“Quiet, you bastard!” someone roared back, and a simultaneously startled and shaken Lalitkumar turned his head and saw Dhui beside him and a little further away, Lambodar, Sridhar, Nishapati, Keshab, headless Jhulanlal—all of them standing, waiting.

Harbart rattled and rolled into the furnace. His clothes, his hair and the sheet that covered him burst into flame. Clatter clatter clatter—the door to the furnace rolled shut—clatter. And then only an unbroken hum as the fire burned within.

A little to the back of the crowd stood a forlorn Surapati Marik. Two English-newspaper cuttings folded in his pocket. “Farewell, friend, farewell,” he thought to himself and lit a cigarette.

People, so many people, a wave, swelling down to the ground.

The furnace hums on.

Suddenly, a small explosion. Like a bucket-covered chocolate bomb bursting: Boom!

Before the trace of it has completely disappeared, there is another. Louder: Boom! Then another, yet another. One after the other. Louder, and louder. The doors of the furnace begin to shiver and shake, the crowds begin to panic and pell-mell stampede back and away. The on-duty policemen scramble to their feet.

And—TI-DOOM!

Part of the ceiling over the top of the furnace explodes, launching bricks and sand and chunks of plaster everywhere, and through that hole billow multicolored plumes of smoke, reeking of gunpowder and explosives.

“Bloody bomb!” a local goon roars, “Bloody bomb!”

“Switch it off!” one of the policemen, displaying an astonishing presence of mind, finally manages to shout, “They’re bursting inside!”

At that very moment a sky-splitting explosion rips out the walls beside and behind the furnace. Bits of hot coil fall into pots of funeral water and hiss and sizzle and smoke. The lights go out. The destroyed furnace smoulders red.

An awful affair.

People rush about in the dark. Someone in one of the houses opposite must have telephoned. The police arrive. More police arrive. Cordon off the entire crematorium. Much later, when the CESC people somehow manage to patch together a temporary electrical connection and the lights came back on, the furnace is found to have been exploded from within, blown entirely to bits.

In the end, deep at night, under the eagle eye of the police, Harbart’s head, entrails, arms and legs, belly and breast—all the bits and pieces—are collected and taken to the next-door manual set-up and burnt on a wood fire, a wood pyre.

*

That Harbart’s body was jigsawed together and burnt led to a lot of debate and discussion during the initial phases of the investigation. Only natural. After the events of May 21, 1991, everyone had reason enough to believe that, comparable to Dhanu, the LTTE’s live human bomb, Harbart had been a dead human bomb. Although his motives were not entirely clear. In fact, at first glance, there seemed to be no motive at all. Because that night no prominent personality had been expected at the crematorium. And even if they had been … the veteran investigators eventually dismissed that hypothesis.

At first, when one particular event ends up having a profound impact, people try to explain all subsequent events in its light. Such is human nature.