A quiet Haryana village, an unsettling video and a family under the spotlight

The narrow, paved lanes of Fatehpur in Haryana’s Panchkula have never seen so many government vehicles as they make their way towards a house that has suddenly become the most talked-about address in the village. Even though only his extended family were at home Monday morning, officials and representatives from different government agencies kept arriving, turning the doorstep of an otherwise ordinary family into the centre of an unfolding investigation.

Just a few days ago, the eight-year-old boy who lives here was, for many residents, simply another child in the neighbourhood — someone they had seen playing in the lanes, with other children and even with street dogs. Villagers are now struggling to reconcile those memories with the one in the video that they have repeatedly seen, where the boy can be seen assaulting a girl.

“The entire village knows about it now,” says a villager at a shed just outside the street. On October 28, the boy assaulted a kindergarten student inside an empty classroom at a government school, according to the video.

According to police, the boy attacked the girl with a brick and a flower pot, repeatedly banged her head against a desk and stomped on her face and body, leaving her with serious injuries. The girl sustained multiple facial fractures, including a fracture of the nose, and was admitted to PGIMER, Chandigarh, for treatment.

She regained consciousness Saturday, the third day of her hospitalisation, and her condition has since improved. Hardly 80 metres away, at the village taxi stand, a group of men sit discussing the video. The conversation keeps circling back to the same question: how could a child they had watched grow up be at the centre of such a disturbing incident?

“Yahin kabhi bachon ke saath, kabhi gali k street dogs ke saath khelta tha… pata nahi kya ho gaya usse… par aap dekh nahi sakte video. Kara toh aise hai jaise darinde bhi nahi karte. Ab kaun apne bachche bhejega iske saath khelne (He used to play here with children and dogs.

Don't know what happened to him? But you cannot even watch the video. What he has done is something even beasts would not do. Who will send their children out to play with him now)?” asks Rustam Singh, a taxi owner, while speaking to The Indian Express.

The shock is not confined to the taxi stand. It follows people through the lanes, where the family's house has become impossible to ignore. The boy’s family has lived in Fatehpur for years now. His father, a driver, initially drove vehicles on hire before buying a Maruti Swift Dzire, but work has been scarce, his fellow taxi drivers said.

His mother is a homemaker and his elder sister studies in Class 6. For the village, the repeated visits have brought an extraordinary public gaze to a family that had otherwise lived an ordinary life. Jaspal Singh, another neighbour, remembers the boy as a familiar face.

"Poora khandan aisa hai ki kabhi chinti bhi nahi maari hogi. Agar kabhi aisa kuch dikhaya hota ya pata hota to school hi na bhejte gharwale (The entire family is such that they probably wouldn’t have hurt even an ant. Had the boy ever shown such behaviour before, or had the family known about anything like this, they would never have sent him to school),” Jaspal says.

For a neighbour, the boy was someone who would not pass her without a customary greeting. She remembers him as a child who called her ‘taiji’ or aunt and touched her feet every day. But of late, she said, he started keeping to himself.

“Meri beti chaar saal ki hai. Usske sath khelti thi. Bas kuch samay se apne mein rehne lag gaya tha. Phone bahut dekhta tha mummy ka (My four-year-old daughter used to play with him. For some time, now he had started keeping to himself.

He used to watch a lot of things on his mother's phone),” she says. Rustam Singh, the taxi driver who had worked with the boy’s father, also said the boy spent considerable time on his phone. “Saare gaon ko pata hai ji. Phone pe bahut rehne lag gaya tha (The whole village knows about it.

He used to spend a lot of time on the phone. Earlier, he would play with the dogs in the street and with other children),” he says.