DHARMANAND TIMSINA and his 19-year-old son, Gopal, met me at their home in Lumbak—a village in the Ilam district of eastern Nepal’s Koshi Province, connected by road to Darjeeling—in May 2022. The house, a simple wooden structure, had a small patch of land where the family grew corn and other crops. Gopal was the only earning member, having dropped out of college to work in the family farm and do odd jobs. He had also signed up as a temporary security personnel during that year’s general election. His dependents included his uncle Durga Prasad, who had returned, nine months earlier, after spending over four decades in West Bengal’s jails.
Gopal’s grandmother Dhanmaya had recently died at the age of 81. She had single-handedly raised her three sons and two daughters after her husband’s death in a construction accident. After a cow hit her, when she was thirty-five years old, one of her arms was infected and had to be amputated. Her youngest son had died, while one of her daughters, who suffered from a mental illness, had stayed at home. Gopal recalled that Dhanmaya had not recognised Durga Prasad, her eldest son, when he first came home. “She said that he had phokse masu”—weight without strength, implying malnutrition. “He barely spoke and stared blankly at those around him. He had difficulty in walking and had a hard time comprehending what was being said,” Gopal told me.
Durga Prasad had disappeared one morning in 1980, while visiting his sister in Fikkal Bazar, the business hub of Ilam, which is around forty kilometres away from Darjeeling. No one knew where he had gone—the only clues were his footprints in the frost. On 12 May that year, he was arrested at Darjeeling’s Sadar Police Station. He was charged with murder, and his name was recorded in court as Deepak Jaisi. Over forty four years since, the trial is yet to begin.
