The rains had lashed continuously for a week and Dhubri town, like 80 per cent of Assam, was inundated. The floodwaters reached Bhuyan’s waist as he stood at the door to the jailor’s office. Inside, a few guards, clutching candles, looked helpless as waters swivelled just a few inches below the jailor’s desk.

“I told them, ‘Do something. Save the files, put them on top of the cabinet’,” says Bhuyan.

“Files? Forget the files. What about the inmates?” one of them shot back at him.

It was then that Bhuyan heard them. Behind, through the wall, there was a low thumping sound and cries of despair: “Save us. Let us out.”

There were 409 of them — men, women, and children — marooned in their cells. “And we had to get them out,” says Bhuyan, 36, who had joined his post in November 2018.

His boss, Superintendent of Police Shri Yuvraj, sent him a text: “Ho paayega (Can it be done)?” Bhuyan remembers being unsure. But he took the Almighty’s name and sent a text back: “Yes, Sir.”

The Transfer

Electricity had been out that entire day in Dhubri town. Earlier that morning, Jintu Borah, an Assam Civil Services officer posted with the district administration, had come to check on the jail. Established in 1965, it was housed in an old Assam-style bungalow and spread over 8 bighas. Within the premises lay a pond and a juvenile jail, which had been empty for years.

Borah had been the jail superintendent earlier, and knew the area well. “When I reached, the water level was just below my knee,” he recalls. “The kitchen had started flooding and the medical unit looked like it was about to.”

With the rain not letting up and the waters rising every hour, the 40-year-old began to work out alternative arrangements. He had heard that many years ago, in a similar episode of flooding, the inmates had been shifted to the District Library, 2 km away. Borah went to check on the library. “It was under water too. Plus, there were security concerns.”

Through the day, Borah waded through the waters, inspected other potential jails and made calls, before realising the answer lay right across the road: Dhubri Girls’ College (established in 1983), housed in a three-storied brick building with high walls and a big gate. “The verandahs too had grilles. And the college was closed for the summer. We had found our designated jail,” says Borah.

But it was already late evening, and before the transfer could begin, the administration had to give the college the form of a jail, turn classrooms into cells. Each floor had eight doors, all of which had to be padlocked, windows double-checked, two giant generators brought in, and entries and exits sealed. The work, including the construction of two bamboo watchtowers, would spill over to the next morning, with 15 workers on the job. “Imagine all of this in the middle of a storm, when practically the entire town was blacked out,” says Bhuyan.

When the transfer finally started at around 10 pm, the police and civil administration, nearly 50 of them in all, formed a human chain across the breadth of the road. Two registers were maintained — one at the original jail, the other at the designated one. One by one, as the handcuffed inmates were led across the road carrying the three things they would need the most, their blankets and a plate and bowl each, their names were jotted down — first on leaving, then on entering. Each prisoner was escorted by a guard each.

“We helped the elderly and sick carry their belongings,” says Bhuyan. Of the eight women prisoners, two had children with them, a two-year-old and a six-year-old. One of the police constables carried the baby in his arms as the mother, a short woman, had water up till her neck.

Bhuyan says that, all through, he and his colleagues had another fear: “Rescue in any case is tricky. But even then, never do you expect that the ones you are rescuing might make a run for it.”

While the policemen were armed, the rules didn’t allow shooting in case someone did try to flee. “That is because many prisoners are under trial and in for petty crimes. However, to ensure they didn’t try something like that, we scared them saying we would fire if anyone tried to run away,” says Bhuyan.

But the fear of nature proved stronger. The criminals, some of them hardened, accused of crimes ranging from theft to rape and murder, did as told. “It dawned on me that they did not want to run. Standing in water all day is a scary thought and all they wanted was to get to drier ground,” says Bhuyan.

As hours passed and the procession continued without incident, the authorities decided to let a guard handle up to four inmates each to speed things up. The transfer ended about eight hours later, at 5 the next morning.

However, just as Bhuyan and the team were about to take a break, a tally of the two registers showed that while 409 prisoners had checked out of the jail, only 408 had made it to the college. One prisoner was missing.

The alarm though proved shortlived. Two prisoners with the same name, Shukur Ali, had been noted down as one.

The Escape

Almost immediately, the officials started getting the new jail into shape. With the ground floor flooded, the prisoners had to be accommodated on the first and second floors, and were told to make their beds with the blankets they had brought.

A kitchen was set up and the “biswashi” or trustworthy prisoners (usually the ones serving life term) roped in. Borah set up a WhatsApp group called ‘Designated Jail Management’, with officials across departments such as the Public Works Department, Assam Power Distribution Company, municipality, police etc.

“This was a way to keep everyone informed. Were the inmates eating? Was anyone sick? Did they need to go to a hospital? Was their electricity?” says Borah. Among those who had dropped in at night was Deputy Commissioner Anant Lal Gyani, and SP Yuvraj. “The thing is everyone, including the prisoners, saw how hard we were all working. That led them to cooperate,” Borah says.

Bhuyan decided to head out to other parts of the flood-hit town, reassured that his work at the district jail was done. But he woke up the next morning to what he had feared all along. A text informed him that an undertrial accused of rape, Hafizur, had escaped.

A ventilator with a broken iron rod on the first floor was suspected to have been the escape route, with Hafizur landing safely on the waters flooding the road below.

The Capture

Then started the hunt through a town that by now resembled a water park, says a local journalist, who did not wish to be named.

Police had little to go on except a photo of Hafizur taken 10 months ago when he was admitted to the jail. Bhuyan says there was no resemblance with that photo now. Plus the geography of Dhubri added to their worries — 40 km away is West Bengal, and 50-60 km by land the border to Bangladesh. “He could escape anywhere,” says Bhuyan.

Bus stations were alerted, railway stations checked, as the team scouted the route on foot, vehicles, even a boat, from Hafizur’s first wife’s house near Dhubri town to his second wife’s mother’s house in Dakshin Dharmashala. “We found that he had reached his second wife’s home the night after his escape. He had told her he was out on bail and that he was going to Delhi,” says Bhuyan. The wife gave police a number that ultimately led them to Rupchand, an ex-convict who Hafizur had made friends with in jail.

Sixty hours later, police found Hafizur sleeping in a house surrounded by water in Fakirganj in neighbouring Goalpara district.

On July 22, a week after they had been shifted, the 409 inmates returned to Dhubri District Jail. This time the transfer was smooth. The rain had abated, the waters receded, and the prisoners took a bus in broad daylight.

Things are slowly getting back to order. The jailor, who did not wish to be named, says, “The office is in a mess. Everything is ulat-palat. But at least the prisoners are back home.”

And that matters, Bhuyan says. “I realise Hafizur’s escape could have made a joke of our efforts. The fact that we had successfully transferred 400-plus people would have been forgotten. The media would only see that one person had escaped.”

In September, says the 15-year-old, the resident of a village in Assam’s Goalpara district, 200 km from Guwahati, he got a missed call. When he dialled back, on the other end was a voice he had never spoken to before.

Over the course of the next month, according to the teenager, that brief ‘wrong call’ turned into long, intent conversations. “I had never really spoken to a girl before. I began falling in love,” he says. The mobile plan he had purchased for Rs 100 allowed him unlimited calls for the month. “I could not take photos or watch videos on my phone, like my friends did. But I could talk.”

Soon the person he was talking to expressed a desire to meet him, claims the minor. “I wanted to bring her back home as my bride,” he says. Her village, even though not too far, fell under Barpeta, a separate administrative district. A date and a time were set.

On the morning of October 17, the boy set off on his cycle to meet the owner of the mysterious voice. “I told her I would wear a blue shirt so she would recognise me.”

His mother, also a daily wager, says she had no idea where her son had gone. “I assumed it was work.” Since her husband died eight years ago, the 35-year-old had raised the children on her meagre earnings, and hoped her son would now pitch in.

The 12-km journey took the 15-year-old almost two hours — the roads were broken, and to get to the island beyond which the person he was going to meet lived, one had to cross the river. In October, the river is mellow and thus, easy to cross — by road, or over the many precarious makeshift dolongs (bridges) across it. The boy crossed several.

When he finally arrived at the address provided by her, he was met by an elderly woman. She asked the boy to wait before serving him lunch. “She fed me rice, telpitha. I ate but I kept asking her where my bride was,” recalls the boy. After lunch, the woman, roughly 60 years old, told him it was her.

The bride

All her life, she has lived in the char chaporis (or simply chars) of the Brahmaputra and its tributaries — growing up here, getting married, becoming a mother of five, grandmother to “several”, and losing her husband. Life in these sandy, shifting islands of Lower Assam, covering nearly 3,600 sq km of the Brahmaputra basin and mainly occupied by the Bengali Muslim community, isn’t easy: flooding almost every monsoon, poverty, lack of development, and the fear of being branded “illegal” or “foreigners”.

“Town girls never want to be with char boys. And char girls are always looking to get out,” says the woman.

Even within the ever-changing life of the char, she does not have a home of her own. Her face wrinkled, her few remaining teeth rotten, she says, “I keep moving, from my children’s homes to my neighbours, relatives.”

Her story about how she met the 15-year-old is different.

They met, she says, in September, at a construction site in Bongaigaon, about 100 km away. “He would tell me, ‘Bhabhi, find me a girl. I want to marry’,” she claims. She says she urged him to come to her char. “I said, ‘There are many girls there’.” She also claims she never asked for his name, and doesn’t know it still. “This ‘wrong number’ story is rubbish.”

She says while they exchanged phone numbers, she lost his not knowing how to save it. Then, a month ago, the woman claims, they started talking on the phone and a day was fixed for him to come to the char. “He came, we roamed around the village. He even liked one girl he saw.”

By that time, she says, it was too late for him to return home. “I asked him to spend the night at my place,” she says, adding that she herself was staying at her daughter’s house. “But many people in the char had seen him. Someone started a rumour that a young boy and I were having an affair.”

In the night — and here is where the stories of the teenager and the 60-year-old merge — around 10 men turned up at the woman’s house, allegedly dragged him out and started beating him up. “Our village is full of such people,” says the woman. Her daughter adds, “Yes, they say they are doing it for the village, but they just want trouble.”

No one else in the village wants to talk about the incident now.

As they beat him up, the men asked the teenager about his relationship with the woman. “He blurted out that he loved me,” says the woman. “So, I confessed my love too.”

Was she in love with him? “Of course not. But if I hadn’t said that, they would have killed him,” she says. “It was my duty to save him.”

The marriage

The couple were forced to marry in the “xamajik (accepted)” style. A qazi was called, a little ceremony held, and the teenager spent the night with the woman. Both insist that it was in separate rooms.

The next morning, the 15-year-old took his new “bride” home along the same route as he had arrived — on a cycle, down the rickety roads and the dolongs. She wore a red sari, he the same blue shirt.

When they reached, says the boy’s mother, she was shocked. “I had a daughter-in-law who was older than me.” The local diwanis (self-styled leaders who wield a lot of power in the village) were called.

Shah Jahan Ali, a businessman, says, “The boy told us how they had begun talking on the phone. We weren’t surprised. A few months ago, a woman from Nalbari had showed up claiming she was in love with a man here. Before that, a Nepali woman from Tinsukia married a Muslim man from our village.”

Both were ‘wrong number’ marriages, he says, talking about the phenomenon in rural Assam where phone calls (whether unintended or not) often set off a relationship.

The verdict of the diwanis was that the 15-year-old and the woman should have a “xamajik” divorce. So about two hours after they returned, the two signed some papers in the presence of a qazi. In 15 minutes, their marriage of less than 24 hours was over.

By then, the story of the marriage had spread, first through mobile phones, then local media and TV. “The clip has some 5 lakh views on Facebook,” says a local journalist who broke the story.

Says Ali, “We got enquiries from the local police station, but since the wedding had happened in another district, they did not follow up.” Shah Alam, the Officer-in-charge of Alopoti Char police station, says, “Since no complaint was made, we did not do anything.”

There were reports of the Assam State Commission for Protection of Child Rights taking up the case. But Chairperson Dr Sunita Changkakoti says no one reported it to them.

The divorce

Ali says, “the boy is now famous, as the one who married the widow”.

The 15-year-old’s phone was broken by the villagers that day, and his SIM card destroyed. “I don’t care how much it helps the world but phones are obviously bad,” says his mother. Without a phone, the boy has been trying to find jobs here and there, and the mother adds that he is sullen and talks much lesser now.

The 60-year-old returned to her village the same afternoon as the “divorce”. She says while no one brings up the incident, one thing has changed. Walking barefoot to the market, she shows two things tucked inside her petticoat: a tin of zarda, and a mobile phone. It is dead. “They took away the SIM card that day,” she says. “But I still carry my phone around. It’s a habit I can’t get rid of.”