The Punished by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-02-25T23:27:10+00:00

The Life and Times of Muskan Devi

ACCORDING to Titli Bai’s statement, Muskan had snatched the gold chain from her neck and cackled, ‘Give me that, whore!’

Titli said that as she lay drugged and bruised on the ground, Muskan made sure that her loud voice pierced some dark corner of her mind. ‘She wanted the trauma to go deep . . . right into my nightmares,’ she stated.

Tonight, though, it was Muskan herself who could not sleep. She pulled out her notebook from under her pillow and wrote ‘Ram’ on the page. She had started doing that out of necessity. The silence of prison life brought back such vivid memories that they threatened her sanity, so she wrote ‘Ram’ in her notebook every time she remembered something terrible. This one was the hundredth ‘Ram’ on the page.

No matter how anyone else might have judged it, Muskan firmly believed that her life as a bandit in the Chambal ravines had an intrinsic simplicity. You were either the victim or you victimized others out of revenge or necessity. But in prison, things got muddled. Because there was nothing to do, too many thoughts ravaged the mind so that the boundary between what happened to you and what you did to others slowly dissolved into one free-flowing experience of hell. And it did not matter whether you were the wretched victim or the victorious victimizer. The pain that she had inflicted upon Titli Bai now seemed as unbearable as the pain Titli Bai had put her through.

Unable to sleep, Muskan brought out the Bhagavad Gita from under her bed. The words lit up as she switched on the tiny booklight clipped on to the page. The Gita and the booklight were gifts from Faqir Chand, a ferocious dacoit with a Sufi bent of mind and her one true love.

The other women in the barracks snored in the darkness as Muskan read, once again, about how Krishna revealed himself to Arjun. She had been very young when she was kidnapped and taken to the ravines. She had learnt how to survive in that ruthless environment only by watching Titli Bai. Part of her had deeply resented her and part of her had simply observed and absorbed as Titli Bai unleashed her cruelty.

Muskan was beaten, dragged by the hair, starved and raped, and through it all she watched, learnt and plotted her revenge. She understood early on that as fearsome as they seemed, most of the men were to be used as props; you had to get close to one to end the other. While Titli Bai was heading the main gang with the sardar, Jabresh Yadav, Muskan decided to side with the rebel faction by marrying their leader, Mahendra Singh.

In a night-time guerrilla attack, they overthrew Titli and Jabresh.

As Muskan shifted on her thin mattress, she felt grateful. From sleeping under trees and inside caves in rocky ravines to sleeping on a firm but soft bed, the difference was unbelievable. She did not have

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.