Here is a report from my birthplace, Ara:

Bhojpur (Bihar): A farmer in Bihar’s Bhojpur district has been under trial for 33 years and is still waiting for justice, while all those originally involved in the case are not even alive.

Back in 1973, Suraj Nath Yadav, a landless labourer, was accused of stealing oxen. Thirty-three years later, the complainant, four other co-accused and even the policeman investigating the case are dead but for Yadav the trial continues with the court yet to deliver a verdict.

“All the papers are lost but I still have to present myself in the court on a regular basis,” Yadav complained.

Yadav was 13 when he was accused of the crime and had he been convicted he would have been imprisoned for a maximum of three years. But the ordeal for him and his family has dragged on for over three decades.

Yadav treks 20 kilometers every three months to reach the court and spends over Rs 200 on lawyer’s fee every month.

“It has been 33 years now. We have sold everything fighting for this case,” Yadav’s daughter-in-law, Kushila Devi said.

Just the other day I was reading a review-essay about Kakfa’s The Trial; the piece took Kafka’s old translators Willa and Edwin Muir to task for ruining the language of the original: “… the Muirs had adapted Kafka’s Prague vocabulary to High German, thereby elaborating upon his classically plain style, a style that Kafka had wrested from the unadorned and dying language of Prague officialdom and transformed into a dream language, the language of the unconscious self.” I don’t mean to go all precious on you, but the language of the report above, about the farmer in Bhojpur, is the language of the “weird and slightly bizarre report” which appears on certain pages of every newspaper. And a part of me believes that if the language were to be changed, it would instead excite horror in the reader.

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