Possessed man bangs 3-yr-old kid to death to appease goddess

"The previous day, I cut my finger and offered it toDevi-maa for the well-being of my family… after all it is my responsibility to look after them… I was possessed in sleep… had a premonition about the police forcing me into the lock-up and beating me… look here, the same has happened …," he continues blabbering. His wife Durgabai is a shattered woman having seen her son killed in a horrifying manner. And she is repulsed by any mention of her husband.

"If so ever I go to meet him (Nandlal), I will throw my bangles and mangalsutra on his face. I have had enough of it," she says.

The shocking incident that occurred in Chargaon-Dafai – a tiny hamlet located 4 km away from the temple-town of Ramtek in Nagpur district – shortly after the midnight of July 19, has apparently created a great deal of shock and indignation in the region.

A family of four brothers hailing from Balaghat in Madhya Pradesh, the Kathotes migrated to Ramtek in search of labour a few years back and settled in adjacent huts at Chargaon-Dafai.

Nandlal, the eldest amongthe brothers, secured the job of a chowkidar with a private mining contractor and has since been living with his wife and two sons, Kanhaiyya (6) and Vijay (3), in a tiny hut. Belonging to a community of traditional devotees of goddesses Durga, Sharada and Kaali, Nandlal would often perform pooja at his house. However, as his wife recalls, he had neither any spiritual guru nor had any previous record of psychic behaviour.

Of late, though, he had started living in his own world and the first sign of his erratic behaviour came when Durgabai noticed that her husband had cut off the index finger of his left palm. Little did she know that tragedy would strike her the same night when the family went to sleep as usual. As Durgabai recalls, "I was feeding my younger son when he (Nandlal) got up suddenly and caught hold the child with his two legs. Before I could realise what was he up to, Nandlal started banging the kid against the floor."

A frightened Durgabai asked her elder son, Kanhaiyya, to run awayto her mother’s house nearby and tried to save Vijay when Nandlal launched a brutal onslaught on her, chewing off a part of her cheek. "So possessed was he that I could do very little to save my child."

Nandlal’s mother, who resides in the adjacent house with his younger brother Raju, heard some commotion but took it for a usual ruckus that Nandlal often created in an inebriated condition. It was around 4 am when she asked Raju to check out the happenings at Nandlal’s house.

Witnessing the horrifying scene inside the house, Raju rushed to the village Sarpanch. By the time, the police could be summoned at the site early in the morning, a hysterical Nandlal stood in front of his house, hurling abuses at anybody daring to approach him. Continuing his tirade, Nandlal made a vain bid to dissuade the police party from taking him into custody. As of now, in the absence of a medical evaluation, the police have been unable to reach any conclusion as to whether Nandlal’s act was the result of a schizophrenic attackborne out of an obsessive belief in sorcery or had some other reason to do with.