Phoolan then thanked my guide and informed me he was on bail and had once been a member of her gang. He left, just as casually as when he had followed me and led me to her.

I entered the “cell”. It was more like a broken-down barn. A male prisoner, wrists and ankles manacled in heavy iron chains, sat smoking. Phoolan Devi was not handcuffed and looked completely relaxed. About ten armed guards filled this 12-by-6-foot room.

Phoolan and I sat close together on a rickety corrugated-tin sheet that covered what used to be a sink. It wobbled every time either of us moved. We clutched each other to regain balance and laughed. She examined my clothes, telling me her favourite colour was pink. She played with the glass bangles on my wrist. She touched my hair and placed her elbow on my knee. I began to understand that, unable to speak her mind in the presence of armed guards, she was checking me out without words. Sensuously, deliberately, instinctively, as an animal would do. I relaxed. I knew she was testing my reactions, my fundamental response to her, cleverly and deftly, without clarification or explanation.

Dressed in a bright yellow nylon sari, she wore a gold ring in her left nostril and my silver chain round her neck. She fondled the chain, tilted her head and smiled at me. No mention was made of the present I had sent her the day before and I realized that, whatever she might say, she was aware of the need to leave many things unsaid. She woe silver anklets and a black thread knotted round her wrist, amidst yellow and gold glass bangles, which indicated her participation in some puja or religious ritual. Her small, slender frame, the mobile expression on her face a tribal face with high cheekbones made her look almost like a child dressed up for some occasion. It was hard to imagine her with a gun. A rifle like those that hung from the male shoulders crowding the room seemed almost too heavy for her to hold, let alone use. Yet it was such a rifle that she had surrendered.

I was not sure what to say. I wanted to say how important this meeting was for me and to explain my purpose, but I felt inhibited as I eyed the guards. She followed my thought process; in a gesture of affectionate humour she thumped the man closest to her in the chest the one who had opened the door and said, “Don’t worry about him. He’s from my village.” We all laughed.

The man in chains began to interrogate me. “Where are you from? What do you do?”

I told him I was a researcher.

“What’s that?” he asked.

I added the Hindi word for “journalist” and he nodded in understanding, then began to tell me that he was one of the state’s most wanted killers. I felt Phoolan Devi nudge me in the waist with her elbow as we listened.

Suddenly, a female prison warden entered the cell. She said to Phoolan, in Hindi, with a sense of urgency, pointing at me, “They know she’s here. They’ve cancelled your court appearance so you have to go back to jail.” She handed a piece of paper to one of the guards.

As Phoolan left the cell, escorted by all but two of the guards in the room, I tried to assess the situation. The prison warden indicated that I should remain where I was. The male prisoner was still telling his ale, impatient about the interruption, trying to make me shift my attention back to him. He was very proud of his exploits and assured me that he had “political contacts”. He even asked me if I would like a cup of tea!

Several minutes passed before the warden returned to say that Phoolan was on her way out, near the gate. “They say she must go back,” she said with a shrug. Then, with a direct kind of simplicity, ignoring the others in the room she said, “She wants to know how long you will stay in Gwalior. There is someone she wants you to meet. You must speak to her mother.” I nodded and, without being able to thank her properly, rushed out of the door.

I raced through the courtyard, no longer self-conscious, unaware of the drama I was causing as I forced a passage through the crowd in order to reach the gate. I knew several tiny side streets led off it. They could take her in any direction.

The man in the lungi was at the gate and pointed me down a particular alleyway. I kept running till I saw the posse of police, surrounding a bright yellow sari. I shouted out, asking them to wait. They all stopped, looking somewhat confused, but I was not looking at them.

Phoolan Devi, still casual and relaxed, said, “Meet Amma. Don’t worry, we’ll meet again. Stay in Gwalior a few more days.’

I asked the guard from her village if I could talk to her for a few minutes. He said it was not allowed.

Phoolan interrupted my attempts to persuade him and said, “Talk is not important. What else do you want?”

“Photographs,” I said. “Proof that we have met.”

She stared me straight and square her strength is most definitely in her eyes and said, “Take them. Now. Then run.”

I did as she said, as fast as I could, knowing that a crowd was gathering behind me. She posed for me. It was over in a few seconds. One of the guards behind her was coming towards me, a look of irritation on his face. I took one last shot, we smiled at each other and then I took her advice and ran.

The attention I had drawn to myself made me feel vulnerable. Fotunately, I spotted Ashok on the road just outside the court gates He was talking to the man in the lungi. I rushed up to him and said, “Come on, we must move fast.” To the man in the lungi said, “If you see her mother or her sister tell them I’ll see them this evening.” He nodded as I turned to follow Ashok down another crowded lane where he had parked the scooter.

Later that day, I had made an appointment to see the Deputy Inspector-General of Police, Gwalior, Ayodhya Nath Pathak. I was tempted to cancel the appointment, being exhausted by the events of the morning and intimidated by the heat of the afternoon, but Ashok advised me against it.

“I’ve heard he’s a good man,” he said. It seemed he was fast taking on he role of my co-researcher.

He dropped me at the hotel and returned later, at 3.30 p.m. on the dot, knowing that the D I G was an “important” man and that punctuality was essential.

Police constables began to salute as I approached the D I G’s office. I nodded in acknowledgement, wondering what kind of tyrant I was about to meet. I was ushered into a vast room with vast desks, somewhat like a conference room. Portraits of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi adorned the wall at one end. Another, of Mahatma Gandhi, was decorated with a garland of fresh flowers. There were several phones but little clutter on the desk.

Mr Pathak, in his mid-forties, was like a gentleman-fox sharp, cunning, trained to monitor detail but very much a “gentleman”. He rose from his chair as I entered, folding his hands in a namaste, rather than shaking my hand. I felt clumsy, clutching my files and notebook, as I returned his greeting and sat down in the chair he indicated.

He came straight to the point. “I know you’re a journalist. What do you want to know?”

Amazed at his directness, especially after my meeting with the Commissioner, I blurted out, “I want to know whatever you can tell me about Phoolan Devi.”

He asked me if I would drink lassi and ordered two glasses. “So, you want to know about Phoolan,” he said, leaning back in his chair, a meditative look on his face.

“I want to know how you see her, as a police officer,” I explained, trying to take the emotional content out of the way I had begun.

“She’s an elemental woman,” he replied, “a kind of female Heathcliff.”

I was impressed. I had never heard a police officer talk in this way. “Have you met her?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, several times.” His response was casual as he rang a brass bell on his desk.

An armed sentry came through the curtains of a adjoining room. Pathak instructed him to tell the “secretary sahib” to bring him Phoolan Devi’s file from the C I D office. We drank lassi, I smoked cigarettes, he chewed tobacco and we talked.

He said he knew the family well and described Shiv Narain as a “bright lad”. He said he felt sympathy for Rukhmini’s situation and was trying to get Mathra Prasad, her eldest son, into the Police School as a cadet. “It means he’ll get some formal education and eventually go through the necessary training to be a constable. Have you met Phoolan?” he asked suddenly, so I told him about the difficulties I had faced in Bhopal and Gwalior. I decided it was best not to speak of my escapade at the court that morning.

I asked him how closely he was connected, workwise, with Phoolan Devi and he said; “I do what I can. Technically, she is in judicial custody so the police have no say, as such. Occasionally, I receive complains from her or members of her family and then I stop to consider what I can do to assist them.”

“So you want to assist?” I asked, somewhat foolishly.

“But of course,” he laughed. “I was born into a family of farmers. I understand these people. I also understand the powers-that-be in this society.” Then he told me a charming story about his first formal interview in Delhi, when he had applied for entry into a “government job”:

“Actually I had applied for the foreign service my mother thought that was the best, you see! After that the I A S [Indian Administrative Service], and my third choice was railways.”

I smiled. “So how come you ended up in the police force?”

“My name appeared on a list they had vetted the applicants for all these various jobs and I was placed accordingly.”

At the interview, he told me, he had felt intimidated by the snobbery of city people, who were familiar with things that he had never seen before. For instance, a closed door with a shiny brass knob. He had wondered if the knob had a purpose or was simply a decoration. It hadn’t occurred to him that it opened the door.

“When the interview was over, I tried to leave the room, pushing this unyielding door, much to my embarrassment. It wouldn’t budge!”

By this time I was laughing outright, enjoying the story. “What did you do?”

“Fortunately,” he replied, “before I could speak they rang some bells and a uniformed attendant opened the door from the other side. I told my mother I had failed the interview.”

Obviously he hadn’t, and had now reached the position of being one o the most highly-decorated officers in the Indian Police Force. There, too, another irony: his medals had been gained by shooting dacoits, tricked and ambushed by a network of contacts and informers.

I asked him whether he was drawn to literature and he said, “It’s one of my favourite things.” He quoted some lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, prefacing them with the comment, “This is as straight an assessment of the Chambal Valley as you will ever get:

…where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water…”

Quite something, I thought.

The file arrived and he began to give me some facts. Phoolan had made 27 demands at the time of her surrender. Her first criminal offence had been assault, when she was in her teens: assault against her cousin over the cutting down of a neem tree on her father’s land. Her parents were poor peasants caught up in a land dispute involving her father’s elder brother, Biharilal, who was now dead. He made no judgements about Phoolan, saying that a policeman’s job was to arrest a suspect, not to judge the prisoner. He was without prejudice in many ways. He told me I would have to travel to remote villages, talk to local people, understand the terrain and its culture, before I could understand Phoolan. Sound advice. He gave me the names of villages in the ravines that featured in Phoolan’s file for one reason or another. He talked of history and spoke of the legendary characters among bandits. He warned me against certain things.

“Don’t refer to them as dacoits when you speak of them among their supporters; you know it comes from the Indian word Daku which has disrespectful connotations. They prefer to be called baghis because they see themselves as rebels fighting injustice.”

“And do you think they are?”

I asked.

He laughed. “Now that’s a loaded question. After all, I am a police officer!” It was my turn to laugh as he continued, “It’s not as simple as that. Each case is different.