahay tells us during one recess. “Some can really get angered by it.”
An orphan boy who lands up as a bonded labourer in a carpet factory breaks loose and also sets other children free. Denied compassion and justice, they form a group to retaliate on the system that refuses to change. This philosophy can lead to a flashpoint I am told. At one of the fairgrounds outside the village after the show is over, one sturdy man comes forward accusing us of propagating radical ideologies. As it is the Maoists have made our life hell, he grumbles. What more do you folks want now? We show him counterpoints. This way I’m sure this feudal society is shaken up in some small bits. Most fascinating are the local women who have rarely encountered a city woman before, other than in B-grade Bollywood movies that run in the crowded bazaars. Women here go out only with their families. After their initial curiosity subsides, these women approach me, run their course fingers on my arm and make sure I am not made of fragile porcelain.
“She is not even fair-skinned! So unlike the actresses! Such short hair she has!” They exclaim. Emboldened, they laugh. Often I have problems understanding their dialect except a few key Hindi words, but they nod and smile and examine my palms.
“She has never cooked, she has never held firewood,” the refrain goes, but they still smile at me.
Muskaan comes to my rescue at these moments.
“Halo, halo!” She shoos them away in the local dialect. “Learn from her play, you miserable wenches! You’ll be stuck with your heads inside the clay ovens while she’ll go study in America.”
She winks at me after delivering the concluding comment. She accompanies us to several places despite her nearly endless chores of crushing grains, fetching grocery and running sundry errands that require her to be away from home for hours. We’ve come to realise that Muskaan is also the right hand of the headmaster, Mr. Sahay. He heeds her opinion about several things. Although eighteen or nineteen, she’s capable of assuming the sudden demeanour of a forty-year-old from time to time. Sombre. Reflective. Angry. At those times, I feel troubled.
For the past three weeks, I’m no longer afraid of sleeping alone with the window open while the bajra rustles outside or with a musk shrew darting through a hole in the roughly plastered walls startling the alley cats waiting for the mice. Muskaan still accompanies me around the village. I even did a theatre workshop with the kids and another one with the women. I no longer imagine dead bodies in the fields, although Muskaan keeps sounding her warning now and then.
“Why do you still say that, Muskaan?” I look at her from the corner of my eyes while keeping notes of my travels in the country. We have this post-dinner chat almost every night when she tells me startling tales of a rural India which I’d never encounter once back in the city. In turn, I speak about my dreams of a life not subjected to predestined mores. My question elicits undefined facial gestures, pleasant or angry I don’t know.
“Don’t you think you should fine-tune your play a bit now that you have seen life here firsthand?” In a snap she sounds very grown-up.
Muskaan plans to attend her evening college the following day. She has invited our troupe to come along, insisting it will be a useful experience. I wonder what we might see there other than a few surly adult students, underpaid teachers and broken blackboards.
“Muskaan knows a lot of people even outside Durjanpur,” Headmaster Sahay says proudly the next day, encouraging us to go with her.
The so-called college is in a dingy little town called Banka, a few miles away by bus. Her classmates include a union fellow, a commercial painter, a widow and a social worker aspiring to find a job in Delhi. Maybe we can enrich our play from knowing them and help them too. We take the morning bus. It’s a day trip which involves doing some necessary shopping, eating at a place where electricity is not considered a rare commodity and maybe visiting a cinema theatre. Tired of doing shows, we sing and clap in the bus. Too long we’ve turned into contour-less forms in dim kerosene or paraffin pressure lamps, too long we’ve travelled over hard dirt roads where rugged jeeps routinely burst their tyres and rattled our bones, and for too long, we’ve walked on the mud banks between the slushy paddy fields to reach our destinations where macadamised roads are a perpetual myth. This, therefore, is a picnic.
***
The town of Banka with its jostling cycle-rickshaws ringing their bells in a bid to outdo each other, blaring bus horns and the paan-spitting boisterous crowd, looks a nice change. Chaotic. Cathartic for some of us after spending weeks in the village where the only local telephone is located in the headman’s house, the health centre is miles away – as is the police station – and the television is the news of the twenty-third century.
“Sheherwali.” Muskaan jibes. “So this is what you like, a crowded town? Dirty, smelly and pushy. Did you enjoy the movie?”
“Yeah, well.” I shrug, feeling good with my freshly shampooed hair.
“What about the greasy restaurant meal? I’m sure those electric fans overhead were a bonus?”
“Of course!”
“And you went berserk buying toiletries and what not!” She starts laughing.
“Muskaan,” I say. “I can’t live among the bajra all my life. Do you know I haven’t seen my reflection clearly in a mirror in the electric light for nearly a month now? Maybe I got blackheads on my nose, thousands of them, yet I can’t do a thing.”
“Alright, alright.”
She leads us into a weathered building near the busy Banka market, its sorry state highlighted by the gloomy yellow walls patchy with peeling plaster. We climb a crumbling staircase and enter a damp-smelling small room with a few desks and chairs, most of them unstable as we try to sit or lean on them. The walls are bare, save for a crumpled calendar depicting a workman-type fellow smilingly holding up a wrench-spanner-hammer-type of instrument in his grip. Hovering in the background is presumably the wife in a red sari, carrying an infant. A happy family. An ideal society.
Muskaan introduces us to the union guy whose looks befit that of an office executive or a businessman– tall, smooth and persuasive. His handsome jaw – sporting a starched shirt collar underneath and his bluish shaven cheeks– don’t betray any angst characteristic of the union leaders I remotely know. His probing glance scans my face for fleeting moments, oozing city sleekness. He’s not a villager. I start reasoning. No man in Durjanpur has looked at me like this till now.
“This is Avadhut.”
He uses only one name. We nod and greet each other.
“Meet our Sheherwali… a brave woman. Her name is Nora.”
I hope Muskaan is serious about the introduction. I’m grateful she remembers my real name although calling me ‘city woman’ is her pet jeer.
“She and her friends are here with their play. She plans to study creative writing, uh, in America, am I right?” Muskaan looks at me, patronisingly.
Avadhut – the name totters on our tongues – doesn’t seem to be impressed by the mention of America. Thirty-ish, suave and slow speaking, he sizes up our lot with eagle eyes. Among the adult students, the widow is a good-looking thirty-year-old. Probably she comes here for the alert dashing Avadhut with his prominent sideburns, I think rather slyly. The commercial painter and the social worker chat in a low voice, they don’t seem interested in us. I’m a little surprised for I hardly see any books around. Probably evening colleges are like this all the time. I’ve never been to one.
“Where’s your teacher, Muskaan?”
The teacher is absent today. Avadhut will lead the class, she informs me. Is he a qualified teacher? No, but he does such part-time teaching. Apart from the union leadership. I find it strange.
“Shouldn’t we be going?” Safdar nudges.
But Avadhut has something to say. He requests us to do a show in a place close to Durjanpur. We haven’t been there because we were told it’s a trouble spot, known for political skirmishes in the past. No one might also come to our show there, Sharan argues.
“No, that’s not true.” Avadhut raises his eyes and repeats. “Please come there. That’s a meeting ground for peasants, traders, potters, weavers – both the villagers and the townspeople. I’ll personally make sure you have the best audience ever.”
Fine. As long as it’s not too far from Durjanpur, our base camp, it should be fine. Sharan gives in and nods. We all nod.
“Now go eat more golgappas or chaat. You won’t find all that in Durjanpur. And come back in an hour, okay?” Muskaan hurries us out, not waiting for us to say anything.
Later in the bus, sitting next to me, she hums a tune. I feel sleepy.
“Just a one-hour class?” I mumble drowsily, under the influence of a butter-naan-chicken-tikka lunch, “Is that enough for you? You need to be in a full-fledged college.”
“I will, I will.” She stops humming, and stares in the style of Avadhut. Probingly.
In a green outfit, she looks like a tender bajra shoot. I want to ask more but I doze off.
***
Avadhut didn’t lie. The place where we have come for our show tonight seems well attended. I’m told it’s a junction between the village of Durjanpur and a weekly market called Chinnamasta – ‘the headless one’. Although the name of a Hindu deity, I coil up hearing such a name.
“So, Sheherwali, do you know there used to be a temple of Goddess Chinnamasta over there? In olden times, they performed human sacrifices. The British colonial rulers got it stopped. Even then for many many years dacoits and thugs made the derelict temple their hideout, to pounce on passers-by,” Muskaan says.
“Now?” I wrap around my bright scarf protectively. I deem that piece of fabric to be necessary at this new venue, attended by hundreds, nearly all male.
“Now there’s nothing but the name,” Muskaan says, “You can rename your play The Ghost at the Chinnamasta Temple if you want!”
She’s obviously joking, knowing I’m a chicken, scared of whispers or shadows. Our nightly chats have familiarised her to the vulnerable sides of city women like me. Avadhut has made sure there’s enough light all around. Those archaic things called paraffin pressure lamps or simply ‘petromaxes’ to the locals, glow with their sizzling bright white auras. We stand in a clearing with mammoth trees hovering at a short distance. Someone can even climb up those trees and watch us – or easily, pounce on us like in the olden times. I let my imagination rest and start concentrating on the play. I have three roles. First, a mother who dies leaving an orphan boy, then, a socialite who fusses on bonded labourer kids being freed, and finally, I become the metaphor of an uprising or an angry goddess or time – whatever one may like to interpret.
“Uncle Sahay – your mausaji – didn’t come,” I casually comment before I leave Muskaan’s side.
“Ah, yes, for him this place is a little too volatile. If something goes wrong it’ll be tough for him to handle. Anyway, you go start your play.” She virtually commands me. “Don’t expect me soon after it’s over. I got to watch a couple of things.”
She vanishes. I strain my eyes to see which way she goes, catching a glimpse of her clothes – she’s wearing yellow again, like the first day, her braid is helplessly twitching on her back. I also look around for Avadhut. He was seen a moment ago checking the lights, shouting instructions at the people. Our eyes did meet once. He looked very focused, as if he had prepared for an exam or something, his forehead slightly taut and the handsome mouth pressed tight together. I can’t see him again now, but he must be watching us perform. Our voices ring in that empty clearing and bounce back from the looming trees and the massive human border of the arena as we sing and say our lines. The audience oohs and aahs. The petromaxes on the bamboo poles hiss as their flames burn noisily, like snakes coiled over those posts. Our shadows hop, skip and jump over the red terrain and suddenly I lose my concentration. I see the Chhinnamasta’s shadows, headless and menacing. But wait, I am the goddess in this play. I am the symbol of human spirit and boundless time. I’m quite sure it’s an illusion that takes over my mind, when a burning arrow swoops into the arena and hits a wooden box, one of our meagre props. It bursts into flames. Commotion spills all over. Light and shadow jostle to find an escape route and people circling the arena heave, push and run in all directions. Our whole team stands frightened in an unscripted freeze.
“The landowners’ army has come, run!” Screams a man picking up a stick.
I want to imagine this as an extension of our play, a dramatic sequel. Nazim and Sharan pull me away. Others scamper. Another burning arrow swoops down, this time striking down a petromax lamp. It bursts like a bomb. Seems I’m watching some corny Western without the customary ‘yee-haw’.
“Move on, come with me!” Avadhut comes rushing from nowhere. His handsome stern face sweaty and angry. He shouts back instructions in the local dialect and a mass of people behind us rise like a giant wave at unseen enemies in the darkness that dwells outside the lighted arena. The primordial trees not so far away shake violently, as if possessed by a spirit. I actually see men leaping off the branches with machetes in hands. Now I shudder. Are these the loyal men of Goddess Chinnamasta, the headless one? The medieval dacoits Muskaan was talking about? Where is Muskaan in this melée? Avadhut ignores my concern and escorts us, urging us to whisk up our pace. I can’t hear my own voice against screams that seem to chase us like a twister. We run clear of the arena to wherever Avadhut takes us. My scarf slips behind me.
“Don’t look back, don’t look back…” Avadhut pants.
We speed past the great trees, past red mounds of soil and pebbles that feel like roller blades under our feet and before I realise, we enter a bajra field.
At once dense and dark.
The shoots spear the darkness to rise above. I feel moist soil underneath my feet and slip every so often. The rustling sound within the crop that greets us reminds me of a vast sea busily sifting its sand. We helplessly drift inside the tossing dusky mass.
“Are these Hindus come to hunt out Muslims?” With blood curdling shouts falling behind us, Safdar at last finds his voice.
“No, no!” Avadhut doesn’t slow down.
“What is this landowners’ army?” Sharan’s words tremble. “Who are they attacking? Are there Maoists here too?”
The bajra plants spin around us in a trance of dervish dance and us with it. The sharp leaves scratch my cheeks.
“Don’t talk,” shouts Avadhut in a whisper, “We aren’t out of danger yet.” He looks back.
As if to complement his comment, pandemonium ensues behind within the dense bajra field where we passed. A flare soars too, maybe another fire arrow.
“Damn, can’t be that they are caught up with us here,” his face a black orb in the moonless night, he swears heavily. For a second he stands still and tries to hear something. Then he whistles. We huddle together fearing marauding men swarming all over us. A whistle floats back and we run again, pushed by Avadhut. I start whimpering, almost weeping. A scuffle probably takes place not far behind us on the moist soil.
“Oh my god, oh my god!”
I finally let my tears and words flow and feel howling is the only way I can remain safe. I miss home, the electricity, my carefree city life, seeing my face again in the mirror and even Muskaan for some confounding reason. Just then, a gunshot goes off nearby deafening me momentarily. A yellow flash – recognisable even in the dark – sweeps me into the ominous bajra crops. I choke on the smokiness and the suddenness of what I see. I ignore Avadhut, follow the direction of the bullet sound and get deeper inside a territory where I’ll never go again. I see a small dark form inside the crop, illuminated only by its lemony attire. A country gun smokes from her hands. She crouches like a tiger with its tail not thumping, her long black braid resting by her.
“Sheherwali,” she whispers. “Now that you’ve found me out, stay with me.”
***
I have no idea what has happened. I’ll know later. Shivering by Muskaan’s side, I hear whistle after whistle float back and forth, birdcalls in the dark of night with only fire shots flying over my head. Finally, the shots dwindle and fireflies fill the space above our head. Muskaan relaxes from her crouching position.
“Man, this was tough, but we can’t let our mission fail.” She wipes her forehead with her sleeves, and adds while still scowling, “Why didn’t you go with Avadhut?”
I stare at the gun. What mission is she talking about? Is she… a Maoist?
***
I will come to know in the far future that it was a mission in which we were the unsuspecting players – our whole troupe from Delhi. In front of those hundreds that had gathered near Chinnamasta’s Temple that night, Avadhut’s gang had hatched a plan to abduct a prominent landowner’s son. It was part of a vendetta that had complex layers for us to understand. Our visit to Durjanpur and the stay at Headmaster Sahay’s house only helped the scheme. The elderly schoolteacher could not be implicated but some say he was the ‘moral’ force behind the appalling crime. Our role that night – unknowingly – was to lure the victim into Avadhut’s lair. The young man – either a Brahmin or a Rajput or a Bhumihaar, for those were the groups that were engaged in constant feuds with the lower castes and so-called social renegades – had been abducted and killed by Avadhut’s band of comrades, the dreaded Maoists. The young man’s body was found thrown deep inside the bajra fields, between Chinnamasta and Durjanpur, his throat slashed. Naturally, Durjanpur was again in the news, for another bad reason.
***
“You need to run faster, Sheherwali.” Muskaan tugs at my wrist, “We must find the right direction and get away before it is dawn.”
We have been in the labyrinth for god knows how many hours, going round and round. I find myself scurrying again through the great tangle this vast bajra field is. Darkness before dawn is always so imposing. I feel it for the first time, for it doesn’t betray there could ever be a trembling morning waiting, grateful in collecting the soft light thrown its way, with the happy realisation that it has another day to pass. Brambles tug at my feet while Muskaan keeps running, hardly looking back. She seeks out the alleyways inside this green cover of fearful deeds, darting between shoots and leaves and stalks. I try hard to keep up but I miss her footprints. And then I fall, actually slip. I lie face down on puddles of water or slush.
I spit mud.
“What have you done!” Hearing me go down Muskaan turns.
I totter and wipe my face. I taste saltiness with the mud – a saltiness I’m not used to. Clammy, bitter and animate. Fresh human sap.
“We could’ve got you an early bus to the train station. Now you’ve stained yourself with blood all over,” she hisses. “You don’t want the police after you.”
We can’t return to Headmaster Sahay’s house. We must find Avadhut and the others. We believe the fireflies will lead us to wherever they are. Away from the inert corpse lying on the damp soil. Away from Chinnamasta’s country. I follow Muskaan like a wounded tigress, this time without tears or fears.
* * *
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