Carnage: A newcomer to Bihar is stunned by a massacre, but to even the victims families, this is just a slice of daily life."Massacre amavas ki raat ko hua hai," said the man. Death under a new moon. The man was a CPI(M) supporter, guiding us - me, photographer Bhaskar Paul and Senior Correspondent Sanjay Kumar Jha - with a hurricane lamp through soggy fields of darkness. We were looking for Bathe village, where feudal lords had ordered a savage bloodbath the night before.It was only my second day as a journalist in Bihar. We slogged through the silence of the night, until the throb of an electric generator broke the calm. It was Bathe. Bonfires illuminated the huts, policemen sprawled around them. "What happened?" we asked District Magistrate Arun Kumar Singh. "Nothing, really," he said laconically. Nothing? Hadn't 60 people been butchered here? "It was just to spread terror," Singh shrugged. "Maybe, the people will tell the real reason to you journalists." He paused, then added: "If you get to know something, please let me know." He was, in other words, saying people had no faith in his administration. He was right. They told us the story: just another land dispute between the Bhumihars and the Dalits. They never said anything to Singh; neither did we.I had seen nothing like this before. The bodies had not been cremated. They lay where they had fallen. The earth, littered with torn flesh, was red with blood. Paul, our photographer from Calcutta, walked to the village; when he returned, his despair was evident. "There's a two-year-old girl among the dead," he whispered. There was more. In one hut, the bodies of a woman and her two children, one two years old , the other five, lay clutching each other, a sort of final embrace. Something was not right: it was the silence. There was no sound, no crying. Everything was very still, as if the bodies didn't really exist, as if the massacre hadn't occurred. Pain had been muted by experience; it was suffocated by the oppressive shroud of a feudal system. This is how life ends in a violent land. Weeping doesn't help any more.The police had readied the banks of the Sone river with enough firewood for the last rites, but the villagers turned away. First Chief Minister Rabri Devi had to appear, only then would they part with their dead. Now everything would happen tomorrow. We tried to find a place to sleep near the bonfires, but the villagers would not allow it. They readied a hut for us. A soiled blanket was placed over heaps of animal fodder, which served as a make-shift mattress; then someone offered us a quilt to help keep the cold at bay.I was hungry but it was not a night for trivialities. Yet our host Siddhanath sensed my hunger. Minutes later, he returned with a helping of flattened rice and some jaggery. If the wretchedness of Bathe's dead was something I would never forget, so was the resilience of the living. Life goes on in Bihar. Always. When we returned to Patna, almost everybody I met asked, matter-of-factly: "So Bihar has given you the right kind of welcome?" I didn't know what to say.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Sep 4, 2012--- ENDS ---
