My uncle would keep the whole crop from the land in his house and even if my father worked somebody else’s land, on a crop-sharing basis, he would send his servants to reap the harvest at night when no one was watching and add the stolen grain to his own. He tried to undermine them whenever he could and, if my mother or father protested or lodged complaints, he would send goondas [hoodlums] to thehouse to attack them. This was all before any of us were born.

“Ever since my mother told me this story, I began thinking of the evil my uncle and cousin had perpetuated and I felt that fire of hatred. He who had four servants working for him, feasted on milk and jalebis while my parents survived on dry roti and water. I begged my mother to show me those fields which they had illegally occupied and she pointed them out to me. Some of the land was across the river and part of it was at Mangrolhar. It was the month of Chait. I said to my sister, Rukhmini, ‘Let’s go and eat some hora [chickpeas] from our fields. After all, it is our father’s share.”

Rukhmini had been reluctant and asked, “What about Maiyadin?”

“What about him?” Phoolan Devi had laughed back, in the mood for an adventure as she strode on ahead of her sister towards the river.

It was many years since Rukhmini had thought of that afternoon although it had been the beginning of a long chain of events that were to follow. At the time she had not been aware of the weight, the significance that day was to have for their lives. Neither had Phoolan. She too could not put a date on it, except to say, “It was the month of Chait,” the spring festival celebrating the birth of the young crop. She had been about ten at the time and her sister, Rukhmini, thirteen.

The Jamuna River, calm and steady at this time of the year, flowed past their home, built high up on the ravine’s edge, past the village of Gorha Ka Purwa. Everyone from the villages scattered along its banks, drank its waters, swam in it, bathed in it and washed their clothes, spewing all manner of pollutants into its course. Landowners and rich farmers had tapped its resources by installing mechanized pumps here and there, which pumped water into their fields above the sandy cliffs that encased it.

For Rukhmini and Phoolan, bathing in the river was a daily ritual which they both looked forward to. They had just come away from the family’s parched, three-bigha plot of millet-like bajra. Bajra, in itself, would yield no more than six hundred rupees that year, after keeping back enough for the family, so Devidin had decided to try sunflowers. He had been told that, if soldin Kalpi to manufacturers of sunflower-seed oil, they would fetch a good price. Also that they needed little water. He had decided to try and interspace his new “cash crop” with the bajra, already a foot high in his fields. Phoolan had been helping her father clear weeds, the only thing that seemed to grow in abundance on their dry land. The sun, high in the sky, burned into their backs as they worked in silence, their heads wrapped in wet towels as protection against sunstroke. When Rukhmini arrived to say her mother was calling him, Devidin decided to take a break and the two girls headed down to the river.

Before entering the water, Rukhmini tied her sari up around her legs like shorts. Phoolan took off her muddy dress, entering the water naked. She looked much like a boy except for her long, uncombed, sun-bleached hair. They could both swim like fish, in and out of the water, through the fast current to the opposite bank and back but neither challenged the other to the “race” that day, being exhausted by work and the crippling heat of midday.

Rukhmini had spent the morning mixing cow dung and straw in a bucket, after which she had repaired a broken patch in the wall of their hut. Another bucket containing just cow dung and water had been used to replaster all the floors.

While helping her sister to dry her freshly-washed sari, by holding it up against the wind, Phoolan Devi repeated her intention of going to the fields that Maiyadin occupied. Rukhmini tried to dissuade her but, being older, decided to flollow out of a sense of responsibility. She knew only too well the strength of Phoolan’s stubborn spirit. Her ability to be reckless was also part of her nature and everyone in the family had at times been either amused or annoyed by it.

Rukhmini was very different from her sister: quiet and gentle, soft-spoken and easily upset but always reliable. She shared a bed with Phoolan and they whispered together late into the nights. During most family fights and arguments, she defended Phoolan and now, once again, felt protective as she walked some paces behind her. They reached the edge of a lush-looking field. Hora mixed with mustard.

“This is only part of it,” Phoolan informed her. “Isn’t it beautiful? Come, let’s go and sit right in the middle!’

Rukhmini, apprehensive as she felt, followed her sister, treading carefully over young seedlings. The hora was knee-high. Phoolan Devi, in high spirits as she moved through the bright yellow flowers of the mustard crop, turned to Rukhmini and said with the joy of conviction, “One day this will be ours!” Rukhmini doubted that but sat down by her sister who was picking green hora from the taller plants. As they sat, feeling the luxury of their surroundings, chewing on the soft nut-like pea, they saw Maiyadin’s servant and watchman approaching, striding briskly across the fields towards them.

Phoolan Devi pressed hard on her sister’s wrist and said, “Leave this to me.” Rukhmini had expected trouble and was not looking forward to it now that it had arrived.

“What are you two doing here?” the servant demanded to know. “Go home!”

“Just sitting,” Phoolan Devi replied, “besides, this is like home,” she added as she laughed, offering him some raw hora from the palm of her hand.

“Don’t give me any bakwas Maiyadin won’t put up with any of your back-chat. If you don’t leave now, I’ll call him.”

“Call him then,” said Phoolan, still smiling as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

As expected, the servant returned with his master. Rukhmini wanted to leave but Phoolan was determined to stay, so she too stayed. They watched as Maiyadin, dressed in crisp white, crossed the fields in their direction.

“Look at him,” Phoolan said to Rukhmini, “dressed like some Thakur. The truth is, he’s a common thief.”

As he approached, Maiyadin looked confident and arrogant, his features hardened by the exercise of authority, even though he was still in his early twenties. Looking straight at Phoolan Devi, recognizing her as the protagonist of this scene, he said quietly but firmly, “Go home.”

“But this is like home,” she replied defiantly, “I’ve already told your servant.”

“Don’t try and act smart with me. Get up. Both of you. Get up and go and don’t let me see you on my land again.” He was shouting.

Undaunted by the aggression in his voice, Phoolan Devi plucked a flower from a mustard plant and stared back at him. “Your land? Who says it’s your land? Huh?”

Maiyadin turned to his servant and instructed him to throw them off the land. The servant, somewhat nervous of tackling Phoolan Devi, grabbed hold of Rukhmini and started dragging her towards the edge of the field. Phoolan rushed to her sister’s defence, only to be pulled aside by Maiyadin. She fought back, biting into his hand, screaming abuse and, in the struggle that followed, managed to bring him to the ground by tangling her legs around his. In a fleeting moment she had the satisfaction of seeing her cousin’s spotless white clothes muddied, his look of humiliation and his face distorted with rage. Phoolan herself cannot remember what happened next because she lost consciousness. She thinks he found a piece of wood or brick and started beating her around the head.

• In her diary she said:

“Leaving us there, he went to our house and took my parents to the village sarpanch and complained, saying, “This man’s daughters have been stealing hora from my fields.’ The sarpanch ordered my parents to be beaten, holding them responsible for our behaviour. My mother pleaded with them, saying we were only young but they were thrashed and abused anyway. My mother told me later, ‘It was as if they wanted to break every bone in my body.’ It was in this condition that my parents came to fetch us from the field. My mother was in tears and kept saying we had no future in the village. She begged my father to look for suitable bridegrooms for both my sister and me. Within weeks in 1967, my father went to see a boy in Teoga village for Rukhmini, as she was older than me. He returned saying that both he and his family were suitable enough.

“My mother asked him to try and borrow some money for the marriage but, though he went to almost everyone in the village, no one was willing to give him anything because they were afraid of the sarpanch and Maiyadin. So, eventually, my father went to the village of Narhan and borrowed some money against his land and my sister was engaged to be married.

“Arrangements were made and everything was ready for the wedding but eight days before it was to take place, the sarpanch found out and started asking where the baraat [wedding pary] was coming from. Someone told him it was the village of Teoga in the district of Kanpur.

“My parents were not aware of what was happening. All our relatives had collected at our house and festivities had begun. On the day of the tikka ceremony, relatives went to the outskirts of the village to welcome the bridegroom but discovered there was no baraat and no bridegroom. They returned home wondering what had gone wrong and why the baraat had not yet arrived. Just then Maiyadin and the sarpanch arrived with the police and said my sister was a minor. They accused my father of marrying her off for money. My father denied this and said he had borrowed money but they refused to listen. Instead they started threatening our relatives, demanding to know the truth.”

Present laws in India prohibit both child marriages and the payment of dowries but, given the social and economic realities that prevail in villages throughout the country, these laws become meaningless. They are only used to extract bribes and intimidate those whom the authorities wish to prosecute. Otherwise, age-old traditions are not only allowed to continue but encouraged within village society. Nearly every village I have travelled in, throughout the length and breadth of the country, is still trapped within this practice. There are few exceptions.

“Eventually, the sarpanch pulled my parents aside and said he would persuade the police to let them go ‘this time’, provided they were given some money. Ny father had borrowed for the wedding 2000 rupees, which they took and Maiyadin even unchained one of our cows and handed it to the daroga [Inspector] as the police left the village.

“Seeing my father so upset and worried, one of our relatives said he knew of another boy to whom Rukhmini could be married, quickly and quietly to save her any permanent disgrace. My father went to see this family. They were very poor and agreed immediately and my sister was married off in a hurry. I knew my urn would come next.’

Strangely enough, Rukhmini grew to love her husband, Rampal, despite all the humiliation she had been subjected to preceding her marriage, and they had three children before he died some years later in Gwalior. These were the children I had met in the police quarters, Mathra Prasad, Usha and Santosh.

Child Bride
AS I TRAVELLED across the Madhya Pradesh border, crossing the Chambal River into Uttar Pradesh in a hired jeep, I pored over Phoolan Devi’s words, slowly, laboriously. I had not read anything of any substance in Hindi since my school days and struggled with the handwritten script, working my way at a snail’s pace around an unfamiliar writing. At times the driver of the jeep, Lakshman Rao, helped me decipher sentences and paragraphs that seemed to run into one another, exhausting the eye and the mind. As time went on, although the writing became more familiar and I managed better, I decided that I would have to recruit the help of someone in Bombay or Delhi to translate it all into English, in order to save time.

Still, protracted though the process was, the events of Phoolan’s life unfolded as we passed through the ravines of central India, breaking our journey every night wherever we could. It was May.

Water was scarce and becoming a major problem. Every well we stopped at was either dry or contained only a few feet of water at the very bottom.