It was life, finally, that unhinged him and sent him fleeing from the revolution, from Comrade Jansevak and the PAC, from Bihar. The platoon leader who had taken Aadil on his first ambush was now an area commander, and Aadil was allowed to know his name, Natwar Kahar. Natwar Kahar operated in Jamui and Nawada mostly, aided by a second-in-command named Bhavani Kahar. This Bhavani, who was just twenty-four, was a distant relative and special protégé of Natwar Kahar's. Natwar Kahar had inducted Bhavani into the party when he was a young boy, and groomed him as a soldier and potential party leader. The boy had charisma, and he was fearless. On Diwali night, young Bhavani was picked up by the police in the village of Rekhan. Bhavani was deep in a drunken sleep in the house of a woman, a widow, when the police found him. And so handsome Bhavani disappeared into the grinding jaws of justice, and Natwar Kahar was left raging. The police had obviously received a tip-off, a very specific one. Natwar Kahar examined his suspects, all the villagers, and he finally settled on Bhavani's woman. She was the only one who knew that Bhavani would come to her bed that Diwali night, that he had a weakness for good rum. She had sent her two children to her mother's house, and that on Diwali night. So Natwar Kahar had her seized and brought up to his camp. He asked for her name which was Ramdulari and then he asked her for a confession. Ramdulari protested, she was innocent, she would never do such a thing, and especially she would never betray Bhavani. She was a tall woman, Ramdulari, not beautiful but with a long, lush body and a fast walk. Her husband had died of kalazar during a flood some eight years ago. She had raised her two boys, and maintained her house and survived. When she spoke to Natwar Kahar, she had her head covered but she looked very directly at him and did not beg, or tremble, or look afraid. Natwar Kahar insisted on a confession, and she shook her head, and spoke back at him impatiently, saying that Bhavani was dear to her, as much as he was to Natwar Kahar.
So Natwar Kahar convened a people's court that very same evening. Ramdulari was tried, the evidence was examined and she was convicted. She again refused the chance of confession and self-criticism. The sentence was, of course, death, as it always was for betrayal. But Natwar Kahar wanted to make an example of Ramdulari. Instead of proceeding with the customary beheading, he cut her a little at a time. The next morning he called the squad together, and in front of them he cut off all her toes and fingers. He did it with a small kulhadi which was kept about the camp for stripping poles and saplings. She screamed, and bled, and Natwar Kahar laughed and had the camp doctor attend to her. 'Keep her alive,' Natwar Kahar said. The doctor was not really a doctor. He had once been a compounder, and he had never encountered multiple amputations. But he had some experience with bullet wounds and cuts, and Ramdulari survived. She was very strong. They kept her in a pit behind Natwar Kahar's shack. She was given food regularly, and it became something of a camp amusement to watch her try to eat with the pads of her hands, and bend double to lick up grains of rice from the dirt.
Aadil saw Ramdulari three weeks after her trial. He hadn't believed the story when he had first heard it, about Natwar Kahar's punishment of the informing whore. He thought it was good propaganda, effective in preventing the Bhavani Singh situation from occurring again. Even when Aadil came to Natwar Kahar's camp, to pick up a delivery of cash, he did not think to mention the woman. He thought she was dead and the matter closed. He had finished putting the plastic-wrapped stacks of notes in his jhola when Natwar Kahar asked, with a grin, 'Do you want to see Ramdulari?'
Aadil didn't know whose name that was, and Natwar Kahar explained with a proprietary pride. Aadil followed him, the bag heavy over his shoulder. The stench from the pit pressed at Aadil's face, but Natwar Kahar walked on, unconcerned. They stood overlooking the sloping hole. At the bottom, in the moist yellow and brown mess, there was a large moving object. Aadil couldn't make out what it was. It was neither human nor animal, nothing that he had ever seen before. It moved in sideways jerks and spasms, something like the little crabs that popped up from the sand on the river's edge. Then Aadil's head swam softly and lifted, and the sun shifted its arc, and he saw that below him was a woman, but strangely attenuated. She was not complete.
'We cut her at knees and elbow four days ago,' Natwar Kahar said, chopping at his arm with the edge of his hand. 'I thought for sure she was gone. There was too much blood. But the bitch won't die.'
Ramdulari was looking at Aadil. He felt himself swaying, unable to look away. Her eyes were enormous and dark and remote, and he could read nothing in them, not pain or sorrow. The dark hair wrapped around her face and her lips drew back. She was saying something. But what? He was sure she was speaking. He couldn't hear her, not past the roaring that came from inside his body, everywhere, his arms and legs and stomach, like the flapping of a thousand wings. Natwar Kahar was saying something. What?
'If we put food and water on the other side, over there, she crawls. It takes hours, but she gets there. She just won't die.'
Hearing Natwar Kahar's voice, hoarse and low, broke Aadil's trance. He was able to look away. Natwar Kahar was watching Ramdulari, and he was almost admiring, almost respectful. He was rubbing his chin. Aadil heard the scrape of his fingers over his white stubble. Natwar Kahar said, 'She's as strong as a horse.'
Aadil reeled away. He found the support of a tree, and vomited at its roots. He finished, and Natwar Kahar was waiting for him, one arm folded across his chest, the other smoothing out his moustache.
'It was the smell,' Aadil said. 'Very bad.'
'Arre, Professor,' Natwar Kahar said, smiling widely, 'after all these years you're just the same.'
Aadil didn't assert his toughness, his many ambushes, his operations, he did not argue. All he wanted was to be out of Natwar Kahar's camp. He left within the hour, even though it was long before darkness. He took his bodyguards and left, and pushed hard all night, down the paths and across the nullahs. They reached their safe house in Jamui town early. The boys slept, but Aadil sat by the window and watched the road. He was afraid to shut his eyes, because when he did so a crawling began under his skin, a jerky sliding that terrified him. He wondered whether he had remained the same, or whether he had changed. At two in the afternoon, when the heat came off the ground in billowing breaths, he slipped out of the door. He left the bag of cash he had collected from Natwar Kahar on the floor of the front room, and took nothing with him, not even a pistol. In his pocket he had eight thousand rupees, his Rampuri knife and a driver's licence in the name of Maqbool Khan. He went to the station, bought a second-class sitting ticket for an express train, and was in Patna at a little past six-thirty. He went straight to the ticket counter, paid four hundred and forty-nine rupees, and sat on the platform until his train got in at eleven-twenty. He did not have a reservation, so he squatted in the corridor in an unreserved coach, squeezed in tightly amongst a wedding party. At Jhansi, he got out of the coach, and bribed a sleeper berth out of the ticket collector. Then he slept. The motion of the train somehow countered the agitation in his body, and he was able to doze whole afternoons away, getting up only to use the bathroom and drink water. In a little more than fifty hours, he was in Mumbai.