{ONE}
AS THE JEEP he was in approached the Shilapani bridge, Jagadish Chandra would not have known he was being watched. It had been a trying and chaotic few weeks for him, but he had tried to right his life again, return to the normalcy he had been used to. Geeta, his newly-wed, needed it. Their love had been something from the movies. They had met a year before, when the whole town of Bhikiyasain had been lit up for Shivaratri, the local fair thick with stalls selling sweetmeats and balloons.
She came from a difficult family: a domineering Rajput step-father, a mother made more vengeful from her second marriage and a loose cannon of a step-brother. Chandra was different. He was caring, charming and knew so much about the towns further afield, across the hills. His economic prospects were looking better too, from being a plumber in the town to working under a woman contractor of the Jal Jeevan Mission. Their admiration, then love, germinated quickly among chance meetings and calls, the secrecy making it all the more meaningful. Within the year they found themselves in a temple nearly hundred kilometres away, in Almora, tying the knot.
The Bhikiyasain Jagadish returned to was not the same one they had left. Geeta’s family saw no circumstances under which they would accept their daughter’s marriage to a Dalit man. They could not afford to stay in Chandra’s village, the fear of an attack always stalked them. Instead, they stayed at the home of a lawyer friend called Narayan Ram, in Almora. Goodwill was the one thing Chandra had earned in abundance over the past two decades, between activism, organising Dalit communities when a need arose and through the wide travel his job allowed for. Enough goodwill for him to have stood in two state elections as the candidate of the Uttarakhand Parivartan Party—which represents progressive elements within the state—from the Salt constituency. Narayan Ram was one of the many allies he had found along that journey.