It was as though a ball of fire had suddenly dropped down from the moonlit sky into the courtyard. They stared at him in shock as if they didn’t understand what he had just said. The Chinese government will send ships! To take back the people imprisoned by the Indian government! How strange! How impossibly strange!

After some moments of stunned silence, the atmosphere turned noisy.

The deputy commander raised his hand.

‘Another thing. Those who want to stay back and those who want to go must send their applications within a few days. The family members who have been left behind must do this as well.’

The internees listened in complete silence and then started throwing their questions at him. After answering as many as he could, he left.

The commander had thrown a pebble into a calm pond. Wing 5 turned turbulent. Doubt, confusion, fear and a host of questions were consuming everyone. They looked back on their past. Their society. Their own people. And they searched inside their souls. In which soil was their soul implanted? Which country were their hearts tied up with?

They were to be uprooted them from this country. China wanted to take them back to the land from which their forefathers had come. It’s true that their roots were connected with that land. But that was far away in the past. An unknown land which most of them had never seen. The first place they had known when they had opened their eyes was this country.

How would they find out who was Chinese and who was not?

The Indian government seemed to know.

Post-war talks between the enemy countries were centred on a handful of prisoners. China had already returned their prisoners of war to India. Now the Chinese government wanted to take back the people of Chinese origin imprisoned by the Indian government. They wanted to accept those who had announced in open meetings that they were with India. They had said, ‘You have confined them as they are Chinese. We will take responsibility for them. We will give them shelter. Send them back. We can’t see our people suffering.’

Could they ignore this offer?

No. They couldn’t. People shook their heads. At the same time other questions started to take hold.

What was the reason for this sudden interest? Was it just a sense of responsibility? Or was it sympathy for those whom the Chinese considered their own people?

Everyone was confused. Murli Gola cowshed floated in front of their eyes. And so did the inside of the train. The memory of the abuses and denouncements returned to haunt them.