Blood spilled as love bloomed in a Bihar village’s Maoist trenches

Kumartadi is eerily quiet, the kind of quiet that can only exist in a forest. An 8km dirt road, traversable only by two-wheeler or on foot, is the only meandering path in, framed by a thick, dark cover of green. For all of those eight kilometres, there is no electricity pole or drinking water pump, not one school, nor one primary health centre.