I have met others who have a deep sense of honour. One cannot generalise. If you are interested particularly in Phoolan, you should see Rajendra Chaturvedi, who is now posted in Rewa. A fine officer.”

Pickingup the intercom on his desk, he asked for Chaturvedi’s office and residential telephone numbers, which he wrote down and handed to me. We had talked for a long time and I began to feel I was imposing on him. I had seen a number of people sitting on a bench outside, presumably waiting to see him. I got up, thanked him profusely and asked if I could get in touch again.

“Any time,” he said. “You have my number.” He rose and escorted me to the door. “By the way,” he asked as I was leaving, “have you read The Yellow Scarf, about Sir William Sleeman?”

I said I remembered it from childhood (there had been acopy in my father’s house), but it seemed to be out of print.

“You must read it again. We still use it as part of our syllabus in the Police Academy, you know. You may borrow it from our library if you wish, as long as you don’t go off to Bombay with it.”

I assured him I would return it within a couple of days and gratefully accepted the note her gave me for the police librarian.

Having collected the book, I set out to find Ashok. I went round in circles for half an hour or more; every scooter looked the same and I wished I had noted the number. Finally I recognized his two-tone shoes jutting out over the driver’s seat. He had fallen asleep, his face covered with a cloth as protection from the sun. Walking him, I told him to drop me at the hotel then take the rest of the day off. He reminded me that Moola and Rukhmini would be expecting “us”, but I felt too tried for any more conversation that day. I asked him to leave a message at their place that I would come early the next morning. I told him he had been absolutely right about Pathak Sahib.

That night in my hotel room I read The Yellow Scarf (The Story of the Life of Thuggee Sleeman or Major General Sir William Henry Sleeman, KCB, 1788-1856) written by Lieutenant General Sir Francis Tuker. Sleeman had been an officer in the Bengal Army and also in the Indian Political Service. I saw immediately why Pathak felt he was, historically, such an important figure. The record of his experience is invaluable to anyone attempting to understand the cults and tradition of present-day baghis. Much remained unchanged. Living replicas of the protagonists of old existed on both sides of the law.

For instance, the author recorded how Sleeman had brought to an end his either-year hunt for Feringheea, the Prince of Thugs, the “devil incarnate”, as he thought him to be. Having heard from an informant that Feringheea had gone with his family to a particular village, apparently organize new Thug incursions, Sleeman had sent instructions to the police that night to surround the house where Feringheea was known to be sleeping. “And remember this,” Sleeman had said, “the family is almost as important… Get me them, if you can’t get him, and I will have him in jail before winter’s gone.” At the last minute Feringheea had eluded his would-be captors but they did indeed secure his mother, wife and child, seeing to it that they were “comfortably ensconced” in Saugor jail. As a ploy to flush out Feringheea, it succeeded:

On bright morning in January 1831 there was a con-course of curious people standing round the great tree in the Saugor court compound. Among a group of armed police there stood a tall man, shackled ankles to wrist. He was the centre of interest. He appeared very tried but maintained his dignity, while some quality within him seemed to keep the crowd silent and at a distance. A police inspector broke away from the group and walked into the court-room where Captain Sleeman was sitting.

“Your Honour, I have brought Thug Feringheea. Shall I march him in?”

“Yes, bring him in,” and turning to his clerk: “Now you will see Shaitan (the Devil) himself.” Sleeman picked up a thick file, placed it before him and started to study it.

The guard marched the prisoner in.

“Sahib, Thug Feringheea,” announced the inspector.

Sleeman went on reading as though this prisoner were of no account. The minutes ticked on till at last the British magistrate looked up at the man before him. With a slight start Thuggee [Sleeman’s nickname by then] realized that this limb of Satan, whom he loathed beyond all things, had dignity, self-possession, and commanded attention. Looking casually out of the window he asked the Thug in Hindustani why he had come what he wanted. Feringheea replied evenly that he had come to demand the release of his family whom Sleeman held unlawfully…

Phoolan Devi’s mother had also been taken into custody unlawfully. She had told me how the police had held her as bait in the hope that Phoolan, hearing of her mother’s plight, would give herself up. It hadn’t happened. Both mother and daughter bore the punishment, having undergone many such hardships in the past.

Moola, from her account, had not been “comfortably en-sconced”. Police had arrived at her home in the village one day and driven her away in a police jeep for questioning. When she denied all knowledge of her daughter’s whereabouts, they had sent her to Orai Jail in Uttar Pradesh, on some sort of “holding charge”. There she remained for six months, in a tiny solitary cell.

“Shiv Narain was in school then,” she recalled, “but he would come every Sunday to see me, bringing milk and whatever food they could spare from home. I told the others not to come in case they too were arrested. I thought my son was safe, being a child, but then one day they started beating him, slapping him around the head and pushing him to the ground before my eyes. They said it might help me remember where Phoolan was. I was so shaken after that, I told him no to come back again because I could do nothing to protect him. So from then no, for the next four months, I saw no one from my family.”

She was repeatedly interrogated, sometimes at odd hours during the night. She was slapped and beaten, threatened and abused. On one occasion she was hit so hard she fell against the corner of a wall, cutting the side of her head open, and needed stitches.

“Finally, the police changed their tactics. I suppose they knew they couldn’t hold me for ever. I was taken to a room one night and asked to sit down. I felt afraid. They had never offered me a chair before. I began to cry, thinking they were about to tell me they had found Phoolan and killed her. Then the officer in charge put a whole pile of money on the table bundles and bundles of notes. I had never seen so much money in my life. He told me, ‘This is the reward the government is offering to anyone who can lead us to Phoolan Devi. You can have it all if you take me to her. Think of all you can do with it. You an educate your son and make your family rich.’ He told me to have a closer look. He told me to count it I didn’t touch that money. I didn’t even look at it again. Instead, I stood up and, touching my stomach, said, ‘My only crime is that I gave birth to her. You can shoot me for that if you like and you can shoot her too if you find her.’ Then I started crying again more out of relief than anything else. I knew they were about to let me go.”

It is still common practice throughout India, when dealing with the poor, to take a hostage from the family when the wanted person cannot be found. Such people have no recourse to the law since they know nothing about how it operates.

Although I had learnt much from my first visit to Gwalior, I knew I was getting nowhere in terms of meeting Phoolan Devi in order to interview her. I also knew that even if I did get permission to see her in jail, it would in all probability be a short visit, under conditions that would not enable her to speak freely or at any length. What I needed was many hours with her, repeated visits, in a relaxed environment. This was clearly not going to be possible. I discussed the problem with her family but they remained hopeful and kept telling me not to give up so easily. Phoolan had agreed to tell me about her life, she wanted to see me and spend time talking to me and that, they said, was significant in itself. Phoolan had refused to co-operate with many people in the past, including “Bombay film wallahs” who had apparently offered her large sums of money for the exclusive rights to her story. I was greatly reassured by all this but still could not see a way forward. Then, out of the blue one night, an idea occurred to me. If Phoolan couldn’t talk to me directly, she could tell her story to someone else who could write it down for me. I had experienced her way with words the day I met her and was impressed by the way she had spoken to the press in the past. At the time it seemed a little far-fetched but there really seemed no other alternative.

When I spoke to Moola and Shiv Narain about it the next day they said it was possible. Moola said she would discuss the idea with Phoolan. For obvious reasons, I cannot describe how this was finally achieved but it was achieved, over a period of almost three years. If any of us had known at the time that it would take that long, we probably wouldn’t even have attempted such an arduous process. All Phoolan asked me was where she should begin and to clarify, as we went along, what I needed to know in order that I might do some justice to her story. She has always felt that the press never understood her, never gave her a fair hearing. Much of what is to follow is based on these “prison diaries”, which I received in instalments, handwritten in Hindi by a variety of scribes.

To fulfil my part in the scheme of things as they had evolved, I took Pathak’s advice and made arrangements to travel in the ravines with members of her family and other people I would be working with.

I left for Delhi, saying I would be back soon, as Phoolan Devi got down to the task of telling her story.

The Hora Field

THE NEXT TIME I arrived in Gwalior, I found that Moola had just left for her brother’s village in Uttar Pradesh; Shiv Narain couldn’t take any leave just then and Rukhmini was keeping the household going, cooking every day for her brother, her children and her youngest sister, Munni, who had returned from another relative’s village. To earn a little extra money, Rukhmini was also working part-time in the police grain store, separating wheat from husk by hand, for seven rupees a sack. Her hands were lacerated but she made little of it, saying, “I am accustomed to such work. Shiv Narain’s salary won’t support us all.” In fact, she said, she was grateful to have found some sort of job. She knew many in the city who couldn’t and, besides, Munni, who was about twelve by then, had taken over all the washing and cleaning and could look after the children when she was out. Clearly, no one was in a position to travel with me so I decided to hire a jeep and go on alone. My first stop was Bhind. There had been one important breakthrough; I had the first part of Phoolan’s diary. Half a notebook, to be precise: paper was precious so the exercise book had been neatly divided in two. As I travelled, I read.

It began like this:

“My name is Phoolan. My parents were very poor. We were five sisters and one brother and my parents found it difficult to bring up six children. My father would work the entire day and in the evening come back with food for us and only then could my mother cook to feed all of us. It was out of these meagre earnings that they saved up for the court case. I had often heard my parents say that the lawyer asked for too much money and where would the money come from? I remember asking my mother, ‘Who is a lawyer? Why does he ask for money?’ And from her I learnt this story.

“My father was one of two brothers. His name is Devidin and his older brother was Biharilal. My uncle has a son called Maiyadin. My father is illiterate bus his brother was not. Without his knowledge, my uncle had bribed the sarpanch, the headman of the village, who kept the land records, to transfer all my grandfather’s property into his name. Ignorant of this, my father kept toiling on that land and it was only after he had reached the ago of nineteen or twenty that he asked for his share. It was then that the two of them my uncle and my cousin turned him out of the house and my father was forced to build a small hut on the outskirts of the village. They took over the land and my father did not get any share of either the 80 bighas of land we had in the village, or the two-storeyed family house that my grandfather had built.

“At first, my father appealed to the village panchayat the elected council of the village to help him get his share of the land, and meetings had been called to discuss the matter. Biharilal denied in the presence of the whole village that my father was his ‘real brother’. He said he was a servant on whom he had taken pity. The villagers who knew our family didn’t believe this and advised my father to file a suit, which he did, but Biharilal kept winning on the strength of his money. Sometimes my father would make some headway. Because of this my uncle and Maiyadin continued to harass them. They wanted to drive my parents out of the village so that they would have no further claim to the land.