![]() Four gun-wielding youths had dragged him out from his car, and pushed him into the back-seat of another vehicle. That moment, when another vehicle had stopped before his own. ![]() The memory of the moment made him shudder. How harsh, how frightening, the words had been that day! They had dragged him out from his own familiar world, and pushed him into another one. ‘We shall be outside, don’t try to escape. On that day, they had put him inside a house and locked the door from outside. He had written down the experiences of the first day on the very first page of the diary. In this manner, he wished to preserve intact the memories of these days. to read about the events of the past almost every day. Rifling through the pages of the notebook, he glanced through the previous entries before writing down the experiences of that day. ![]() He had accepted the discipline of the words, ‘I shall remain outside. What if his mind hindered his feet from discharging that responsibility? What if his mind tempted his feet: ‘The open sky is out there, there is freedom outside, go, get away!’Īnd what if his feet really went out through the door? What if they, his feet, refused to accept the bond of that unseen trust? But no, he had shut the door. As long as the door was open, he had had a sense of unease. He felt at peace after imprisoning himself.īy not remaining there, the youth who had said, ‘I shall remain outside,’ had placed the prime responsibility for his own captivity on him. The murmur of voices from the other house had created the impression of some link with it. So long as the door had been open, he had not felt like this. But even this self-imposed captivity felt normal for him. Now it was as if he had willingly made himself captive. Those entries, of course, were from memory.Īs soon as he closed the door from inside, a sense of captivity engulfed him. He had also written down, as far as he had been able, a record of the time before. Out of his total captivity of seven months, he had kept a record of his daily experiences for the last three months. The youth had brought him this notebook when he had expressed the desire to keep a journal. For the last three months or so, he had been keeping this journal of his captivity. Sitting on the bed, he took out the notebook from the satchel that he carried with him. The following is an excerpt from the story, ‘The Captive’. Through these stories, Deka gives the readers a searing vision of the human condition, even as he brings alive the unique landscape of Assam in unforgettable images. Translated into English by Mitra Phukan, Guilt and Other Stories, is a collection of short stories written by Harekrishna Deka over a span of several decades.
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