[First-person — Indra Deka]
Bamboo makes a sound like a thousand ribs singing when the wind runs through it. In Assam, the bamboo remembers footfalls for a long time. That morning the stalks were hush and the leaves were close-mouthed; even the geese in the marsh were quiet. I walked the path by the river and tasted steam and mud in the air. I felt almost foolish the way the village moved when I passed — like an animal close to its den, wary yet sure its guardian would do something.
They had sent a message from Calcutta: higher command wanted the man who assaulted Tezpur found and broken. The Raj didn't send prank letters. The summons came with steel in its handwriting: Gurkha companies, Maxim emplacements, two armored cars borrowed from the railway brigade, and a small field gun.
Good. If the Raj wanted spectacle, they would get spectacle. I preferred they get their spectacle on my terms.
I am not subtle. I don't train people to whisper and hide forever. I teach men to hit until the other man stops moving. That morning, I took the young men I'd trained and set them like teeth along the trails that choked between the tea bushes and bamboo clumps. We were not ghosts. We were a wall.
My hands itched. Each morning I checked the scar tissue under my skin as if it were a map. The fights had already begun to do something to me — more than heal. My knuckles had rings of callus like the rings of an old tree. Joints that once bruised now felt like hammered iron. I could feel force finding new home in my bones, like the Brahmaputra laying new silt down its banks after a flood. I liked the feeling. It meant I could do more damage, and damage was a language the Raj spoke loud.
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[Third-person — The Raj Column]
Captain Lionel Hargreaves stood on the back of the second armored car, his breath fogging in the chill river air. His men were seasoned; Gurkha sergeants clicked their knives in readiness. Major Caldwell had sent a field gun — a small thing meant to frighten, not utterly destroy — but the column moved with a confidence born of years patrolling this land.
"Clear the lines," Hargreaves ordered, voice precise. Telegraphs had been tapped for weeks with promises of reward and stern warnings. The plan was simple: push through the tea belt, make arrests, parade the troublemakers in Guwahati. A public whipping of disobedience would remind the province who held the whip.
They did not expect bamboo.
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[First-person]
We waited until the sun was at the back of the line. I don't need to tell a man when I'll strike; the land tells you when a column will be thin, when wheels will catch on a root, when the men get lazy. I had children send messages tied to kites; old tea workers marked the route with white paint on the underbark of trees. We had set traps not to maim, but to slow.
The first car ran into a line of sharpened bamboo — stakes hidden under mats of leaves. The tire shuddered, metal screamed on wood. Men scrambled. I stepped out of the bushes and did not run. They expected I would shadow and vanish. Instead, I walked to the front of the column.
A Maxim crew peered out of a gun nest. They looked like a small island of metal and intent. The first burst of metal slashed across the ground where my chest had been a moment before. It felt like a line of hot nails. The sound was unbearable. The second burst hit my shoulder and I staggered only a little.
Then I did what I had never tried before.
I didn't close the distance like a man. I closed it like something with weight and purpose — like the horn of a bull. I charged the gun nest with my shoulders lowered. A burst of lead met me mid-stride and a dozen impacts flared along my left flank. The machine gun crew thought the bullets would stop me. Their faces went from triumph to confusion to fear as the impacts flattened and my feet kept pounding forward.
My shoulder struck the tripod and it shuddered. I wrapped my arms around the steel and, for the first time, felt entire tendons and bones singing with a new strength. The tripod bent like brittle reed. I heaved — not slow, not careful, but brutal — and ripped the Maxim from its mount. Men screamed. Sandbags flew. The gun clattered into the mud.
Something bright and hot radiated through my forearms as if the body was greening new muscle under fire. When I let the gun go, it fell with a thud that sounded like a drumbeat across the tea bushes.
I stood in the clearing breathing hard. My ribs felt like they had been sanded down and a new plate set. I put my hand to my side, and the feel of new scar tissue made me smile without warmth.
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[Interlude — A Gurkha Sergeant]
Sergeant Pasang looked at the empty gun mount in a silence he could not name. He had fought in plains and in mountain passes. This was different. Men told stories to keep fear away. But when a man on your battlefield bends a Maxim with his bare arms, the tales have to be retold.
"He's not human," one of his men whispered.
"He's a curse," another said.
Pasang only tightened his grip on his kukri and watched the jungle shadows as if some old thing had come awake.
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[First-person]
They tried the field gun next. It smelled like a sleeping beast wheeled out into sunlight. The officer barked coordinates; the crew aimed and fired a shell into the line where I had stood. The concussion hit me like an ocean wave; dust smeared in my eyes. I had been hit harder than anything before and for a breath I thought maybe the fight would end.
Then I pushed.
I crawled forward on hands that felt cemented, crawled around the overturned Maxim, and wrapped both arms around the field gun's carriage. The metal bit into my shoulders, but my muscles answered. I heaved and the carriage shifted. A wheel tore loose, spokes snapping like twigs. The crew scattered.
One of the Gurkha men swung his kukri at my shoulder — a clean, fast strike meant to break muscle and spirit. I felt the blade cut through skin and into flesh for the first time in months. The sting was hot and immediate, but it healed shockingly fast. The cut closed even as adrenaline made my legs pump. The blade nicked bone and for an instant I saw stars. Then the wound knitted under my palm like wet clay smoothing over.
When that man blinked and saw the scar already sealing, his foot went from ready to slack. He dropped his kukri and put his hands up. The fight in his eyes died a slow death and gave way to something like prayer.
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[Third-person — Guwahati Telegraph Office]
Telegrams stacked up into a parchment tower: Armoured car disabled; Maxim emplacement neutralised; casualties: significant; village uprising; envoy requested. Government clerks in Guwahati felt the shape of panic fit them like a new collar. From Calcutta, messages forwarded to London read terse and impatient: Containment failing. Consider escalation. Political pressure increasing.
In private rooms in the Viceroy's house, men who had spent their lives managing Indian unrest met and spoke like men planning a complicated surgery. Their words were neutral but their faces were worn.
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[First-person]
I didn't kill the officer who ordered the advance. I could have. I let him live because martyrs feed movements, but living and well-taken defeats haunt people more. I picked him up by his collar and walked him to the edge of the river where the water ran fast over silt. I held him there and talked, low and simple.
"Tell them," I said, "that Assam will not be mashed beneath their boots. Tell them if they want spectacle, we will give them spectacle they will regret."
His eyes were empty then, the bravado washed out. He did as I asked. He returned to his men with a story he could not stand.
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[Interlude — Subhas Chandra Bose]
Somewhere in a quiet house where letters moved in secret, Bose read the dispatches and sat silent with a cigarette between his fingers. He had been watching this ''Barx Ronga Xingh'' with a soldier's appraisal. Fire in the people was not something you courted lightly. In a voice heavy with thought, he wrote a short line and sealed it:
"We must not make a god of a man. Harness him, yes — but guide, not worship."
His message would find its way to a few trusted hands, and then wait.
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[First-person]
When the last man left the clearing and the sound of boots died away, the bamboo held its breath. We had taken heavy blows — men bleeding, a few with bullets through their shoulders — but the British line had been broken and an armored car abandoned. The news would ride the rivers faster than any courier. Later that night a child came to me and pressed a handful of wildflowers into my palm and then ran like the wind.
I put them in my hair because my mother liked flowers perched like crowns. I do not wear crowns, I thought, but I let the village see me wear one.
I walked the path back to the village with the smell of gun oil and earth up my nose. The evening was full of small celebrations and quiet sobbing. A boy with a scraped knee asked me if I was afraid. I said no. He believed me and that believedness would be a seed.
Under the moon, alone by the riverbank, I flexed my fingers and felt something new anchor into my bones. Pain had been the measure of my limits. Each time I surpassed it — each field gun I upended, each Maxim I bent — something in me accepted the new capacity and built scaffolding for it. I felt it as a small, steady hunger: more force, because it could be borne.
There is always a moment after a fight when you must decide whether to drink the blood of victory or to let it dry. I let it dry and planned. Power without plan becomes tyranny; power with plan becomes a machine.
That night I slept poorly and dreamed of London: of men in grey rooms, hands steepled, whispering of partitions and strategy. The thought made me laugh in my sleep. Partition was a thought for men in closed rooms who thought lines on paper could quiet rivers and crush people. Let them plan. Let them scratch maps. Assam had no use for their ink.
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[Third-person — Calcutta & London]
The papers told two different stories. The London dailies printed sanitized dispatches and editorialized about "native unrest" and "extremists." The Calcutta press, however, vibrated with eyewitness accounts — photographs of bent guns when the printers dared to run them. The Viceroy's office sent urgent anxious cables: the "Indra problem" had become a symbol. London, which preferred to manage its troubles from a comfortable distance, began to worry — not about the man himself alone, but about what it meant if more men like him stood up across India.
Backroom whispers, meant for ears with privilege, began to circulate: perhaps stronger measures, perhaps more brutal crackdowns, perhaps political bargaining of a different sort. In these rooms, men who had long relied on the Crown's prestige began to use a phrase they hoped no one would catch: strategic partition — a concept still young, whispered like a weapon in a child's palm, a desperate notion forming in the minds of men who feared losing control.
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[First-person — Indra]
If they were planting the idea of partition in dark rooms, they were sowing cowardice. Cowardice grows its own weeds. But I had no illusions about my usefulness to men like Bose or the hard-eyed revolutionaries. I would fight; I would also be wary. Gods on the battlefield are bad masters; they are worse saviors. I needed allies with sense and loyalty, not sycophants.
I had smashed a Maxim. I had torn the spokes from a field gun wheel. My skin felt thicker than the hides that wrapped the tea chests. The hunger inside me curled, waiting for the next test. I knew too that men like Hargreaves would not stop at bruised pride. They would escalate. They would bring in more firepower, more men, more money.
So I trained and I planned. The village learned to read the wind and the river. I taught children to tie cords and to see the shape of ambush. I taught grown men to take pain and turn it into armor. And when I slept, I dreamed not of glory but of the slow, patient work of unmaking an empire that thought itself immortal.
Blood had been spilled in the bamboo that day. It would not be the last. The hammer had fallen twice now — and the Raj had felt the bruises. They would come back, and I would be there.
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