Chhabirani Mohapatra found justice last week after 22 years. She was not there to see it being done. Nor was her husband, Nabakishore, or her son, Dany, for whom she gave her life on October 3, 1980. A group of Congressmen chased Chhabirani, raped and murdered her on the Biluakhai riverbed near this village, as Nabakishore stood transfixed with eight-month-old Dany, hidden in a bamboo grove. When the couple was attacked by the gang, Chhabirani had asked her husband to flee and save his life and that of their son. Last week, the Supreme Court convicted four of that group for raping and killing Chhabirani, overturning a high court judgment that had let them walk free and called the husband a coward. 'I still remember their faces when I searched for my wife with a torchlight on the riverbed. A day before the incident, my wife was on fast for the entire day. When the goons started chasing her on the wet riverbed, she had no energy left to flee from their clutches. She begged for mercy,' Nabakishore said. The couple incurred the wrath of some influential local people after news agent-cum-reporter Nabakishore wrote certain reports on corruption in Oriya newspapers, for which he worked as an unpaid part-timer, encouraged by his wife, who had a flair for poetry. Durmukha, a satirical magazine, published two of her poems and she became a correspondent as well for the publication. Two decades after Chhabirani's death, her husband is not a crusading journalist, but has found safety as a lowly official in the Orissa Forest Development Corporation at Berhampur, where he has been living for 11 years. Nabakishore, who once wrote in the newspaper, Nirbhika, how the doctor of the primary health centre was pilfering medicines, has remarried and has a daughter by his second wife. Dany, now a young man of 22 with a business in another district, Kendrapara, does not live with him. Father and son appear to have drifted apart, memory of that day in the bamboo grove perhaps fading with time in Nabakishore. Or of the love poems Chhabirani wrote to him during courtship when she was in her teens. On October 3, 1980, Dany - the last of the couple's four sons - was too young to pick up baggage for the future. First-born Lalu was mentally-challenged and last heard was living with Chhabirani's parents. The other two died, possibly at birth or soon after. 'We still meet,' Nabakishore said, revealing that he brought up Dany till he was 15. Nabakishore's youngest brother, Dushashan, and family members dispute it. 'He hardly visits us or his son,' said Dushashan. Few in this village - where Chhabirani first stepped in as a newly-wed, her romance with Nabakishore having started in 1970 in Puri - are comfortable recounting the incident. Nabakishore's mother, Pramila, who could not muster the courage to see the mutilated body of her daughter-in-law in 1980, let a thin smile cross her lips after being told for the first time of the quartet's conviction. 'It's good that they have been punished. But isn't it too late?' she asked. It is, at least for one of the four convicted. Babaji Mania died five years ago. The other three - Birabar Mania, Dhira Behera and Madhabananda Parmanik - are small traders on the wrong side of 50. 'I thought these people had managed to grease everyone's palms as we saw after my sister-in-law was raped and murdered,' Dushashan said.