On the entrance to a small bright-green home with a picket door within the village of Kazhuthapali in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu, sits the King of Love.

That’s the literal translation of UA Anburaj’s identify. And the 43-year-old lives as much as it. The tall, quiet man watches his spouse Revathi and their two youngsters – five-year-old son, Agaram, and eight-year-old daughter, Yazhisai – put together for the native temple pageant, and smiles contentedly.

Greater than a decade in the past, the couple have been furiously writing to 1 one other – practically 400 letters in a handful of years – however neither dreamt they might in the future be right here: at dwelling, collectively.

That’s as a result of the letters have been exchanged between two high-security prisons within the neighbouring state of Karnataka – the place Revathi and Anburaj have been every serving a life sentence.

“We truly fell in love over letters,” says 32-year-old Revathi, smiling. “I keep in mind how my roommates used to tease me each time a letter got here in.”

Heroes and bandits

Many years earlier than the primary letter was despatched, Anburaj was rising up in Kazhuthapali, a village whose identify means “donkey creek”. “It was actually the place the place the [forest-dwelling Soliga tribe] from the neighbouring hills used to dump their donkeys to allow them to drink water from the creek,” Anburaj explains.

His mother and father have been each weavers – his mom Annakodi, 65, nonetheless works on her pedal loom, expertly weaving a vibrant doormat​​ exterior the home whereas her son speaks. When Anburaj was younger, his father needed him to turn out to be a police officer. However the boy had different pursuits.

“After I was eight years previous, I had heard tales of a forest bandit and his gang roaming these very hills. However … not one of the villagers had ever seen him,” Anburaj remembers.

The forest bandit – Veerappan – was a infamous poacher and sandalwood smuggler. However most of the villagers and forest dwellers in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka supported him.

“In 1972, India introduced within the Wildlife Safety Act to guard the forests and the very subsequent day, the looking tribes and forest-dependent villagers grew to become criminals,” Anburaj explains.

The newly shaped forest division put stress on the tribes who have been depending on the forest for meals, however offered them with no different various, he provides.

“There was an enormous hole between the federal government and the forest dwellers – and it led to the rise of Veerappan as a frontrunner who protected forest-dependent tribes from the authorities.”

However whereas the adolescent Anburaj was inquisitive about Veerappan, he discovered his hero in another person – an previous village storyteller named Sevi. The clever elder spoke of the best way of affection, helped resolve village disputes and shared ethical tales that will seize the eye of the whole village.

However then in the future, when Anburaj was 15, one thing occurred that will change each his and Sevi’s lives ceaselessly.

Listening to a commotion exterior, Anburaj stepped out of his home to see the often quiet village full of males wearing camouflage – a part of a particular police job power shaped to seize Veerappan and his males. The startled teenager slowly moved via the crowded avenue and there, in the midst of a throng of individuals, was a unadorned Sevi, huddled in a foetal place. A bunch of policemen thrashed the previous man with batons as villagers regarded on in shock.

Ladies begged the policemen to cease and, once they ultimately did, the villagers shortly clothed the storyteller. The police officers declared that the identical factor would occur to anybody who dared to help Veerappan. Anburaj watched as his hero limped again to his hut, not figuring out that it was the final time he would see him.

“Sevi thatha [grandpa] by no means got here out to share his tales once more, and he died inside months,” he says. Sevi’s dying had a profound impact on Anburaj, who determined then that he needed to hitch the rebels within the forest.

When he was 17, Anburaj acquired his probability.

He was grazing his sheep within the hills when he encountered Veerappan. The bandit took an instantaneous liking to the inquisitive teenager, taking him beneath his wing and educating him the methods of the forest. Anburaj would stand guard for Veerappan, carry his groceries, and do his bidding.

“At that time, I used to be simply Veerappan’s soldier who blindly obeyed his orders. I might beat up anybody he asks me to,” he remembers, recounting his involvement in two offences the place the gang kidnapped forest officers and two freelance photographers for ransom.

However, simply three years after he joined them, Veerappan requested Anburaj and another bandits to give up to the police as part of his reconciliation efforts with the state authorities, which he stated had promised them amnesty in alternate for his or her give up. Anburaj did as he was requested and remembers bidding a teary-eyed Veerappan farewell.

The state authorities backed out of its dedication, nonetheless, and put Anburaj and the opposite bandits on trial. Veerappan – who didn’t give up as a result of he wasn’t positive the federal government would honour its promise – went on the run till he was ambushed and killed by state police in 2004.

Anburaj was 20 years previous when he was sentenced to life in jail for aiding the forest brigade and being an adjunct to kidnapping.

“When the decide learn the assertion that stated I needed to serve my sentence ‘till my final breath’, it felt like a dying knell,” he says.

When destiny attracts a path

“[In prison] the meals, water, all the things was abysmal. The worst half was we got two bowls: one to eat on and one other to gather our excreta; we needed to get rid of it ourselves the subsequent day,” he says.

The shortage of fundamental human dignity shocked Anburaj, who responded by organising peaceable protests requesting higher sanitation amenities. His authorized petitions would later pave the best way for improved rest room amenities throughout the state’s prisons.

When he was not protesting, Anburaj was studying. Papillon by Henri Charriere – a novel that explores the title character’s imprisonment and subsequent escape from a French penal colony – hit significantly near dwelling. Like its hero, Anburaj felt that the punishment for a criminal offense he had dedicated as a juvenile was too harsh.

“Like Henri, I used to be not able to spend the remainder of my life in jail, so I hatched plans to flee its towering partitions,” he says.

However whereas looking for methods to surmount his bodily obstacles, Anburaj met “a famend theatre director who had come to organise performs for prisoners” – and his plan modified.

As performs have been typically held exterior jail grounds, Anburaj volunteered to arrange a staff of actors and theatre technicians in his jail, hoping that this could be his ticket to flee.

It did free him, however not in the best way he had anticipated.

Earlier than they might start work on the performs, inmates have been requested to attend workshops the place they did issues like paint, craft clay fashions, and dance. “The thought was to deliver out the mindset of a kid in every one in all us, which it did. I had by no means held a brush or canvas in my life but I painted two big canvases, immersing myself within the expertise for 3 complete months. As a prisoner, we don’t get to see the dawn or sundown contained in the jail so I created a portray of a heat dawn,” Anburaj remembers.

Over the subsequent six months, he was swept into the world of theatre. Every script and character spoke to his soul. “After I learn the scene the place Woman Macbeth cries in anguish about her incapacity to scrub the scent of blood from her fingers, I might connect with the guilt she felt.”

Anburaj felt a have to hug his victims and to ask for his or her forgiveness. He believed it was obligatory for each prisoner to really feel that sense of guilt with a purpose to reform themselves. He was additionally closely influenced by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, studying near 150 books on the revolutionary’s life as a part of his preparations for a play about Gandhi’s spouse, Kasturba.

Within the males’s jail, feminine characters have been often performed by male prisoners. However when his theatre staff needed to placed on a play referred to as Madhavi – a scathing commentary on patriarchal society – he felt that solely a lady might do justice to the position.

So in 2008, he wrote to jail officers requesting that feminine prisoners be allowed to carry out within the jail theatre. His petition was accepted and 12 feminine prisoners from a close-by facility joined their group of performers.

That’s when he met Revathi.

An opportunity at a future

When Revathi was three years previous, her mom died. Quickly after, her father deserted her. So she lived together with her grandmother in Chennai. However when she handed away, 14-year-old Revathi selected to stick with the household she labored for as a home helper.

A yr later, that household relocated to Bengaluru, the Karnataka capital, taking Revathi with them. However inside six months of the transfer, that they had despatched her to work for an aged girl in a fancy condo within the metropolis.

“I used to be shocked when in the future that girl nonchalantly declared that I used to be bought to a prostitution ring in Mumbai. My abdomen churned, I knew that there was completely nobody to save lots of me,” Revathi remembers.

She claims that when she shouted for assist, the girl stabbed her within the abdomen and arms. She says she managed to seize the knife from her and “attacked her again”.

Revathi remembers how the girl “sunk in a pool of blood”.

“I handed out earlier than I realised what had simply occurred.”

Three days later, the 16-year-old awakened in hospital. That’s when she discovered that she was to be tried for homicide.

Revathi was convicted and sentenced to life in 2003.

She performed the scene out in her thoughts time and again, questioning if she might have finished something in a different way. However there she was in a white sari – the uniform worn by feminine prisoners – that declared her a felony to a world she barely knew.

Throughout her first yr in jail, she didn’t speak to anybody. She fell into despair. Then, a number of years into her sentence, a jail official inspired her to hitch a theatre group within the ladies’s jail.

After jail officers authorized Anburaj’s request in 2008, the feminine inmates started practising together with their male theatre counterparts beneath a big tree within the backyard of the lads’s jail. After their workshops and rehearsals ended, the ladies’s and males’s teams would then return to their respective prisons.

When Revathi first arrived with the opposite feminine inmates, Anburaj hardly seen the quiet younger lady.

Revathi stored to herself as she couldn’t communicate the native language – Kannada. It took her days to determine that Anburaj was in actual fact from her dwelling state, Tamil Nadu, and spoke her mom tongue, Tamil, fluently. Slowly, she started opening as much as him.

“In the future, I used to be requested to craft one thing in clay as a part of our theatre workshop on the males’s jail. I selected to mould a statue of a mom. Having misplaced my mom at a younger age, it was the primary picture that got here to my thoughts,” she says.

She grew to become overwhelmed with emotion and Anburaj, who was the assistant director for the jail theatre initiative, helped her end the statue.

A friendship blossomed between the 2. “We solely spoke a number of phrases in individual however he wrote to me extensively. His phrases have been at all times type and soothing,” Revathi smiles.

The workshops and apply periods allowed them to fulfill for 5 days per week over a interval of 11 months.

Their conversations advanced into lengthy discussions in regards to the characters of their performs and the challenges of their lives earlier than they have been imprisoned. “I had studied solely until class 4 so I might hardly write. He, alternatively, wrote mellifluously. In truth, I discovered to jot down from him,” she laughs.

When jail officers thought-about releasing Revathi for good behaviour, and she or he fearful about the place she would go, Anburaj assured her that she might go to his household. His mom and siblings would deal with her like their very own, he insisted. That was the second Revathi knew that Anburaj was her future.

For Anburaj, Revathi was somebody who shared his imaginative and prescient. “I knew that I wouldn’t simply step out of jail and handle simply my household. I wanted somebody who understood my ideology. No matter was denied to us, I needed to attempt to give again to these we are able to,” he explains.

“As an individual who has been a sufferer herself, I had seen Revathi arise for widespread good even contained in the jail grounds. She had petitioned to deliver sanitary napkins for ladies prisoners. She was empathetic and is my equal in each sense of the phrase.”

Plentiful love

In 2011, three years after they met, whereas each have been on parole – short-term launch given to prisoners primarily based on good behaviour – they acquired married. 4 years later, whereas Anburaj was away acting at a Bengaluru theatre pageant, Revathi bore their first baby whereas in jail – a tiny, untimely child lady.

Anburaj and his jail supervisor rushed in a single day to see the new child in a personal hospital in Mysuru. “The minute I held her I felt immense pleasure and hope. There was additionally this sense of giant duty on my shoulders. It was not about pampering her or giving her wealth or training. I simply needed to supply that little lady with the perfect atmosphere to let her fly and let her be,” he stated.

The subsequent day, Revathi returned to jail with the infant.

Six months after giving beginning, and after 14 years in jail, Revathi was launched for good behaviour. Anburaj was launched a yr later, after spending 20 years in jail.

The couple moved to reside with Anburaj’s mother and father in Kazhuthapali.

With some assist from associates, Anburaj arrange an oil processing unit and later expanded it to an natural store that sells greens, groceries, honey, oil and handicrafts. He continues to return to the jail the place he was imprisoned, to organise performs for inmates. Revathi has plans to arrange a separate theatre unit in a ladies’s jail, and the 2 are attempting to create related programmes in different states as nicely.

Revathi says they’re hardly romantic in standard methods. “In all these years, he has gifted me a sari and I’ve given him a peaceable Buddha statue, which he retains on his desk at our store,” she smiles.

“Solely love has remodeled us into people and we really feel it’s essential to deliver this peranbu [abundant love] to the world round us,” says Anburaj.

Having witnessed the challenges that underprivileged forest tribes skilled throughout his time with Veerappan, Anburaj has helped arrange a tribal cooperative society that works in the direction of advertising and marketing sustainable forest assets and is within the course of of making a college curriculum primarily based on native ecological information.

Revathi typically accompanies her husband on his journeys to fulfill the tribal communities within the neighbouring Thamaraikarai Hills and says she likes to see him remodel into a little bit baby as he animatedly shares his tales with individuals there.

“Our love story has by no means been nearly us,” she declares. “All I needed was love, and now, I really feel it abundantly.”