One Great Escape, Part-5

One Great Escape, Part-1

One Great Escape, Part-2

One Great Escape, Part-3

One Great Escape, Part-4

On his 12th day at the camp, Parag Da came to know that the leader, along with the other guy had planned to meet the higher authorities for the 3rd time. As usual, everyone had rice at 10 AM and immediately after they had their meal, the two guys left from there. Everything was quite cool and after a heavy meal, most of them were relaxing inside the camp, including our Parag Da. But after exactly 10 minutes, when those guys left from the camp,  all of a sudden everyone heard a series of gunshots. Within no time, the rebels collected all their weapons and one of them carried the medicines and started to run, up the hill. Parag Da noticed that all of them were damn scarred and they thought their colleagues must have died in the shootout.

After running for 15 minutes, suddenly someone saw their leader, down the hill. Both their colleagues were alive and were running in the same direction, up the hill. They waited for their leader and after a few minutes, their entire team was together. Their leader said to them that they had a close encounter with the army and in order to confuse them he fired a few rounds, so that they could escape from there. All the rebels were extremely surprised, as the army came so deep inside the forest. Without wasting much time, they simply started to run. Parag Da had a very hard time, as he didn’t have his shoes. He was so freaking scared and wondered “How the hell army would know that I am not one of the rebels? They would simply fire at all of us” 

Everyone continued to run for their lives and they ran for almost 3-4 hours, that too without any break. It rained quite heavily that afternoon and they continued to walk, the remaining day. When it started to get little darker, the rebels were little concerned about their shelter for the night. At 7 PM, they heard the sound of flowing water and could see the blurred view of a river, at some distance down the hill. They stopped at that place and started to prepare a temporary kind of shelter for them and it almost took 2 hours for that.

Their place of shelter was like a factory of mosquitoes and one of the guys advised Parag Da to be a little careful of the mosquitoes, as that place was highly prone to malaria. They neither had any food with them nor any mosquito nets. They only carried weapons and medicines with them and mostly malaria medicines. Two of the guys went in search of food and the remaining just waited out there. It was quite difficult to stay there, due to those mosquitoes. One of them had an idea and he somehow dried a wet piece of cloth and put some fire on it. The guy wanted to create some smoke and was successful in that. The intention was to disturb the mosquitoes but after sometime they themselves were very much disturbed with the irritating smoke. 

Life never had been so miserable for Parag Da, as he shivered in the rain and was literally starving. Sleeping was out of the question because of the mosquitoes but everyone managed a few minute naps, every now and then. At midnight, the guys who went in search of food, came back with boiled rice and some burned potatoes. They even bought a couple of big polythene sheets to survive the rain. After they had their food, everyone got busy with the mosquitoes for the rest of the night. Parag Da was horribly disturbed and he thought, he wouldn't survive much longer in that drastic condition. Also, the army could have come any moment to kill them all. He realized that there was no other option left for him and the only way out was to escape from there. But how? Something strange was going through his head. He had a limited knowledge about the geography of that region and the river down hill, gave him some sort of hope. Parag Da felt that the nearby river was not broad enough and it would definitely meet the mighty Brahmaputra at some place. He thought that if he could follow the river downstream, he would have a much better probability of his survival. For the first time he seriously thought to escape from the custody of the rebels and from that moment onward, he desperately waited for an opportunity.  

Image courtesy: google images

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