A lady in a house at Wadsa, Gadchiroli district, rages and switches off the television every time Prime Minister Narendra Modi appears on it. The lady is an aunt of Mahesh Raut, who, at 34, is the youngest of the accused in the Bhima-Koregaon case and has been languishing in prison since his arrest on June 6, 2018. That house at Wadsa, where a family of 14 children and adults live, is home to Mahesh. 

Anger alone does not define the Wadsa household. At every festival, at every glad tiding, all of them turn teary. They wept when Mahesh’s sister Sonali gave birth to a child in 2019, as they did when Monali, his other sibling, married last year. Here every moment of joy has each family member murmur “wish you were here,” the title of Pink Floyd’s haunting song on aching absences. Those words they are fated to repeat over and over again.