Due to the nature of my profession I have to travel a lot through the hinterlands of India. Sometimes I have to halt at remote villages where even today there are no signs of even the advent of electricity. There may be lights in the next village but some bureaucratic quirk has prevented this particular one from being lit up. Truly, India still lives in the heart of darkness. This last week I stayed for about three days at such a village near a semi-urban town in Eastern India. As is the custom here, we group for chatting under desultory skies in the evening where tea and biscuits are customarily served. The men told me that for the past few months a strange malaise has struck this village. Their women are being abducted at night and even during the noon when the men are in the fields cultivating paddy. Have you informed the police? A home-guard among them spoke up, yes, sir, the police themselves are scared. It seems every night or so a group of people terrorize this village and ones nearby by first knocking on the doors and then someone starts crying pitifully till the door is opened. As soon as it is opened, people are put in a coma through some odiferous powder. Then the women are no longer seen. Two of the abducted six have been later found raped and murdered and left in their own paddy fields. Though hard to believe, I decided to investigate this more thoroughly.

Why have you not informed the press? Why has not police acted? How is it possible that at 2pm a green Maruti with darkened windows come up to a remote meandering red-soil path and just grab a solitary woman walking? How come none raised a hue and cry?

There seems to be great reluctance on the part of the villagers to divulge their gory details to the outer world for the following reasons:

a)Their village is near a rural tourist spot. None will come here if this is known.
b)It seems that one or two locals may be involved who have veritably bought the police of the area.
c)Metropolitan brothels are paying huge amounts for these kidnapped women.
d)The women themselves don’t want to speak out for fear of violent reprisals from the men folk.

On my last day I had a brief chance in my professional capacity to question a young newly-married woman in her early twenties:

Are you scared?
Silence.
Do you know who doing this?
Silence.
I heard six have been kidnapped and of them two raped and killed?
Sobs, much more and all six killed…

I rest in peace thinking everything to be only a rumor but then it has to be a very well orchestrated rumor for the girl to cry uncontrollably and lapse into an unending silence. A wee boy also told me that the girls are being taken for their blood and body parts, i.e. an organ donation racket is functioning there. Curiously, when I tried to visit the families of those who have lost someone, I was hurried out of the village and there my investigations ended. Take this as yellow journalism or what you may, but let us be warned that evil walks in our midst.

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