It is the courtyard of a police station, which is not like the current ultra-modern hi-tech police station with bright colours and high impenetrable walls. We are talking of a time before somebody with a heart burn blasted it with bombs. It is an old building with tiled veranda and mud coloured walls. The courtyard is surrounded by a four foot high compound wall.
Chitti, who was thrown into a position of lying on his face and was in a daze, moved a little and lifted his head up and looked around. For a while, he couldn’t even recognize where he was. He became conscious as the sand heated by the afternoon sun burned his skin. As he saw the moving buses, rickshaws, cycles and people over the compound wall, he figured out he wasn’t ‘encountered’. As soon as he thought of ‘encounter’, he shivered in fright. He wanted to get up from there and shout loudly to the people passing outside ‘the police caught me’. Forget about shouting, not even a whimper came out of him. There was no strength in his hands and legs.
*****
‘Okay now tell us what happens if the shops won’t respond to your “shut down” call? ’
‘You became heroes eating the government food’
‘Come on tell me. Who is training you to be like this?’
‘Speak up’ the lathis of the police interrogating Chitti danced on his young five foot body.
Maybe because Chitti heard so much about ‘torture’, he didn’t find any of this new and he felt as if he had experienced all these before. The only firm thought in his mind was that he shouldn’t reveal anything regardless of what the police did.
The constable got tired thrashing Chitti. The SI (Sub Inspector) told the constable ‘throw him outside and I will take care of him’.
‘You take tiffin boxes for them, do you feed them rice?’
The brutal dance of booted legs on the tender fingers spread on the sand continued.
‘The government is feeding you for free in the hostels. You are being overfed.’
As he heard these words, Chitti thought of the masoor dal sambar and the food cooked with rotten rice that they gave in his social welfare hostel. On the rare days that they made Dal with fresh vegetables or curry with fresh leafy vegetables in the hostel, they would put it in a tiffin box and go to the bank of the canal.
‘I wonder if they brought even Ramulu and Sankar? Sankar will never say anything even if they beat him to death. Anna said he will go only after making sure everyone left after the meeting. Who knows where he is’ thought Chitti.
*****
Nobody bothered to check if the boy who was lying motionless was dead or alive. Chitti lifted his head and looked at the road. The people were walking rapidly as if something was pursuing them. In any case, who would like to walk leisurely in front of a police station? Chitti imagined that some of the people going on the road might be stopping and looking over the wall and then pretending not to look, they walked on in a hurry.
It was four hours since they brought him to the station, they may leave him alone now.
‘Why are you still keeping him there?’ the SI asked while leaving the station. Chitti’s whole body felt like a big wound because of the way the police beat him black and blue all over. The constable who came to lift him up was his father’s age. ‘Are you Lakshmaiah’s younger son?’ he asked. Chitti nodded his head.
‘Which class are you in?’ asked the constable.
‘Seventh class’ replied Chitti.
‘If both you brothers take this path, what will happen to your parents’, thought the constable though he didn’t say it aloud. He gave water to Chitti and said ‘ask your brother if he will surrender’.
What did they do to Sadanandam who surrendered to take care of his mother? They picked him up from the shop right in front of his mother and then declared him ‘missing’.
The twelve year old Chitti learnt his political lessons from the police lathis and boots. The police used to raid their hostels at midnight, break down the doors, drag whoever they could find by their hair and question them ‘who is there inside your rooms? Who is teaching you these things? Which of you is going to meetings outside?’ At that time, Chitti didn’t really know anything.
When the children from the hostel came to know that Radicals* intercepted the ration rice that was being taken away stealthily and distributed it among the people, they ran to see the spectacle. They saw the happiness of the people, who crowded around the cart carrying rice sacks, and filled their baskets with rice. ‘Hey! Isn’t your brother also there among the Radicals?’ asked his friends and he didn’t respond. He wasn’t even sure if what they were doing was a good or a bad thing.
But when he came to know that his brother was caught by the Police in Gollapalli, but the women there rescued him and chased away the Police, he started thinking about the situation. When they protested in the hostel against insect infested food and for an increase in the ration quota, his thoughts took a step forward.
He came out of his hostel and went to all other hostels. All of them discussed the problems and issues in the social welfare hostels. They started agitation in the school too regarding the dilapidated state of the class rooms and school building, lack of benches and chairs, the absentee teachers and the increased syllabus.
They started boycotting classes and holding dharnas on the road demanding the reduction of syllabus, proper supply of notebooks and the construction of class rooms. In the evenings, the students would again meet in their houses and discuss the next steps in their program which moved into a higher gear.
This continued till the high school students were arrested. Then, they started the agitation to get them freed by putting up posters, writing copies of ‘radical voice’ through the night using carbon papers and sticking them on walls early in the morning before anybody got up.
He was caught once by the patrolling police while he was distributing pamphlets. The police thought he was too young to be doing this of his own volition and somebody must have tempted him with chocolates to do this work. So, they asked him to get into the jeep and show them who gave him the pamphlets. After the jeep went some distance, he asked them to stop it in front of a house and showed them an old woman and said ‘this amma gave me the pamphlets’. His friends and he had a good laugh about it for many days after the incident.
They wrote posters demanding that those arrested must be presented in the court within twenty four hours after arrest and put them up in the bus depot. The RTC (Road Transport Corporation) drivers figured out somehow at 5’o clock in the morning while it was still dark, that there were posters in the depot. Every one of them stopped the bus in the depot, got down from the bus, looked around and read the posters and only then moved the buses.
*****
It had become dark and mosquitoes started buzzing. Chitti could hear some familiar voices outside. He felt nauseated by the smell of urine in the lockup. He suddenly felt hungry because after eating sambar rice in the hostel in the morning, he didn’t eat anything else. They told the hostel warden they were going to school instead of which they roamed around distributing pamphlets.
‘Boycott the fake elections’
‘Beat the leaders coming for votes with your slippers’
These were the contents of the pamphlets. The second pamphlet was supposed to apply to the entire spectrum of politicians from the red shirt communists to the latest entrant to politics NTR*, who started a new party and claimed that Naxalites were true patriots.
Suddenly the entire station became alert due to the SP’s (Superintendent of Police) visit. The CI (circle inspector) stood in front of the SP and told him ‘they make four folds of the pamphlets like this in order to throw them easily into shops and houses’.
While looking into the case files for the day, the SP told the CI “let go of the girls and the minors, we are getting a lot of phone calls about them’.
‘Yes Sir, just now civil liberties activists also came to demand the same’ said the CI.
‘In their view, these are the only citizens and they are the only ones who have rights’ said the SP in an annoyed tone.
The CI pointed in Chitti’s direction and said ‘He is P.K’s brother Sir’. The SP merely said ‘Ahh’, looked in Chitti’s direction and left. Chitti mentally prepared himself for a night of beatings.
‘Who are all the people who come to the hostel?’
‘I don’t know’
‘Show us your brother’s shelters’
‘I don’t know’
‘If you don’t assist us in capturing him, we will ‘encounter’* you’
So went on the interrogation of Chitti in the lockup.
*****
The morning dawned and the station was all abuzz with combing party in which the CI was also a member. They were talking about the areas to be combed in shortcut forms – RC, BG, Kottur …..
Chitti was alarmed when he heard Kottur, because the shelter where he met his brother was there. Sweat broke out all over his body and his face became pale. He asked a nearby constable what the time was and the constable told him it was 9.15. He felt very relieved and could breathe easily. He had an appointment with his brother at 9 and it was now past that time which meant his brother will no longer be in that place. Chitti looked proudly at his crushed fingers.
(Chitti is his real name, so is his brother’s. I didn’t change the names as their family, that provided four members to the revolutionary movement, has none left for the police to ‘encounter’.)
NTR* – N T Ramarao, a Telugu actor who entered the political scene of the state of Andhra Pradesh in 1982 and won a landslide victory in 1983
Radicals* The left wing youth. Radical Student Union members popularly known as Radicals)
Encounter* – So many fake encounters take place in the revolutionary movement areas and hence, over a period of time the word encounter became synonymous for ‘police murder’.
Anna – elder brother
Amma – mother
Dharna – protest
(Translation of “Chitti chetulu”. [Initially published under the pen name Jannu Chinnalu in Arunatara, July 2006] From the collection of “Viyyukka”) –Translated by P. Aravinda
