A fortress of kindness

On a cold and sunny December afternoon, Mamta is washing clothes at the tap in her front yard when the gate opens and two women walk in uninvited, clad in Haryanvi lehengas, full-sleeve shirts and ghoonghats. On their head are wicker baskets containing a lamp and pictures of Hindu goddesses. “Be generous,” the beggar women implore. Mamta squints against the sun to see their faces, and shakes her head. “If you knew my story, you wouldn’t be here. Go find out from anyone in the village,” she replies, rinsing away the soapsuds all the while. The women glance at each other, wondering what ill-fate has befallen her. Finally, Mamta has someone in the house search for a coin in her almirah. The women take it, mutter blessings and scurry out.

It’s been 10 years since Mamta married Ashok Kumar and moved from a neighbouring village to Ghamroj, Gurugram’s Sohna road. The 2.5 sq km village is a loose cluster of homes scattered among yellow mustard fields, cycle repair shops and photo studio kiosks. Ashok and several generations of his family have always lived in this village of 4,500 residents, of whom 350 make up his extended family. Today, this very kinship has come to the aid of his family, after it was devastated by a development in distant Gurugram three and a half months ago.

A village rallies round

Ashok had been working as a bus conductor at Gurugram’s Ryan International School since February, prior to which he had been a conductor at Vivek Bharti, a school in his own village where Mamta too was employed as a cleaner and where their two kids, aged nine and seven, study today. It was the prospect of a salary jump — from ₹4,000 to ₹7,500 — that had tempted him to join the city school.

But on September 8, when Ashok didn’t return home after his usual 12-hour shift at 5 pm, Mamta grew anxious. When a neighbour alerted her to turn on the TV news, she feared the worst. That evening she felt the “world slip from under her” as she watched her husband, held by police outside the Sohna road station, “confess” on television that he had lost his mind and slit the throat of eight-year-old Ryan student Pradyuman Thakur.

“Weren’t you ashamed?” an Aaj Tak reporter asked, thrusting the mike at his face, in a video clip that can still be sourced on YouTube.

“Yes, I was,” came Ashok’s reply, describing how he dragged the boy into the toilet, tried to sexually molest him and then, when his attempt failed, slit his throat. Twice. The questions came thick and fast, framed in many different ways, daring him to falter or break down, but each time Ashok spoke calmly, shaking his head to “confirm” the sequence of events, sealing his newfound image of a child molester and cold-blooded murderer.

“I lost my mind. Not for a moment did I believe his confession. But what could an illiterate person like me, who has no understanding of the law, do?” Mamta asks through the tears choking her voice. Immediately after seeing the news, nearly 40 of Ashok’s relatives, neighbours and members of the village panchayat stormed into the Sohna road police station, demanding to see Ashok. “The police were vague, they pretended not to know his whereabouts,” says Rajendra Chopra, Ashok’s uncle. That night, and over the week they held a night vigil, staying awake to discuss Ashok’s options. It was only five days later, when Ashok was transferred to Bhondsi prison that Mamta finally got to see him again. “From a distance, the moment he saw me, he broke down uncontrollably. He came limping. I could see the swellings in his limbs. I told him to just tell the truth and not be afraid. I told him the entire village is with you,” she says.

In a matter of days, Ashok’s family and friends in the village offered to support Mamta financially to take care of her children; she no longer needed to work at the school, they decided. Who knew how long this case would stretch? “We tried to reach out to every lawyer we knew, but nobody wanted to touch his case,” says Chopra.

There was a sudden turnaround in the case, however, thanks to two important factors: Pradyuman’s parents’ insistence on a CBI investigation and Rohtak-based advocate Mohit Verma’s arrival on the scene on September 14. The 24-year-old Verma had decided to call on Ashok and his family out of the blue. Just one look at the family’s abject poverty convinced him to become their pro-bono defence council. The lawyer is well known for taking up high-profile cases such as the Sonipat Nirbhaya case, in which he argued for one of the accused to be classified as a minor.

“The very moment I met Ashok I knew he was innocent. He was being framed,” says Verma over phone, expressing his keenness to bring justice to someone wronged this badly.

What followed swiftly was the retraction of Ashok’s statement and his bail after 74 days in prison, as the prosecution failed to produce any evidence against him. In the meantime, the village had got together to build a safety net for Ashok’s family.

Ghamroj in my blood

Mamta affectionately refers to Ashok as a “ gaon ka baccha ” (a village child), as though to reiterate his innocence.

The entire village, in fact, appears fiercely protective of him. His maternal uncle Samay Kumar quizzes me keenly, “Did you for a moment believe he did it? Looking at his face, the whole world could tell that the poor chap was framed!” This is greeted with enthusiastic nods from his friends, all of whom are seated on a jute cot in Ashok’s mud-washed courtyard. “We have known Ashok from when he was a baby. If he sees a child hurt its knee, he has no guts to even clean the wound,” says Chopra. “He’s a darpoke (timid)!” someone else interjects, and they all laugh.

Ashok is brought in a bit later (after I’ve been sufficiently interrogated) wearing a silver grey track suit and pale blue sneakers. He could pass for a local gym trainer, except he moves with the slowness of somebody walking on broken glass, with trepidation in each step.

“They beat me senseless until I said what they told me to say. They gave me electric shocks, hung me upside down, poured scalding water on my hands and feet,” he alleges. “I didn’t know whom to trust, what to believe. I could no longer separate truth from a lie,” he says, stammering a bit.

He has aged considerably in the past three months. His hairline has receded and greyed somewhat. His limbs remain stiff and slightly swollen. But he is surrounded by well-wishers. Every time he struggles to complete a sentence, someone else gently does it for him. He nods and picks up again.

Tiding over caste to help

Ashok and Mamta’s responsibilities have been neatly divided up by the village. While his uncles take care of his health expenses and doctor visits, his aunts and neighbours ensure the kitchen is well-stocked. Some others take turns to pay the children’s school fees.

“Rich people have money. But what’s the greatest asset we poor folks have?” asks 75-year-old Paramanand Chopra, another Ghamroj resident. “We have each other. That is our wealth,” he answers himself, his wrinkled eyes twinkling behind his thick smudgy glasses. Paramanand and Ashok’s father used to break stones in the neighbouring Aravali hills for a living. But now Ashok’s father is learning to become a bus conductor at the age of 60, to keep the family running. “It is Ashok’s soft and respectful nature that made him an easy scapegoat outside. This wouldn’t have happened inside the village,” says Kirtana, a fellow resident.

Ghamroj is home to people of many different castes. While Ashok and his extended family belong to scheduled castes, there are several Brahmins and Thakurs living nearby. But the residents say the village has always tided over caste lines to be there for each other, and this time for Ashok.

A former sarpanch of Ghamroj and a Thakur, Satpal Raghav says, “We are all equal in this village. We sit together and decide on local issues together.” Raghav was among the first from the village to meet the police commissioner, seeking Ashok’s bail. The present sarpanch, Nirmala Devi too has been prompt in cooperating with the investigations and offering full support to Ashok. Many of the villagers are questioning the injustice of it all. “All the investigation we read about in the news has been around the character of the 11th standard boy, who is now the accused in the murder case. Has anybody bothered to find out about Ashok’s character? Ask us and we’ll tell you that he is a noble man. But nobody cares because we are village folks,” says Manoj Tawar, a young resident who holds a job in Gurugram.

Verma is hopeful that with the CBI taking over the investigations, Ashok will soon be given a clean chit ahead of the next court hearing on January 23. Ryan International School hasn’t called even once to check on Ashok, let alone pay his dues for the period he served in September before his arrest. The school didn’t serve him a termination notice either.

Does Ashok want to be a bus conductor again?

Ashok looks up directly at this, for the first time during the interview. “Never again in my life,” he says clearly. “They have broken him so much, inside-out, that he can’t stand without his legs shivering. They have made him incapable of earning a living,” worries Mamta. “Maybe later, I’ll open a vegetable shop in the village. Nothing more,” he says, as if daring to dream of anything beyond could cost him his hard-won second-life.

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