As Bharat, Madho and Varelal lifted the semi-conscious Vikram into the cart, Sri Ram handed Phoolan a bundle of notes.

In her diary she recalls: “Then Bharat said to me, ‘Look after him, Phoolan, I will pray for his recovery. I wish I could come with you.’ Then Vikram said, ‘I don’t know what will happen to me but you must all stay together and remain united.’ He appointed Bharat leader of the gang saing, ‘I don’t know a better man.’ Vareylal, Vikram’s uncle, offered to accompany me, saying I might not be able to manage on my own.

“We left the camp and reached Orai at midnight. We had to get a tempo, a three-wheeled scooter-rickshaw, to take us further. At first none of the drivers would agree because they saw Vikram was wounded and did not wish to be implicatedin anything that might involve the police. Finally, a man agreed to take us at the exorbitant charge of 500 rupees. He didn’t have an inter-city permit for Jhansi so it was a very tense journey. When he asked how Vikram had been wounded, we had to concoct a story saying we were labourers, working on a bridge, and that Vikram had fallen and hurt himself, so we were going home to find a doctor. The driver then started asking who the contractor was, saying it was suely his responsibility to make arrangements if one of his workers was injured. We spent a lot of time discussing the behaviour of contractors in relation to the ways in which they exploited their workers!

“We eventually reached Jhansi in the early hours of the morning. Vikram had a brother called Rampal and no one was aware that he was the brother of a dacoit. We went to his house, following Vikram’s directions. He agreed to help immediately and went to fetch a doctor. He told the doctor it was a private matter, saying, ‘Two of my brothers have had a quarrel and my elder brother shot this one with my father’s rifle. Since the quarrel was over my sister-in-law, we do not wish to file a report with the police. The family would be disgraced so we must treat him at home.’

“The doctor arrived and Rampal asked him what his fee would be. He said it was a ‘dangerous’ case and asked how much we could afford. Rampal put a lakh in his hand and asked him to count it. When the doctor saw the money, he went to get a taxi and said he would like to get Vikram out of town to avoid any suspicion from neighbours. So Rampal, the doctor, Vikram and I got into the taxi and drove four miles out of town to a vacant house. The doctor left us there and went to fetch his instruments. Again, we felt tense, wondering if he could be trusted; but he returned in less than an hour and operated on Vikram, removing the bullet. He left a supply of medicines for eight days and said he would keep in touch with Rampal. He also said, if we paid another 30,000 rupees for the operation and the medicines, he would ensure that we could stay in that house until Vikram had recovered. I told Rampal I had the money and paid the doctor. After that Rampal and Vareylal left in order to bring us some food and bedding. The quilt was soaked in blood.

“A few days passed like this. Vikram slept a great deal but I had been reassured that he would not die and knew he was getting better.

“Then the newspapers reported the story of Vikram’s accident and even the fact that I had brought him to town for treatment. Some reports said he was dead. The doctor got suspicious and came to visit us one day, asking for our real identities. Vikram said in jest, ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow and I’ll also reward you handsomely for looking after me and my wife so well.’ As soon as the doctor left, Vikram said we had to go, so I went out and hired a tractor that was headed for Kanpur. We took all our belongings and escaped. This time the driver was not so curious because he thought the house he had come to was ours. I told him we needed a lift, since my brother-in-law had failed to turn up and Vikram had to go to Kanpur to have X-rays taken. The man got friendly, Vikram and he chatted through the journey and when I tried to give him some money, he refused, saying he was travelling to the city himself and had incurred no additional cost because of us.

“In Kanpur, we managed to hire a room and found another doctor to treat Vikram. The city was expensive and we soon ran out of money. Vikram couldn’t travel, so I set out with his brother Rampal in search of Bharat and the gang in order to get more money from them. With great difficulty we wee able to locate them. All the members contributed whatever they could. Those who didn’t have money parted with gold and silver.”

An Uneasy Peace
THE ANONYMITY OF KANPUR, a big, sprawling industrial city, was a relief. It has some of the oldest and largest textile mills in the country, mills in which cotton dust and fluff fill the air, clogging lungs, shortening lives and wreaking havoc on the health of those who work the looms that were introduced and established by the British in Victorian times. A maze of concrete blocks, built by mill-owners, house the workers and it was in such a colony that Vikram Mallah and Phoolan Devi managed to rent a room without much difficulty, through a contact.

Small and dingy as the room was, Phoolan says she remembers feeling safe for the first time in many months. She remembers the constant sound of children throughout the day, playing noisily up and down the stairways and corridors. She says she found their screams and laughter reassuring and realized how much she missed her own family and how much she wanted to have children of her own. She had, since the day of her abduction, begun to have increasingly painful periods and bled profusely at times. This worried her and she thought it was a bad sign but knew there was little she could do about it, given the life she now led.*

She told herself she had much to be grateful for. Vikram had

* In the course of an interview for Indian Express magazine in March 1983, Phoolan Devi was asked:

Q: Have you had a child?
A: No.

Q: Don’t you want one?
A: (Silence).

Q: What is the matter?
A: Once, in a fight in our village, I was hit in the abdomen. It injured my womb… Doctor say I need an operation.

Made a remarkable recovery, he had several friends and acquaintances in the city and enjoyed taking her around. For Phoolan, shopping for essentials such as bandages and antibiotics, buying for herself the saris that she now had to wear, small luxuries such as glass bangles or mangoes from street vendors, were all new experiences and she began to enjoy herself. She saw her first Hindi film, Sholay, which had caused much controversy at the time of its release because it “glorified dacoits”; its superstar hero, Amitabh Bachchan, later became an M P in Rajiv Gandhi’s government.

Although the dacoits of the Chambal Valley were once again making headlines in both English and Hindi newspapers, no one had ever photographed either Vikram Mallah or Phoolan Devi and they moved around freely, without fear of recognition. They made friends with neighbours in the tenement block where they occupied a room and a kitchen, introducing themselves as relatives of the official tenant, in Kanpur for medical treatment after an accident on the farm. They attracted little curiosity. Phoolan recalls listening to reports on the radio concerning themselves and other gangs in the company of mill workers who, like film audiences, romanticized the life she knew and talked of dacoits as if they were local celebrities. She felt elated to the point where she once asked a young man, who hung around in the evenings playing cards with Vikram, what he would say if she told him she was Phoolan Devi. He hadn’t even looked up as he responded, saying he wouldn’t believe it since Phoolan Devi rode a horse and he couldn’t imagine her on one, with or without a rifle! They had all laughed.

With the money she had collected from members of the gang, they stocked up on cartridges for both their rifles, wrapped in a blanket under the bed, knowing they would soon have to return to the ravines. They had paid twenty-five rupees for each bullet used by the army and supplied to them by a jawan (soldier) on home leave who, by not asking too many questions, had developed a lucrative business.

They had been in Kanpur for almost three months and were waiting for information about the gang’s whereabouts when something completely unexpected happened. Recalling the events from prison, Phoolan Devi says:

“One day there was a report in the newspapers that Bharat and Madho had been killed in a police encounter. Their photographs were also published. Vikram crouched on the floor as if in physical pain and said he felt as if both his arms had been amputated. His uncle Vareylal and I tried to tell him that the police often released false reports and that we should not react until we confirmed the facts. Unfortunately, the report was true. Apparently, Madho had been on his way to Delhi to meet his lover, Kusuma Nayan, accompanied by Bharat. They had been caught at Orai and the police are said to have staged an ‘encounter’, shooting them both at close range.

“The story of Madho and Kusuma was a tragic once. They both belonged to the same village, but to different castes. Madho was a Mallah and Kusuma a Nayan [a sub-caste of barbers within the caste of Sudras]. They were in love but since they were of different castes their relationship was not tolerated in the village. Madho was beaten by the villagers and Kusuma was married of in hurry. Then, finding an opportunity one day, they both ran away from the village. When they returned in a year, having nowhere else to go, Kusuma’s father coaxed her into returning to her husband, after giving him ten bighas of land to pacify him. Kusuma was an only child and her parents doted on her. They had Madho arrested and imprisoned for having abducted her. On his release Madho, who was Vikram’s first cousin, went to him and said, “The Nayans have assaulted me and abused my whole family. They have insulted my mother and my sisters. What should I do to take revenge?’

“Vikram was not a dacoit then. He invited Madho to stay in his house, looking after him for over a year, but Madho became very bitter about all that he had suffered at the hands of the Nayans and the police. In particular, he wanted to punish the pandit, who had beaten him with a shoe in front of many villagers before handing him over to the police. As a result, he said, all Mallahs in the village would now be subservient to the Nayans. This angered Vikram and finally he agreed to accompany Madho to his village so that they could give the pandit a good beating. The two of them went to the man’s house, the fight got out of hand and they ended up beating him to death.

“After this they had to remain in hiding from the police and, to support themselves, got involved in dacoities, eventually having to choose it as a way of life. Vikram once told me that before this event he had no personal enmity with anyone; he had ruined his own life on Madho’s account but, despite this, they had remained close.

“Madho started seeing Kusuma again and one day she ran away from her husband, having fought with her parents, accusing them of living peacefully while she suffered at the hands of the man they had forced her to marry. She wanted to be with Madho and joined them of her own free will. She soon discovered that she was pregnant, so she went to Delhi, where she was arrested by the police. Madho and the gang raised money for her bail and found her somewhere to live in Delhi. When I joined the gang she was not with them, although she had become a dacoit before I did. Madho often spoke of bringing her back and sent a man to fetch her, but she only stayed for four days, finding it difficult to move around with a child in her womb. I wasn’t sure whether the child was Madho’s or her husband’s and didn’t speak to her much either, as I was not considered a member of the gang at the time. She was very beautiful, fair-skinned, with brown hair, tall and well-built but full of complaints, which seemed to annoy Vikram. After she returned to Delhi, Madho would visit her from time to time and it was on one such visit that he and Bharat were discovered by the C I D and shot dead.

“This left only Chhote Mishra and Sri Ram as senior members of the gang and Sari Ram took over as leader, replacing Bharat. We left Kanpur,moving from Orai to Devariya, and kept in touch with the others. Vikram’s wound still gave trouble so we could not return. Then one day we heard that Chhote Mishra had left the gang after a quarrel with Sri Ram during which they had both abused each other.

to be continued...