The same day I had planned and conducted an operation of epic proportions and eliminated one terrorist using a multi pronged covert operation. We waited for the civil administration to take over the body after inquest and necessary formalities. The operation was conducted in the afternoon and by 1300h we had the militant in a heap of bullets with blood oozing from all over his body.
When there was no news from police or the Magistrate till about 0200h the next morning, we started evacuating the now half decomposed body through the dark expanse of the hinterland towards the nearest police station about an hour’s walk away.
It was sometime around 0330h that we reached the police station. The Police station was a battle zone. The Commissioner, and police heads were bandaged from stone pelting and mob lynching. There was an eerie quite as these men who hours back ran an entire district were caught in the middle of a storm. I guess they were replaying the evening’s incidents to get some solution on whether their actions were justified. The story was that during the demonstration when the policemen were hacked to death, the remaining policemen in a bid to save themselves had opened fire killing almost 10 civilians including women and children. More embarrassing was that the crowd had managed to rob the police of a few weapons and radio sets in the chaos. To top it all, during my operation there were almost 10 more terrorist who were cornered in the area where we conducted our operation. In a bid to escape they used a human shield of over hundred local villagers and escaped towards the south. This mob in its wake burned the railway station and post office in the main road axis down. Things were real bad when the district commissioner started working out a solution on curbing further chaos by declaring curfew in likely flash points in the area. As a young officer I too was there and advising them on the strategic requirement of enforcing curfew in a pattern more likely to be effective.
What followed for the next couple of weeks was a dawn to dusk curfew, enforced in and around our base by my team. We were an effective lot and left the colony adjacent to our base free to move around while we cracked down heavily on the other important township nearby by sending regular patrols in and by using psychological means of enforcing curfew. The funny thing was we didn’t even touch a single person. It was sometime during this period that the army took a back seat in operations and my interaction with Lalit and Momi dwindled.
Lalit mistook this two month long break and felt as if the army was leaving him on the lurch to fend for himself. He was going through depression. Somewhere in the market he was threatened not to go back to his village. He had started drinking at local shops. Something he never did.
I remember him coming over to my place one day sloshed and in tears and pouring his heart out. He was crying on everything from the militants threatening him to why I wasn’t calling him. He felt as if a life line was missing. I took him to our Commanding Officer, an officer with vision and true grit. He was asked to come over the next day with his wife early morning to the unit’s temple.Even I was surprised the next day when he came over with his wife to the temple and our commanding officer coerced him to give up drinking completely and take care of his wife. He was made to take an oath at the temple altar. Lalit broke down and took the oath and Momi wept when she saw her husband’s resolve and determination. For us it was almost childlike innocence and the beauty of it all as I admired a simple step my CO had taken to bring back the essence of their marriage.
Everything seemed to work like a dream. Momi and Lalit came a few days later with garlands and homemade sweets for our commanding officer who had saved them both in ways only they knew. Lalit Momi seemed back on track. The honesty evident in their eyes made me feel good on how things had turned out.
It was the festival season there. There were drums being played through the night, Cultural dances and singing spread love and joy everywhere. There were only a couple of more days before we were getting posted out and we were celebrating our raising day with pomp and show.
It was sometime in April.
It was sometime during this phase of revelry that we went all out to live the last few days at an unreal place of good and evil. It was one such drab evening while we were at the badminton court. We were playing vigorously under focus lights illuminating the court, when I got a phone call from one of Lalits relatives whom I had met at one of the festivals dance and singing shows. I was trying to be courteous and was greeting him with my broken local dialect when his words horrifyingly registered.
Lalit was shot when he was on his way to hi mothers place to give them sweets as per traditions in vogue. Lalit was shot, I asked him if he was still alive. I asked him where and when, as emotions and angst slowly took over. My commanding officer saw all this and came over worried. I was thinking of how to break the news of Lalit’s incident to his wife Momi, when his cousin broke down on the phone and said Momi was also shot with Lalit,... They were returning together from his mothers village on a motorcycle.
The next few moments were a blur and daze as I shouted orders to get a quick reaction team well equipped for a little war to get geared and mounted on vehicles. My CO and I along with the doctor started for the location where the incident had occured in three vehicles and an ambulance.
It was a dry and dark evening as we reached the spot. Lalit and momi were lying about fifteen meters apart in a gruesome scene. Both had bullet wounds all over their bodies and both were very much dead. Momi had been five months pregnant, made it so much more painful. An entire family wiped by evil. The motorcycle lay at one end with their belongings strewn all over.
There were over sixty or more women and a few odd men there silently mourning. They were sitting along the muddy road and crying silently as if in fear that their sobs would not be taken properly by the militant cadres in the area. I was holding my wits together just like an officer was meant to before his troops. In a calm and composed way I went about the site recreating the scene and discussing with my CO on what course of action to follow. The cops soon arrived and were going through their rigmarole of recording a homicide. I slipped towards the civilian crowd standing there and spotted Lalit’s elder brother. I took him to a side and very calmly asked him in the local dialect as to who had done this. He was sniffling but kept shaking his head in ignorance. I was holding his shoulders as my black Bulgarian assault rifle slung towards a side. I looked into his eyes and said slowly,“this will Not end like this. I will not leave whoever did this”…
My voice trailed as involuntary tears welled up in my eyes and I broke into breathless sobs. I just couldn’t control myself as the pain of the episode drenched me in misery. In some hysterical way Lalits brother too broke down like a baby and in that darkness we were both holding each other like brothers and letting go of emotions. The womenfolk soon started crying as they saw an otherwise seemingly invincible soldier breaking down. The night was illuminated by only our vehicle headlights and torches, while the bodies were removed by friends and family for final tributes before their cremation scheduled the next day.
It was the evening of the cremation. Lalit and Momi were in stretchers, their Jaws tied with bandages and cotton stuffed in their noses.
I saw the bodies and shivers went down. I just couldn’t believe all this was happening. I wished it was all a nightmare and things would be better when I woke up. But the truth was me standing next to their combined funeral pyre as the flame caught on and in a blaze brought absoluteness to their death. As I stared at the leaping flames my resolve to get the perpetrators pay hell, built with a passion and fury I couldn’t fathom.
Nothing was the same again, or ever after. Nothing could change the gruesome way life played a joke on us. Just when things were working out, everything was snatched in brutality.
Three days later I had apprehended the chief perpetrator of the killings and held a public meeting in Lalits village to let him confess of his devilish intent before Lalit and Momi’s relatives. At the end of the speech I saw the anger and pain in people’s helpless eyes as they silently thanked what the army had done in days. For weeks after, I was drinking in my room and crying to myself as images of the couple flashed in my mind in overlapping sessions of cheerful living and brutally mutilated dead bodies. I could just think of them and I would break down as I felt I was to blame for their deaths. I was the closest to them. My successes had cost them their lives.
The actual perpetrators were still at large. I knew their names and their faces but within the next three weeks we were off to different lands. Till date if I speak to someone from these lands, I ask of these terrorists and what happened to them. The good news is not yet in. Maybe someday I will get to go back and finish what was meant to end ages back.
Until then, may Lalit and Momi’s souls Rest in Peace
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