She was wrong.
Only Kamal was sitting at the dining table when the clock struck nine. Champa had taken Suman and her daughters' tray to their room. Madhu worked hard on concentrating on nothing but the bland taste of roti-lauki prepared without garlic and onions, finishing her meal in five minutes flat and rushing back to sculpt.
She stayed up till one, retiring to bed only when it became clear he would not be back before morning.
Out as soon as her head hit the pillow, Madhu woke up at the crack of dawn with a constricting uneasiness expanding in her chest. She tried to distance the hazy memory of her dream from the mid-second panic it had left her with. Though she couldn't remember what her subconscious had showed her in the handful of hours of sleep she enjoyed, she felt as if she'd missed several steps while walking down an endless staircase.
Registering the aggressive chirping of birds, which was the reason she had woken up so early, Madhu went about her morning routine.
By now it had settled with her that maybe both of them underestimated how far Raju had managed to go. Two, possibly three hours separated the time of him taking off and Nakul going after him. He could be anywhere.
She repeated that in her head while putting her weight over the handpump to push water out, while carrying that bucket to the bathroom, while pouring that water over her head. She repeated that in her head while wrapping a blue cotton sari from her Ma's collection around herself, while shoving down a breakfast of cut up apples down her throat—the most she could do when Champa was still asleep at six in the morning—and while showing up at the Banyan tree outside Brigesh Babu's house, nearly an hour before their decided time of meeting at seven thirty. It was a small wait for she soon saw Sunanda and her three nephews approaching her.
"He isn't back yet?"
"He isn't back yet."
Sunanda didn't reply to that, maybe because she couldn't say much in front of the kids. Instead they walked to the school in silence, passing the people setting up shop in the bazaar and occasionally waving at familiar faces.
Giving board examinations three months after her mother's death had taught Madhu the art of compartmentalising emotions. Subsequent years of backstabbing her best friend while simultaneously building a business from her cramped desk at her father's office had honed that skill. So, going about the motions of teaching basic arithmetic to a class of seventy children proved to be just the distraction she needed. For the first time since waking up, she could feel her stomach uncoiling.
It was only when the five of them were alone in the makeshift one-roomed school, having wrapped up classes and rehearsals in time for lunch, that Sunanda turned to her.
"I need to drop the kids off before Papaji notices they're not at home."
"Brigesh Babu doesn't know they're participating in the Ramlila?"
She shook her head, facing away from Madhu to take out a bunch of keys from her blouse and handing one to her. "Go wait at the Panchayat office, I need to discuss something with you."
"Office?"
"In a manner of speaking, it's on the community farmland, east of Vishal's granary. You didn't think we did all our work under that tree did you?"
She smiled sheepishly. "That might've been an impression."
Shaking her head, Sunanda led her nephews out, parting with Madhu who made her way to the Panchayat office.
Madhu had a hard time figuring out where the office was when she reached her destination until she spotted, on the far end of the community land, a semi-thatched hut which resembled her cow shed rather than an actual government building. But there was no other building in sight, and the hut had a wooden board pinned on its brick walls with the words Gram Panchayat Bhavan written in Hindi.
Any lingering doubt disappeared when a man she recognised from village meetings under the tree came out from the hut, folding his hands in Namaste at the sight of Madhu who awkwardly repeated the greeting.
"Umm...Sunanda asked me to wait here."
"Yes please come in! I'm Satish by the way, the honorary male member of an otherwise all women sabha." He chuckled weakly at his own joke, betraying a boyish tinge to his voice. Madhu placed him at around twenty-two, twenty-three years. Surprisingly young for an aspiring politician.
Then again, young was what Bhabra needed.
"It's a bit messy," he said, unlocking the wooden door.
A bit messy was an understatement. The inside of the "Bhavan" was divided into two parts separated with a curtain that was currently pulled back, revealing a storage side on the right and the actual office side on the left. Rusty metal racks stocked to the brim with old files and a ton of yellowed paper—documents perhaps—lined the wall of the office side, with the remaining space being occupied by a single wooden desk surrounded by five plastic stools. Across the faded pink curtain were piles of sanitary napkin packets, antiseptic bottles, doctor's tape, cotton, aspirins and other first aid equipment.
He cleared his throat when Madhu kept staring at the stock, dusky cheeks flushed. "Sorry for the mess. Making pads available for free is Sunanda didi's personal project."
"The pads are not what worry me," she murmured, glancing at him. "Is domestic violence a big problem here?"
"Not really." He pulled out a stool for himself, sitting in front of her. "Lots of people get minor injuries while farming and cattle rearing. They were dependent on home remedies but those only work so well, so we decided to store medicines for little cuts and scrapes and mild fever here only. The nearest dispensary is at Sakshinagar, a poor farmer can't travel that far for something so small. Though we still don't have enough to take care of knife and gunshot wounds. Water?"
"Oh, um yeah thank you."
He poured water from a copper lota into a steel tumbler and handed it to her, all the while continuing talking like an eager student determined to be a teacher's pet. "Sunanda didi divides funds into three main projects really, setting up a clinic here in Bhabra, expanding the school behind the temple and opening a small veterinary clinic here too. We won't be able to afford professional vets, but locals here know a lot about taking care of animals. If we can somehow manage to pay their salaries then it would help a lot. Nakul bhaiya, you know him right? He takes care of your house?"
Swallowing the cool water, Madhu felt the dread creeping back at hearing his name. "Yeah we're friends."
Satish beamed, bobbing back and forth on his stool. "He's awesome! He's building this generator which might take care of our energy needs. Wish I could help him, would've been the least I could do after he tutored me for CDS, but I'm just a history graduate."
"You want to join the army?"
"Wanted to, but then I failed the fitness test so..." His face fell slightly before he perked up again. "But now I'm preparing for civils, and helping out here. Kind of like an intern."
"A severely overworked yet unpaid intern."
They turned at the source of the interruption to see Sunanda standing on the doorway, holding a tall steel tiffin. Satish hurried to relieve her from its weight, placing it on the desk and pulling out a seat for her.
"Thanks," she said, smiling at him. "Join us for lunch?"
He shook his head, already on his way out. "Need to study and I'm fasting. It was great meeting you Madhulika ji!"
"All the best for your exam!" She called out, receiving a two-fingered salute in response as he skipped away.
"Sorry to keep you waiting. Hope Sattu didn't bore you too much?"
"Not at all, he was very...informative."
"You mean he wouldn't shut up?" She unwound the three round tiffin boxes, opening them to reveal roti, fried aaloo and lemon pickle. "He's a good kid but always overexcited."
"He reminded me of my own interning days," Madhu said, eating a bite of roti and pickle. "You never mentioned you lacked funding for your projects."
"Technically the state government has set aside grants of up to ten Lakhs for Gram Panchayats. But till now, the money's been glued to the collector's ass. Fucker's been sitting on it for three months and on top of that he refuses to meet me when I go to Sakshinagar."
"My dad just used to bribe bureaucrats when he started out with the advertising firm. I have contacts in the media, threatening them with bad PR does the trick of moving up files for me, and saves a lot of money."
"I don't think any newspaper would be interested in a dirt-poor UP village."
"No," Madhu agreed. "But I can still help with donations."
"To bribe the collector?"
"To set up your clinic," she corrected. Pausing to chew, she continued after gulping the last bite. "I mean Satish talked about gunshot wounds, how on Earth do people get—"
"—thieves, smugglers, kidnappers." Sunanda swallowed her own bite. "Media can't come here but it's a free for all for criminals. Seven cows and three goats have been stolen this month alone, not including your cook's Rani who was burned by hubby dearest, and when villagers raise alarm they can get shot."
She twisted from her seat to reach for a dusty file on the shelf behind her, opening it to reveal pictures of bleeding villagers. "Arm. Leg. Abdomen. Cheek." She flipped through every photo, listing the different injuries and not stopping at any for more than a second, yet still managing to imprint the images of writhing farmers in Madhu's mind. "Nakul knows how to stop the bleeding for long hours, so we always get enough time to take them to Sakshinagar for treatment. But now they've started attempting child kidnappings too, remained unsuccessful so far though, thankfully. We always find the kids in the forest."
Madhu was frozen with disbelief. "Nakul never told me anything...no wait, he did mention cattle smuggling, but I didn't think it was...how many people have died?"
"None so far, it's like some miracle. One man had his cheek grazed by a bullet, a millimetre to the right and his head would've blown off! But we can't trust God every time this happens."
"I assumed, when I first heard about it, that it was a petty crime, didn't know they have weapons." Now that Madhulika had processed the information of the actual horrors which faced her village, her brain started working in overdrive. Signing off checks won't be enough.
And selling her land to an outsider would further cripple the state of Bhabra.
"It used to be a petty crime. Animals disappeared but there were no weapons involved up until a year ago. Satish and I think," she hesitated, as if debating whether to tell Madhu the next bit.
"We're on the same side remember?" Madhu encouraged her.
Sunanda took a deep breath. "We think a local is assisting the smugglers. With transport and information about vulnerable farmers. Making them brazen. Because this started when the new Panchayat got elected. When I got elected."
"Vishal."
"And his father."
"Can't we do anything about it?"
"They also know how to bribe officials. But unlike your father, their business isn't just harmless advertising. We need to build a proper case against them, catch them red-handed." She snapped the file shut, placing it back on the shelf before making her request. "Thank you for your offer of donations Madhu, but I also need you to contact those media friends of yours."
"I thought we just agreed they wouldn't be interested."
"And I thought you were a marketing genius."
Both women smiled.