A Few Moments of Love

(A fiction written by me, which was published two years back in "The Assam Tribune" - a leading English daily in north-east India.)

I wonder if you will again appear in front of me. I doubt if those mesmerizing eyes will ever smile at me. I know you will never have those feelings for me. But I know you will never forget those few moments with me. I want to remain as a flying non-erasable desire within you. You seem to be the tranquillity within me. You seem to be the only solace for me……………………..

…………….Decades of terrorism has played havoc with the beautiful land of Assam. The banks of the Brahmaputra and the Barak that have sheltered the homeless and fed the umpteen farmers are being polluted with the burning cartridges and the blasting bombs. Barbarism in the name of revolution has made many innocent souls cross the Ajax. Their beautiful dreams devastated in less than a few seconds. Hiding in the jungles of Assam and its bordering nations the revolutionaries and their various demands have put the common people in a state of panic and distress. It so happened one day when a huge force of BSF jawans marched in one of the jungles of Assam. But why were they marching in those woods? All dressed in green; their faces painted in black!!!!  Who informed them that some regiment of a militant outfit was hiding in the wilderness? Their intelligence bureau? Or a foreign government of some border nation in pursuit of getting some help from the government of India? None knew the reason but the jawans moved on and on. Very soon, a few tents in between the trees were visible to them. There might be some terrorists hiding there. The soldiers instantaneously took position on the ground; their rifles ready to shoot at any moment………………………..

………………..I could perceive that the helicopter was rising in the air. There were handcuffs on both my hands. My eyes tied with black cloth. I could feel two BSF soldiers sitting on my both sides. I turned my head to the right, then to the left. There was nothing but darkness all around. And in the midst of the darkness I could feel her. I could sense her. Far away in the river bank there she was filling the steel pots with water. And then she shrieked when she saw me .Well any lady would have been scared seeing me in that condition. My entire outfit was drenched with mud. My right arm bleeding due to the bullet shot I had received the previous night. Probably I might have been looking wild and deadly. I had spent the whole night in some muddy pit clenching the pen-drive inside my shirt. The pen-drive was more important than my own life. I could not lose it. I could not demolish it. Nor I could hand it over at the disposal of the Indian army. The survival of our entire militant group depended on the documents stored in the pen-drive. I could no longer stand up. I fell on my knees in front of the lady.

 “ O merciful lady. Please help this man in distress. I am badly wounded. Please help me.”

I did not realize at that moment but I was literally begging in front of that young girl. There was a look of sacredness in her eyes. But she finally replied.

“I live in the foothills. But my parents are not at home.”

“Please help me young lady. I am dying. I need some rest and food.”

Eventually she acquiesced with my pleas. She asked me to follow her to the foothills. I limped behind her.  She kept turning behind and looking at me. Waiting for me to catch up to her pace. But she never held my arm and helped me in moving fast. It was beyond the rule of a country lasso to hold the hands of a stranger. I moved on. Finally we reached the young lady’s hut. I entered inside the hut. My strength could no longer support me. I fell down…………………………

………………. The BSF jawans crawled on the ground. They moved very near to the militant camp. A few terrorists were visible to them in the tents. A series of bullets were fired. The terrorists were at a loss to comprehend anything. Most of them succumbed to the shots. The others fell wounded. The militants in the neighbouring tents tried retaliating with bullets. But soon they were too gunned down or captured. The militant outfit was of no match to the huge force of BSF soldiers…………….

……………..I tried moving my hand only to find it was stiffened. It was bandaged. A smell of mud entered my nose. I was in a hut and there she was staring at me sitting in a stool beside me. The next moment I realized where I was.

“So Saab   you are back to senses. I have bandaged your arm. You were bleeding very much.”

Her voice sounded soothing to me. For the first time I looked into her face. Never had I beheld anyone so beautiful. She was very young – maybe in her early twenties. She was fair, had long hair and small eyes – the typical look of a tribal girl living in the foothills. But my heart felt she was mesmerizingly beautiful. I longed to move my hand forward, touch her small hands and smile at her.

“Saab, drink this tea. It will give you some strength. It’s almost dark and my parents will be back home very soon.” she spoke in haste. She might have felt uncomfortable because of me staring at her.

“Thank you young lady”, I told her in a feeble voice. I had realized that I was too weak to utter even a few words.

She smiled back at me. It was a small smile but a beautiful one. And then there was a knock in the door. She peeped out through a hole.

“It is the army people.”

I sprang to my feet. Fear of death always brings out intrinsic strengths from a person.

“Hold on”, I told her “let me get out of the back door first. Only then you open the door.”

She gave a look of alarm at me. Till then she might not have realized that the person she was sheltering and tending to was a most wanted terrorist. But for some unknown reason she complied with my request.

………. By mid-day the soldiers ransacked all the militant camps in the woods. Until a certain soldier raiding the base camp noticed that in the base camp there lived seven terrorists but they could only find six dead bodies there. The soldiers were pretty sure they had surrounded the entire base camp and shot down every single being inside the camp itself. But still one person was missing!!!

   Another observant soldier noticed that there was a destroyed laptop in the base-camp. Soon it was deduced that some shrewd terrorist had escaped the gun-shots, destroyed the only laptop in the terrorist camp and probably ran away with some important documents. The jawans set out in the woods hunting for that one terrorist…………………..     

……………I got out from the backdoor of the young girl’s hut and tried running into the thick forest. In a few minutes I could hear heavy boots following me. I tried to run faster………and faster………….even the bandage in my arm seemed heavy. I had to get away. I needed to get beyond the hills and hand over the pen-drive to our unit there. A sharp bullet hit on my leg. I collapsed. My hand reached out to destroy the pen-drive. The next moment there were several rifles pointing to my forehead. Four uniformed soldiers were surrounding me…………………………..

………………… The helicopter landed somewhere in Guwahati and we were taken to the police station. A huge group of reporters and photographers followed our van. I was taken to police-custody in a wheel-chair. There were blood-stained dead-bodies of my fellow-cadets lying in the police-station. There was also the body of a young lady. There were bullet-shots all over her. My heart almost stopped. I asked the officers to show me the face of the lady. My eyes closed down. I could no longer bear the sight of it. Yes, it was she. She, whose name I never knew. She, who had smiled at me. She, who had bandaged me.

I had spent the last twenty years of my life in the hills and forests evading the ravages of the military and the police. But never had I panicked on seeing death. Never had I cried on seeing a body covered with blood. But this time it was different. My heart screaming at me that this is how you feel when someone you love gets snatched away from you. Maybe, this was how many innocent people had wept when I had blasted bombs across the towns of Assam and killed their near and dear ones. Maybe, this was how the mothers had panicked when my bombs emptied their innocent laps. Maybe, this was how the helpless widows had shrieked when my bullets wiped out their husbands and orphaned their children. Long years of bullets and bombs could never teach me that. But a few moments of love did it.