He Never Returned from the Army Camp

One day Krishna Bahadur was working in his corn field in a remote part of the country with his family. His father was at home making the barn for cows. His sister was in the pasture grazing the goats. The sky was gray with black clusters and some silver lines on the eastern side. In the meantime, he heard a gunshot near the ravine. He knew that his sister was in the pasture right above the ravine and goats were scattered all over the forest for food. "This is not the hunter's fire", he sighed wiping his forehead with the index finger of his right hand.
His father was already at the edge of the yard looking towards the field. He asked Krishna if he heard the gunshot. Krishna confirmed with his father and asked him to call Chameli on her cell phone. His father tried calling several times, but there was no response. Then Krishna, leaving his work, went to the pasture to look for his sister. He was worried because there was a Nepal army in the village hunting the hiding shelters of the Maoist. There was also an encounter between the army and the Maoist rebels last night in the same village where five Maoist cadets and two militia were killed.
When he arrived on the other side of the pasture, he saw several men and women in spotted uniforms, holding guns in their hands. His sister was in the middle of them with a blindfold over her eyes. Krishna Bahadur ran towards the group and pleaded with them to release her. But a lanky boy spat in his face and kicked him with his boots. Krishna fell to the ground. Then he rose up from the ground like a soldier in the war zone. Krishna was a muscular man with strong muscles built up with the fieldwork every day. He grabbed two boys in the neck and dragged them to the ground. In the meantime, someone from the Maiost side opened fire and a bullet passed through his right arm. He saw the blood oozing from the hole. An undernourished man called himself the commander of the group and asked to surrender and follow them to their camp. Krishna saw no hope of escaping from them. Then he followed them into the forest. One of the cadets put a bandage over his wound and also he was blindfolded.
There was no marked trail in the forest where they were walking all day without food and water. In the evening, they arrived at the bank of the Kaligandaki river. Krishna did not know if he was with his sister in the group because they did not allow them to talk. The commander was heard talking on his radio with another commander in some other place in the forest. That night they stayed on the bank of the river. Krishna was offered some morsel of rice with lentil soup. They removed his blindfold while eating, but at that time he was he saw two cadets standing beside him. It was dark. He heard some other boys talking in the distance but could not see due to the thickness of the dark. When he finished eating with his left hand, he asked one of the cadets where his sister was. But they said he was not allowed to speak. Soon they put on the blindfold and asked him to walk with them. They used to remove his blindfold when there was difficult to walk only for a moment.
The next day morning they arrived at the top of the mountain. They could not see a single house in the far far distance.
Krishna asked why they had brought him to the forest and where was his sister. They did not give a straight answer, but they always scolded him with coarse language. In the afternoon there came other three groups of Maoist rebels bringing five more civilians. They said another group of fifteen people coming that evening. There was a large shelter made up of logs and branches. It was surrounded by the Maoist cadets who were fully armed. The civilians who were brought there looked like teachers, shopkeepers, and social workers. They were not allowed to speak to each other. Those who tried to speak were intimidated by the armed rebels and often got spanked. By the evening, another group of rebels arrived in the camp with ten to fifteen people of all ages.
They were all kept together in the same shelter and offered rice and lentil soup with two pieces of unidentifiable meat each. Some of them refused to eat the food blaming them that they gave them the cow meat. Cow meat was not eaten by the majority of Hindus and was banned by the government to slaughter the cows. Krishna was one of them who refused the food. A tall rebel, who earlier introduced Krishna as a commander, came to the shelter and asked them to be prepared for the class from their District In charge of the Maoist rebels. After an hour, the district in charge of the Maoist rebel showed up. He was a tiny man with a long beard and bushy mustache. He cleared his throat and spat on the wall and looked at the group like a spy. Then he started his speech by introducing himself as comrade Badal. He said that the purpose of taking them was to tell them the purpose of their revolution and how they could assist them. They also said that they needed some strong men to fight their enemy.
Then they took Krishna along with other fifteen young civilians to another shelter. There were already more than twenty people packed up in a small room. He saw his sister in the corner with her hair upheaval and eyes swollen and red. The commander asked them to stay there for the rest of the night as they were going to start the training the next morning. Krishna met his sister and asked what had happened to her on the way. She could not talk with her brother as the steam of tears was already sliding down her cheeks. Later he came to know that they tortured them on the way as she could not walk with the blindfold. After some time most of them fell asleep in their own places since they were all tired from walking for long days and nights.
The next morning, the commander came to wake them up and asked them to be prepared for the training as they were going to attack the army headquarter of Myagdi, next month. He also informed them that nobody could attempt escape which could be resulted in an encounter and death. Nobody was allowed to ask questions. If anybody raised a question would be spanked with the nozzle of the gun.  That afternoon, they were all given AK-47 rifles and taught how to hold them properly and aim at the enemy. They took them downhill in the open field and train them to shoot. Anyone who refused to follow the command would be beaten up by the commander. They were also told that they had a group of doctors with them to help the wounded in the battle. Everyone had a strict routine to be followed by everyone. Every morning, they had to climb the trees and the steep hills with fifty pounds on their back. There were girls and boys ranging from twelve years old to thirty years old. Some of them were sick housewives who spent the whole day and night crying. But as the commander noticed them, they would be intimidated by any kind of misbehavior.
On the third day, Krishna saw his sister pass out while climbing the hill. He requested the commander to release her from the captive promising that he would stay with them to fight with the army. But he did not listen to his. He took her to the shelter and left them with a nurse. After fifteen days after their kidnap, Krishna asked his sister to be prepared to escape in the middle of the night when everyone fell asleep. He told his plan of how they could get out of the shelter without letting the rebels know who was guarding the area. He secretly made the hole hardly noticeable which led them to a raspberry bush on the other side. He also told her that it is better to die in the encounter rather than dying in the battle with the army.
On the seventeenth day, after the long days of training, they went to the shelter to sleep. Due to the hard training of climbing, jumping, and shooting, all of them fell asleep immediately. Chameli sneaked into his brother's cabin like a cat entering the attic to steal milk. A rebel at the sentry was already dozed off. Krishna asked his sister to get out of the hole first while he was watching other people in the room. As soon as Chameli was out, he pushed himself out of the hole and ran down the hill. They did not look back until they arrived at a ravine a kilometer away from the shelter. They heard multiple gunshots on the way. They did not stop there. The next morning, they found themselves in the thick forest. They could not navigate the way back home easily. They continued walking avoiding the clearing for two days. On the third day, as they arrived at a small village, they met with some people and asked their way back to their home. They also got some food to eat on the way. Most of the time they kept themselves alive by eating the wild berries.
After three days, they arrived home. It was completely empty with the doors shut. The cattle were hungrily and tethered on the rope with some day grass in front. Krishna went to a neighbor's house and asked whereabouts of his father. He came to know that the very same day the army came to the house ad arrested his father accusing him that he sent his son ad daughter to the Maoist army. It was a big shock for him. On the one hand, he and his sister were the victims of the Maoist rebels, on the other hand, his father was arrested by the army. The villagers did not know where they took him. The whole village was terrified from both sides. Later that day he came to know other three villagers were also captured by the army. Nobody knew where were they.
He went to the municipal office to get more information about his father, but nobody was willing to talk with him. Most of the villagers hid when they saw him after he returned from the camp. He felt strange. All of the villagers' once friends have become strangers. After Krishna and Chameli disappeared from the village the army entered the village multiple time and interviewed people if they saw the Maoists or if they were the helpers of the Maoists providing them food and shelter. The home was no more home now. It was a dark cave that can be hunted anytime either by the army or by the Maoist rebels.
One day, Krishna and Chameli left the village at the dawn releasing the cattle from the tether. He walked a whole day with his sister. They were inquired about multiple times by the police on the way to Ridi Bazar. When they arrived at Ridi bazaar, there they rode on the night bus to Sunauli. The next morning they crossed the border of Nepal to India. At the border, border security asked if he was taking the girl to sell in India. He was taken to a small lock-up room and left for an hour. After an hour, police came with two females and interviewed them if they were involved in girl trafficking. Once they were confirmed as brother and sister and also how they were victimized by the Maoist rebels, they were released. Then they went to Mumbai via Gorakhpur.
Krishna had been to Mumbai in the past and worked as a waiter in a restaurant. He also had some friends from the same village living in Bandra. He went directly to one of his friend's homes. He stayed with him for a few days and searched for jobs for himself and also his sister. Once he got a job in a hotel, he rented a new apartment near his workplace and moved in with his sister. After a month his sister also got a job as a domestic helper in Boriwoli. Krishna started living alone.
One day he met a customer who was from Italy for business purposes. As a room service steward, Krishna was serving him for a month. While talking with him, Krishna shared his past with him. Krishna also pleaded with the guest to take him to a foreign country. The gentleman was nice and kind. He asked him to make a passport and sent it to him at his address: so that he would follow up and start the process as an employee for his own restaurant there in Verona.
Krishna went back to Nepal to make his passport. However, it was really difficult to get the required documents from the VDC since the government officials were living in the district headquarters. He went to Tamghas, the district headquarter of Gulmi to meet the VDC secretary. When he was in a hotel, some unknown people came to meet him. They asked him to come out of the hotel room to chat with them about his father. As soon as he was out of the hotel lobby, they lifted him and put him in the van. They also blindfolded him and drove for about an hour. After they stopped in the middle of the forest, two boys grabbed his arm and dragged him into the forest.  They asked him where his father and sister were. Krishna told them that he did not know about his father after he was abducted by the Maoist rebels from the farm. He also told them that his villagers told him that he was arrested by the army. They tortured him the whole day blaming that he was a spy of the Maoist since he escaped from the camp. Krishna told them that he was not spying on anyone since he had been living in India.
At the midnight, two of the rebels slept removing their AK-47 rifle and storing them on the pillow. Krishna, remember how he learned to open up the fire when he was doing training at the moist shelter before he went to India after escaping from them. As they started snoring, he lifted the rifle and opened up fire. He killed them both shooting them multiple times in the head and ditching them in the near river. He ran away from there. The next morning he arrived at the village at the top of the hill. He has bloodstains all over his body. When the villagers saw him, they thought that he was a Maoist rebel; so one of the villagers informed the army. Krishna couldn't decide where to go. He removed his outer shirt and washed his hand on the tap. Then he walked down the other side of the hill to catch a bus to Butwal. As soon as he arrived at the station, he was already surrounded by more than fifty armies. One of them asked him to surrender immediately. Krishna rose his hands up and followed the command of the army. Soon the army captured him.
That night the villagers heard a gun shut in the army camp. The next day morning, the villagers looked at each other's faces and remembered how many Maoists were taken to the army camp and never see them back down the same way. On another side of the camp, there was a steep rocky slope where even goats could not walk.