It was a small, claustrophobic space, ten feet by eight feet, with mouldy walls, a cracked stone floor and a small grilled window framing a sliver of blue sky. It contained a metal bed with a torn and tattered mattress, an earthen pot for water, and a filthy plastic bucket. The day was unusually warm and the heat in the cell was almost suffocating. But more than by the heat, my senses were assailed by a fetid, cloying smell, the odour of neglect. 'The bastard refuses to wear clothes, doesn't bathe, and they don't use a deodorant where he comes from, Sir,' Inspector Singh offered by way of explanation.
The prisoner was lying curled up in a foetal position on the ground, underneath the window, with his back towards us, so I couldn't see his face. His skin was very dark, the colour of polished ebony, and he had close-cropped, peppercorn hair. He was naked save for a red loincloth, which appeared to have been fashioned from the remains of a T-shirt. He seemed oblivious to our presence and didn't wake up even when the Inspector prodded him with his cane.
'Get up, you bastard!' the Inspector commanded and kicked him in the back three or four times. I winced. But the blows didn't seem to register on the prisoner at all. He remained in his curled-up position, as if in a catatonic trance.
'You don't need to get physical,' I said to the Inspector and gently patted the prisoner on the shoulder.
It was like a magic formula. The prisoner reacted instantly, turning around and sitting up with alacrity. He was quite short, just under five feet, but it was a shock to see how young he was. He had a chiselled, oval face, with high cheekbones and full lips. There was not an ounce of extra fat on his body. He had the lean, toned physique of a prizefighter, but I could see clearly the welt marks where the police had whipped him. His teeth were even and dazzling white, but it was his eyes which had me riveted. Clear white, with small black irises, they seemed to ooze an elemental force. They bore into me like twin points of a laser, unsettling me. Dressed in my crisp white shirt and brown corduroy trousers, I felt exposed, naked and vulnerable in his presence.
It was only then that I noticed he was chained by his leg to the bed and there were manacles on his hands. 'This is for our protection, Sir, this chap is very dangerous, one of the ringleaders of the Naxalites,' the Inspector added, and walked out, leaving me alone with the prisoner.
I did not introduce myself. I simply took his hand in mine, looked into his eyes and said, 'I know you are not a Naxalite. I know you did not kill Vicky Rai.'
He appraised me with frank curiosity.
'Tell me your story, and I promise to get you out of here,' I assured him.
He was shy and reticent at first, but under my gentle prodding, opened up to me. What he didn't tell the police, despite three days of continuous torture, he told me in three hours, simply because I treated him as a fellow human being. He spoke in simple Hindi, but once he began his story, there was no stopping him. It was a cathartic outpouring of all the pent-up emotion bubbling inside him ever since he landed on the shores of our peninsula six months ago. He spoke of the people he had met and the experiences he had had. He spoke of his dreams and his desires, his hurts and humiliations, his hopelessness and helplessness. Above all, he spoke of his yearning for his island and his love for a blind, deformed girl called Champi, better known as the Face of Bhopal.
Did you know, Madame President, that the word 'Onge' means 'Man'? Eketi was a true man, the last of a vanishing breed.
He had ventured knowingly into what his tribe calls the land of the kwentale, or foreigners. For a brief while he was blinded by the glare of our civilization, entranced by the alluring traps of modernity, but very soon he saw through the artificial glitter of our lives to glimpse the darkness which festers in our cities and in our hearts. He was horrified by the elaborate cruelty we perpetrate on each other in the name of war and religion. He was shocked by the way we treat our women as sex objects and violate them to satisfy our lust. Within six months he had seen enough. He wanted to return to his island, to his own primitive way of life where want exists but war doesn't, where disease exists, but depravity doesn't.
He was an unlikely prophet, a memento mori who held up a mirror to our faces, but we did not heed him. He tried to correct us; we tried to corrupt him. He extended a hand of friendship; we chained him and manacled him. He sought our understanding; we killed him. His death serves as a précis of our culture, a withering indictment of all that is wrong with us. This is the bare truth, Madame President, and it is terrifying.
Even more terrifying is the fact that he had nothing to do with Vicky Rai's murder. Eketi had come to mainland India on a quest, having taken a vow to recover an ancient stone, shaped like a phallus, which had been protecting his tribe for centuries but which had fallen prey to the greed of an Indian welfare officer posted on Little Andaman. Another welfare officer called Ashok Rajput offered to help the tribe recover the sacred stone and smuggled Eketi to our shores. The quest for the ingetayi took Eketi from Kolkata to Chennai, to the ghats of Varanasi and the Magh Mela in Allahabad, then to the desert sands of Jaisalmer and finally to our capital city. The sacred rock was last seen in possession of the now disgraced guru Swami Haridas in Allahabad. That is where it was stolen by Ashok Rajput, who, unknown to Eketi, had his own agenda.
You see, Madame President, Ashok Rajput was the brother of Kishore Rajput, the forest ranger working in the wildlife sanctuary in Rajasthan who was eliminated twelve years ago because he would have implicated Vicky Rai in the killing of the two black bucks. Ashok Rajput was in love with his brother's wife, a fiery woman called Gulabo, but the widow had made a condition before she would agree to marry him – that he must first avenge his brother's death and kill Vicky Rai. You probably know more about these Rajasthani women, Madame President, but I know something about revenge. It does not have an expiry date.
So Ashok Rajput spun Eketi a yarn that the ingetayi was now in Vicky Rai's farmhouse and brought him to Delhi. Eketi stayed in the Bhole Nath Temple in Mehrauli, close to the farmhouse. While the tribal befriended the blind Champi, Ashok Rajput made his plan. On the night of the murder, he entered the farmhouse well before Eketi did, through an unused rear door. He came in wearing a blue suit, planted the shivling in the small temple in Vicky Rai's garden, and then merged with the other guests. Eketi was instructed to come in at ten o'clock, switch off the mains just after midnight, run to the temple, take the sacred rock and quickly dash out of the farmhouse through the same rear gate. The lights were switched off at exactly five minutes past midnight. That is when Ashok Rajput shot Vicky Rai at point-blank range. Then he rushed out of the hall, stole into the temple which Eketi had already reached and deposited the murder weapon in the tribal's open canvas bag. When Eketi retrieved the sacred rock from the temple and put it in his canvas bag, he inadvertently also took the gun. Ashok Rajput was hoping that Eketi would manage to smuggle the murder weapon out of the farmhouse, but the tribal was nabbed by the police and subsequently framed for murder.
The police tortured Eketi for three days, but he adamantly refused to squeal on Rajput, sticking to a code of honour that we abandoned long ago.
Yesterday, according to police accounts, Eketi ripped out his manacles, broke open the chain, used his teeth to bite through the iron bars of his window and slithered out of it. Sub Inspector Yadav, who happened to be standing behind the police station, saw Eketi escaping and challenged him to stop. The tribal charged at him, forcing Yadav to shoot him dead.