[First-person — Indra Deka]
The Brahmaputra never forgets. It remembers the men who cross it with promises and the ones who wade in to keep those promises. I walk its bank at dawn and listen to the river. The smell of wet silt and riverweed is medicinal to me — a long medicine for a man who has been punched, shot at, and found himself still walking.
They thought I'd made a spectacle in Lahore and then gone gentle into the night. They were wrong. I came home to build something they could not burn down: a people who could stand when the Raj swung its first hammer.
My clothes are sensible — sturdy pants laced at the ankle, boots that bite mud, my gamocha folded tight in my pack like a flag not yet unfurled. Strength and cunning aren't exclusive. I teach both. I show how to aim a Lee-Enfield, how to hold a line under rain, how to break a man's will without being cruel. I am blunt, yes, but I am not careless.
And inside me — the rhino's bulk, the steady healing — something is changing. After each fight my muscles do not simply knit back; they thicken in a way that feels like the river laying down new silt. The first time a .303 shrugged off my chest, I thought it was luck. After the second time I started to test edges and angles. After the third, I flipped a cart and felt my bones hum as if some animal inside approvingly flexed its shoulders. Growth tastes like iron and rain.
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[Third-person — Guwahati Cantonment, Captain Caldwell]
Captain Ernest Caldwell read the cable three times before he let his gloved fingers slide across the wood table. The telegraph had come from Calcutta: Special instructions — field expedition to apprehend Indra Deka. Bring in Assam Rifles, Gurkha companies. Objective: live capture. Avoid martyrdom. Report all civilian contacts.
He pushed back his cap and stared at the ink blotches of stamp sheets. "Alive," he repeated. "Alive, Hargreaves. That's the order from Calcutta."
Major Hargreaves, newly arrived and accustomed to better weather and simpler problems, said nothing. His jaw was granite. "We will take him alive or we'll bring him in another way," he said, the words both a promise and a threat. They assembled trackers, scouts who knew the jungle like fingers knew a palm. They borrowed armored cars and a light field gun from the nearest district. They planned a parade march — punitive, public, meant to show the Raj still had teeth.
But the jungle had teeth of its own. Assam was not a carpeted parade ground.
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[First-person]
They came at dusk. I saw them on the horizon first as a smear of lamps—men in rows, wheels chewing up the dirt. The armored car's silhouette was ugly and boxy, an iron beetle with a gun. As it rolled into the clearing where the tea sheds lay, a line of boys I had trained moved through the grass with damp sacks and bamboo spikes.
I don't do theatrics for theatre's sake. I do them to make a point.
They opened up. Machine-gun fire stitched the sky and threw sparks off the trees. It sounded like a storm of tiny metal rain. The first impacts stung more than usual; I could taste the powder in my mouth. The sun caught on one of my ribs and for a second I thought of my mother's face. Then I moved.
A man in a Gurkha hat tasted the wrong end of my fist. He was heavy and steady, but a single blow sent him rocking backward like a felled coconut. The armored car tried to turn its turret towards me—steel glinting—but a volley from the riverbank launched a crate of oil straight into its motor. The engine cried and died.
They'd come with confidence. They would leave with questions.
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[Third-person — A Local Villager, Jiten Bora]
Jiten later told journalists how Indra walked through the smoke like a broken monsoon: "He did not shout. He did not run. He walked and men fell away from him. When he lifted the car—that's the thing—that car was an iron thing. He put his shoulder under it and turned. The car rolled. The men inside tumbled like sacks."
No one believed him at first. Then the film reels showed a man throwing a dark box of metal like it was a child's toy. Eyes widened across the province. A legend needs proof. We gave it to them.
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[First-person]
The first moment of the fight is always simple: close the distance, break rhythm, make them react. I closed. Men tried to wall me with bayonets; their blades snapped like reeds against bone. Men thought if they could surround me, they could slow me. What they learned was that my momentum was a thing you could not stop with rope or wood. Bone and leather taught me their limits and then my body went beyond them.
When a field gun blinked a flare and took aim, I did something I had not done before. I wrapped my arms around the carriage and lifted. It bent. The wheels tore loose. Men scrambled to pry me off like I was a demon stuck to their work. My palms burned with exertion and something inside me felt wider, like a river finding a new bed. I let the gun go, and it landed with a thud that made the earth answer.
They tried to pin me. They tried ropes and nets, men trained to handle elephants. I laughed once — a short, ugly sound — and tore a net like tissue. The captain they wanted alive lay stunned at my feet, eyes rolling. I had no desire to kill him. Not yet. They had to learn that capture meant consequences that made London think.
I dragged him by the collar across the mud to the riverbank and held him there, for all to see, for the men on the other side of the clearing and for the faint radio voices from Calcutta miles away. I spoke in a voice like a river rock.
"Take this to your masters," I told the captain. "Tell them Deka is not a man to be paraded. Tell them that if they bring their Empire's pride here to make a spectacle, I will make sure the spectacle is their shame."
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[Interlude — Calcutta, Secret Council]
The telegrams flowed in thick as steam. The Lieutenant Governor's hands shook as he read the reports: armoured car destroyed; Gurkha casualties; prisoner captured and released; local civil unrest surging. The Viceroy's office asked for restraint. "Containment," whispered one bureaucrat. "Don't allow him into martyrdom," said another. But the press was already aflame. London sent a curt cable: Firm response necessary. The colonial machine had only two speeds — suppress and explain — and both were failing.
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[First-person]
When night fell the fields smelled like iron and wet cloth. Men came to me with tears on their cheeks and palms outstretched for a hand to hold. I held what hands I could. I was a blunt man, not a prophet. I told them what they needed: practice, discipline, a place to run when they had to, and the courage to stand when they could.
But I slept poorly. The fight had pushed something in me I hadn't expected. The rhino's force that had always felt like inheritance now felt like hunger — a demand to be used and tested. When I pushed harder in the fight — when I had bent the gun or torn the net — a tiny change settled into my limbs. My skin felt thicker; my breath came easier. It occurs to me then that battles don't just leave scars. They leave an architecture, a scaffolding the body uses to grow.
I do not flirt with immortality. I do not believe in gods telling me favors. I believe in work and pain and the way the body remembers what it's been asked to do. Each fight carves a groove. Each success deepens it.
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[Third-person — British Aftermath & Propaganda]
The official communique called it "an unfortunate engagement with a local agitator." Photographs arrived doctored in newspapers: bloody ragged men, a stoic captain, a warning about lawlessness. The colonists argued that public trials would dent Deka's myth. The opposition in the Raj whispered that more than law was at stake — dignity, the image of authority itself.
In private rooms in Calcutta and telegram offices in London, the tone shifted. This was no petty criminal they could drown in prison. It was a problem that required a new kind of answer: intelligence, containment, and if possible, cooption. The British would not publicly admit fear. They would, quietly, recalibrate.
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[First-person — Indra]
I left the captain at the riverbank with his pride soaked and his jaw bruised. He would take the story back to his superiors. He would carry the image of me bending their gun and he would not like the taste of it. That was enough for now.
The Hammer had fallen. The Raj had been struck. They would learn there were limits to imperial patience when the people on the other side of the empire learned to stand up like iron poles.
And me? I walked back into the jungle and felt my shoulders settle around a new weight. The power grew. I could feel it—quiet, patient, waiting for the next test. I smiled then, and it had no warmth. It was the smile of a man who had only just begun to use the force inside him.
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