A week had passed since Gibrail was released from Tihar. He looked frail, but his family was delirious with joy. Majeed set his heart on getting him married the moment he found a suitable girl, because life must go on.
Majeed took his son to visit Robin in Ranchi’s Birsa Munda Jail and Robin, with his inimitable humour, said, ‘See, when you were in jail, I came to visit you; now I am in jail, and you have come to look me up. Nothing is guaranteed in life because vicissitude is its essence.’ ‘You’ll be out this month itself, I have no doubt,’ said Majeed.
It was the beginning of winter and the weather with its touch of chill was wonderful. The fields were swathed in dew. The ripened paddy crop looks gorgeous in the morning light as did the many ponds and forests of trees around. Though it had many impressive buildings and markets, Ranchi still remained a glorified village.
Robin was at leisure to think and ponder and weigh the many moments of life that he had treasured after coming to
McCluskieganj. He likened his stay in the jail to the feelings he had had as a naughty boy in school. He remembered how sometimes when he and other children did not complete their homework, the teacher would punish them by holding them back after school hours. As most of the boys went home, they felt like rats in a trap. Then Liza would come to his rescue. Robin would smile to himself at that memory. His parents had visited him once in the jail. Liza had cried and cried and Dennis had said, ‘There’ll be no Christmas celebration in the village this year.’
During those six weeks, Robin interacted with other prisoners. At first, they were reticent to become friends with him because of his anti-national antecedents. But gradually they realized that he had been falsely implicated. His good nature won their sympathies. Robin came to understand the absurdity of the Indian penal system. Most of these incarcerated people were hardly criminals; they were more like petty thieves, who were languishing for years and years, emaciated and sick with no relief. There was one who had stolen a bicycle, and another who had stolen a buffalo. Neither had the means to pay for their bail. And so they remained prisoners for life. What kind of justice was that? Robin often wondered. Atoning forever for a small failing. And he, what was he atoning for?
Often at night, through the chilly quietness, Robin could hear Dhaani Munda, the buffalo thief, sing, ‘What sense does our birth make, even God has forgotten us, that is why I pray that he doesn’t send me back to this wretched earth.’
Then he would keep falling in and out of sleep, dreaming and waking in fits and starts. He missed Neelmani all the time. ‘We prisoners are the wretched rags that time helps to stitch and keep together, time is the master mender who stitches each day to the other.’ Over and over again, the investigating officers would question Robin on his links with the underworld, the Jharkhand separatists and the MCC. Robin would remain mute as always. His silence was worse than the lock that hung on the door of his cell. ‘If you tell us frankly about your links, you may even be set free but otherwise…’ the officers would say. But Robin, all he would give as answer was, ‘One day you’ll know the truth about me. I’ll be happy, SP Sahib, if I, an ordinary boy, could die in Ward No.5, where the great Birsa Munda breathed his last. To save his people, he gave his life. The greatest achievement of a human being lies in giving, but today’s leaders only believe in taking.’ Robin’s voice trailed and the inquiry team left him talking to himself. In the last few months, the entire country seemed opposed to the members of the Jharkhand Freedom Front or Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, whom they regarded as the damad, that is son-in-law, of the government mainly because of the special status they enjoyed. The opposition had led a no-confidence motion against the incumbent government for the third time in parliament, but the prime minister was confident of getting the vote of confidence in favour of the bill for the new state. The opposition knew that it was the members of the Front, who would support the resolution and get it passed.
Meanwhile, the happenings in McCluskieganj after Robin’s arrest began to unfold as Liza related to him, everything from the time he got arrested to how the police had lathi-charged the processionists and killed Mrs Thripthorpe, how Neelmani and Jennifer had received blows, how poor Miss Bonner had suffered a massive stroke from which she would probably never recover.
Robin thought that his suffering in jail was nothing in comparison to what so many innocent, almost saintly people had suffered for him. He knew that his father had not left a single stone unturned for his release. Dennis, along with Major William, Mr Brown and Mr Rozario had established contact with both Patna and Delhi. Major William had, in fact, had quite a verbal spat in the lobby of the parliament with one of the MPs of the Jharkand Freedom Front. This latter had referred to Robin as a foreign agent. Major William had shouted, ‘It’s your fellows who are selling the country, you bloody brokers!’
Then Dennis and Liza said something that made Robin really happy. ‘We plan to settle here, son. Liza will go back to Hong Kong for a short while to shut home and close down our business. Then she’ll come back and we’ll stay in McCluskieganj for all times.’
This was as far as Robin was concerned. But the suffering of the Adivasis continued. Early one morning, the van from the Kanke Mental Asylum reached McCluskieganj. Leaving the van at the station, Pranav Chacha went searching for Neelmani and her mother to give the horrible news of Bahadur Oraon’s death. The two women were beside themselves with grief, they wailed and wailed. ‘Bahadur Oraon,’ said Pranav Chacha, ‘died of a massive heart attack. He couldn’t take the news of Robin’s arrest. It had shattered him completely.’
By afternoon the Adivasis from all the nearby villages had arrived. Even Saamu Munda, weak and debilitated as he was, came. If Duti Bhagat had been in front of them at the time, they would have riddled him with arrows. Khushia Pahan commented on how he now stayed put in Ranchi out of fear.
Neelmani, along with Dennis and Mr Mendez, accompanied Pranav Chacha back to Ranchi in the van. According to Oraon tradition, the body had to be cremated at Masna before sunset. All along, Dennis wept thinking of the past, thinking of what bad luck it was for him to lose both a mother-like
Mrs Thripthorpe and a friend in Bahadur Oraon. The days of peace were over for McCluskieganj. Hearing of Bahadur Oraon’s death, the MCC zonal committee of Chhota Nagpur had called for an emergency meeting in which it was announced that Duti Bhagat would be hanged by a ‘people’s court’. It had further warned that should the MLAs and MPs of the region wish to visit their constituencies, they could do so only after taking permission from Commander Hembrom.