Fear gripped me. I tried to calm myself, control the trembling in my hands. I was helped by the fact that I had practised yoga. From my inner consciousness I was sending out friendly rays, but the hostile expressions did not change. I tried to still the thudding of my heart. It sounded thunderous in my ears. Had one of them placed a hand against my heart, he would have felt its rapid beat. This was a way they had of testing you, testing to see whether you were a terrorist. I was afraid of two things—of being interrogated, and of being shot. I tried sending out rays of friendliness towards the interrogators. I always wanted to have good thoughts towards everybody. I did not want anyone to feel that I was a terrorist. But at that very moment, when I was fearing for my life, a police jeep drew up. My friend, the Superintendent, was in it. I felt as if scooping out a hollow in the desert I had discovered water to quench my thirst. I bathed my face in this sense of comfort. It felt like cool water against my parched lips and throat. The Superintendent greeted me in a friendly manner, ‘Ah, Das, what are you doing here? Where have you been all this time?’ I was still very conscious of the expressions of the soldiers around me. Now they began to change, ever so slightly, like a shifting breeze, like the ripples in the ponds growing wider with the movement of the crustacea beneath the surface.

There was silence now that the gun shots had ceased. For some reason, perhaps only to cope with the fear, I started thinking of the prawn farms. No one would come to net the prawns for a long time now and they would grow and procreate in their underwater world undisturbed by any marauders. They would crowd the ponds and jostle each other as their numbers grew and soon, perhaps, they too would begin to war against one another and turn cannibalistic as the space that contained them became smaller. Then, the prawn ponds too would begin to smell of death like the landscape around them. Death has an odour and the wind carries it in waves from village to village. It would not be easy moving the bodies that lay strewn about because the roads were clogged with mud after the recent rains. The flies would be buzzing about them. The guerrillas meanwhile would have slipped away, vanished into the jungle, disappeared along the pathways and tracks that only they are aware of. And who knew how long it would take for some of those shot to die; death does not always happen instantly. But it was only a matter of time and then the women would go out. They would follow perhaps the odour of death and find the bodies, identify them, carry the news back. The death couriers.