OceanofPDF.

com
 Year of the Weeds
OceanofPDF.com
Read more for young adults from Duckbill
Wanting Mor by Rukhsana Khan
Unbroken by Nandhika Nambi
When She Went Away by Andaleeb Wajid
Invisible People by Harsh Mander
Daddy Come Lately by Rupa Gulab
Facebook Phantom by Suzanne Sangi
Jobless Clueless Reckless by Revathi Suresh
Queen of Ice by Devika Rangachari
Shiva and the Rise of the Shadows by Kanika Dhillon
Talking of Muskaan by Himanjali Sankar
The Right Kind of Dog by Adil Jussawalla
The Wordkeepers by Jash Sen
Skyserpents by Jash Sen
Vortal Shockwave by Ashok Banker
Alice in Deadland by Mainak Dhar
Through the Killing Glass by Mainak Dhar
Zombiestan by Mainak Dhar
When Morning Comes by Arushi Raina

Read more by Siddhartha Sarma for young adults

The Grasshopper’s Run
103 Journeys, Voyages, Trips and Stuff
103 Historical Mysteries, Puzzles, Conundrums and Stuff
OceanofPDF.com
 Year of the Weeds

Siddhartha Sarma

OceanofPDF.com
 In the banyan is the cat
In the peepal Mirchak Rai
In the deep gully Bhutuk Rai
In the Hutang Spring is Kaniyat Rai
Greet them well.
—Muria Gond song
OceanofPDF.com
 1
APRIL

The bus was late.

But ‘late’ and ‘early’ are words you can only use if you have a watch. If
you have a watch, time becomes a number, and a bus becomes late or early
or even—why not? on—time. None of the five persons who stood by the
road had a watch. So the bus was an idea that would happen some time.
There was just one bus in these parts; one vehicle that went from Deogan
and neighbouring villages to Balangir town fifteen kilometres away and
back, from morning to night. Balangir was the headquarters of the district.
The bus followed its own rules, so it arrived when it did. There were some
days when it just didn’t arrive. But, as every villager here knew, it would
always come when it was needed.
It was late morning and the sun was warm. There was just a thin tree by
the road and Korok, by shifting both feet into a difficult angle, was trying to
get under its shade. Even the leaves had given up trying to stick to the tree.
Korok was going to Balangir. He would have avoided it if he could, but
he had to meet his father and he had to get his bicycle. He couldn’t avoid it.
Either his father, or the bicycle, yes, but not both.
 And here came the bus, a wonder of engineering, about thirty-seven
sheets of metal hammered over an ancient engine. Over the bad parts of the
road—and there were many—the passengers could feel the sheets trying to
break away. Someday they would, and the bus would be just two rows of
seats behind an engine.
And here, too, sitting on the steps, was Bishto. He was the same age as
Korok but he was the handyman and conductor for the bus and lived in it.
Where he came from, Korok didn’t know. It was even said that he was born
with the bus, but that would make him very old.
Bishto had the thinnest arms anyone had ever seen. They said Korok also
had thin arms. In fact, if anyone was looking for Korok in Deogan village,
people would say: ‘That boy with the thin arms? He’s over there.’ That was
how the villagers knew him, that and his garden. But Bishto’s arms were
sticks, and he had just one hand. The other, it was said, he had lost when he
picked up a bomb from the railway track across the river. That was just
what they said. It is possible that Bishto was born with one hand. Besides,
to get to the railway track, even an infant Bishto would have to get off the
bus and cross the river, and Bishto never left the bus. But two arms or one,
Bishto kept his place on the bus and never forgot to get the fares from his
many passengers. One arm and two eagle eyes—that was Bishto.
Korok got on board after the other passengers.
‘To Balangir, to meet your father?’ asked Bishto at the steps, eating a ripe
guava, his other arm around the handrail, and Korok nodded.
He had a folded, crumpled five-rupee note, the bus fare, but Bishto shook
the guava at him and waved him in. Nobody took money from Korok, not
in his village. In Balangir they took everything.
‘You pay the fare when your father comes from Balangir, not when you
go there,’ said Bishto, smiling at his guava, before he hammered on the side
of the bus and told the driver: ‘Go.’
 Korok took his seat at the back of the bus. He had with him an
aluminium tiffin box with rotis and vegetables for his father that he had
cooked himself. By the time he reached Balangir town, it wouldn’t matter
who had made the rotis; they would be just as hard and rubbery as the ones
Korok had eaten in the morning. But the important thing was he was taking
them to his father.
The Gonds of western Odisha don’t eat rotis as a rule, but just last week
Korok had gone to the little room in the village trader’s house which was
the state’s Public Distribution System outlet with a dirty bit of paper which
said he could get rice and cooking oil at cheap prices because he had an
‘Antyodaya’ card. That is, he was very poor. But the store did not have red
rice, which the Gonds ate. In fact, most of Odisha in these parts ate red rice,
which was called Nali Swarna, ‘golden red’. But the government, or some
Big Person in the coastal cities of the east had decided wheat was better, so
Korok was given a packet of coarse flour and had to make what he thought
were rotis.
The bus went west across the bridge on the Tel River, which at this point
curved around Deogan and the other villages. The bridge, like the bus, was
another engineering marvel, but it was built many years ago, when this part
of Odisha supplied a lot of timber from the forests. Timber trucks would
cross the Tel, and they needed a strong bridge to carry them over, so the
bridge was built to last.
The Tel would last much longer than the bridge, although just then, at the
beginning of summer, it was more stream than river. In the distance, it
curved around Devi Hills, although its source was far to the west
somewhere.
Along its banks reared the mass of Devi Hills. It was actually just one big
hill, with three peaks, but the peaks were some distance from each other,
and the sides came down almost to the level of the river, so it was called
‘hills’. Around it clustered the Gond villages, of which Deogan was the
biggest.
 As the bus rattled on towards town, on each side of the road, laid out for
the curious, were fields of potatoes, millet and cereal, patches of thick
forest, occasionally a village. A tribesman squatted in a field, poking the
soil to see if it was ready for planting before the rains. A group of women
walked along the road with branches and twigs from the forests for their
kitchens. A chicken pecked in a dried-mud courtyard away from the road;
sometimes a goat watched the road with no apparent motive. The chickens
and goats, of course, were doing what other chickens and goats do all the
time, whether they are owned by a Gond or someone else.
Korok never liked leaving his village and walking the two kilometres to
the main road to catch the bus. He did not like the gradual change in the
countryside as they approached Balangir town. He was not comfortable
around the big houses, the cars, the masses of people.
Balangir wasn’t that big a town, nor did it have that many cars or traffic
or people. But it was a distant world from Deogan village. It was a Big
Place. It had Big People. It was where everyone from all the villages, Gond
farmer or Odia trader, had to go to get anything done. Permissions.
Paperwork. Fines. Taxes. Big Things.
At the main chowk in Balangir, the bus wheezed to a stop, that is, it
slowed but kept moving by inches. The bus never really stopped anywhere
and no one had ever seen it stop or its engine shut down. It was said that if
the bus ever stopped it would fall to pieces and lie there and Bishto would
turn into a parrot and fly away. This only proves that people had a lot of
time to think about the bus and had covered every single possibility.
Bishto, the one-handed acrobat and guava-lover, leaned out from the door
and said, unnecessarily: ‘Ei, Balangir …’
Korok got down and almost immediately a motorcycle went past,
honking, although there was nothing on the road to honk at. That was just
how things happened in Balangir. The bus went around the chowk and
headed back out of town.
 Korok walked along the fruit stalls of the chowk. It was puzzling to see
the wives and servants of Balangir’s Big People at the stalls. In his village,
people had their own fruit trees, and if you had more and your neighbours
wanted some, they could have it, if they asked first. Of course, it was not
always about sharing. It made more sense to give away what you did not
want than to have it rot on the trees. So they would say: ‘Take the fruits,
they are about to rot.’
But here the bananas and guavas and lime were put on display and
sometimes the sellers would sprinkle them with water and say they were
fresh. That was how Balangir was. A place where people said, ‘Take the
fruits, they are so fresh.’
Down the road, past the shops and small restaurants. There was a new
temple here. Very new, built by some organisation Korok had heard of.
They’d put up loudspeakers and every morning and evening they would
play religious songs in Odia. In Balangir, new things kept coming up, even
new gods.
And so onward, past a doctor’s clinic and two pharmacies, to a thick, and
very high, reddish brick wall. It was an old, old wall, but so thick and tall it
was. When Korok was very small and had come to Balangir the first time
with his father, that wall seemed to stretch all the way to the sky. It was a
little shorter now, but not by much. Sooner or later, every Gond came to
know it well.
There was a big, impressive and old iron gate set into the wall, and a
wicket gate set into the big gate. Here stood a policeman at attention, that is,
leaning against the wall and cleaning his ear. By now some of the Gond
guards knew Korok, more or less, so after shaking the tiffin box a little, the
policeman rapped on the wicket gate, which opened, and Korok entered
Balangir District Jail.
In the courtyard, he stood among the few visitors after giving his name,
until he was called, and walked through one of the doors into a thick-walled
room smelling of new paint.
 Here a fat and sweating policeman asked Korok his name and pressed a
metal disc into his palm. The disc had the number fifteen etched on it,
although it had been pressed and disfigured by many fingers over the years
and the digits could be just barely seen. This was his visitor number.
Korok took this disc and walked into an inner courtyard, where other
visitors were meeting their relatives or friends.
His father was sitting under the tree at the centre of the yard. This was his
fifteenth month in prison. The police had arrested him for smuggling timber
from Deogan Reserve, the huge forest on both sides of the Tel. That is, they
had not actually caught him with the timber. They had arrested him near the
main road on the other side of the village. Now, you can’t steal truckloads
of logs of precious trees on your own, so Korok’s father must have been
working with other people to smuggle the timber. But the police hadn’t
found out who these people were. Actually, they hadn’t found the timber his
father was supposed to be smuggling either. But the police had said the man
was a timber smuggler, so they put him in prison.
Every once in a month or two Korok’s father’s case would come up in
court and the magistrate would set another date for hearing it. Sometimes
the files were not in court. Sometimes the policemen were absent.
Sometimes even the magistrate was absent. So Korok’s father would be sent
back to jail and wait for the next hearing. He thus became an undertrial—
not yet convicted of anything, but not free either. Balangir Jail had more
undertrials than convicts.
In the months since the police had picked him up, Korok’s father hadn’t
changed much. His beard, particularly under the chin, had gone grey one
hair at a time. But he was otherwise the same. He did not complain, nor did
he talk about the past or future.
Even the way he opened Korok’s box and ate the rotis and vegetables
was slow and methodical. And after eating, he held out his hand and Korok
dropped a bundle of local beedis in it. In jail beedis were currency if you
wanted friends or favours, but for undertrials they were difficult to come by.
Korok, the good son, got him a bundle each week, all made in the village.
‘How is your garden?’ asked Korok’s father, in the weekly ritual they had
of the same set of questions and answers. Not ‘the’ garden. Ever since his
father had been arrested, it had become ‘your’ garden.
‘It is good.’
‘The epho lets you work in the garden, he does not cause problems?’
Korok worked in the big garden in the Divisional Forest Officer’s house.
This was where his father used to work. Now Korok worked among the rare
flowers and medicinal plants, and so well-known was his garden that it was
his garden. The DFO, or epho as people here called such an important man,
did not seem to mind that a jailed timber smuggler’s son worked in his
house. But as everyone knew, only the police called Korok’s father a timber
thief.
‘No, he is mostly away. I haven’t seen him since last week.’
And the week before, when Korok’s father had asked him the same
question, he had given the same answer, because nothing much changed in
their world, except the seasons.
Meeting time was over. Korok took the empty tiffin box from his father
and put twenty rupees in his hands.
There remained the matter of the bicycle.
‘Korok? What about the bicycle?’
‘I am going to talk to them about it.’
‘Be careful. How many more times are you going to ask?’
‘One more time.’
Between the two of them, Korok could have avoided his father. But
sooner or later, he would have to deal with the bicycle.
 Which is why he walked out of the jail and down two streets towards the
chowk till he came to a big white single-storey building with a red-tinned
roof which said: ‘Balangir Police Station’. And next to it, in letters of the
same size, ‘Office of the Superintendent of Police, Balangir District.’ This
was one of the Big Places of Balangir.
In the yard in front and to the left of the office were the various odds and
ends that the policemen brought there in the course of keeping the law
around Balangir and the villages of the district. A bundle of tendu leaves,
which are used to wrap beedis, was lying in the sun. A small coop with
three thin chickens, probably seized after a village dispute. Half-a-dozen
logs of rotting timber, sal timber too, very valuable. These must have been
seized from real timber smugglers, but it must have been a long time ago,
because their outer bark had fallen off and rain and sun had made the sal
wood red like the back of ants. And in the middle of the yard, Korok’s
father’s bicycle.
When Korok’s father was arrested, he had been on his bicycle, with a
bundle of potatoes from his field which he was carrying to Deogan’s
weekly market. In a fit of efficiency that Balangir police were never known
for, they had put him in their jeep and gone off … and come back to pick up
the bicycle and the potatoes.
The potatoes had been tried and sentenced to be eaten by the policemen,
but while Korok’s father waited for the court to decide whether he was
innocent or not, his bicycle was in jail at the police station.
Every week when Korok came to meet his father he would see the
bicycle with its faded brown seat in the police station yard. Once he saw a
constable riding it down the street.
Every once in a while, he would come to the police station to ask if it
could be released, since the police did not need it, and his father couldn’t
use it, but he could.
 Inside the room of the officer-in-charge sat two Gonds on a wooden
bench. They were from some other village and seemed to be here to settle a
dispute, because they were not looking at each other and wouldn’t allow
anyone else to share the bench with them so they could be pushed closer.
Perhaps the dispute was over the three chickens in the coop outside. Korok
stood on either leg for a few minutes and then crouched on his haunches.
An hour or so passed before the officer-in-charge, an inspector, made his
appearance with great speed from another room, sitting behind his desk and
flipping rapidly the pages of the biggest book Korok had ever seen in his
life, not that he had seen many. This was the Daily Diary, the holy scripture
of a police station, where every incident, complaint or action by the
policemen was to be recorded.
Not all of what they did was recorded, of course, such as what happened
to Korok’s father’s potatoes. They might have been important to Korok, or
his father, but not for the police station. But the book was the Key, the Life
of the station.
Korok approached the inspector, who looked up from licking his fingers
to turn the pages.
‘Inspector-sir, I have come about my father’s bicycle …’
The inspector stared at Korok, as if he had never heard words like
‘father’ and ‘bicycle’ in his life. Korok had met him before, but then there
were many Gond boys visiting the police station all the time, and this
wasn’t his village.
‘What bicycle? Who stole it? Why do you buy bicycles if you let
someone steal them all the time?’
‘Inspector-sir, no, my father was arrested for timber smuggling, I’m from
Deogan, his bicycle is here outside. I was told I could take it home …’
The inspector looked down and flipped the pages rapidly, looking for the
solution to some great mystery within them. ‘You have to wait for Patnaik-
sir, he will be here soon. Only he can give you permission to take it away.
Go sit over there and wait for him. Chickens and bicycles! We have better
things to do …’
Korok did not have to wait for long because a car screeched to a stop
outside, a warning honked from its horn, and the might and majesty of the
law, the great and terrible Superintendent of Police of Balangir district, S.
Patnaik, rushed in.
‘S. Patnaik’ was what it said in white capital letters on the polished and
shiny rectangle of black plastic pinned on his chest. Some said it stood for
‘Sanjay’, but others said this was not true at all for a man who was the
biggest police officer of the district and among the most powerful men in
those parts. He was government personified, and how could such a godlike
person have a simple name like ‘Sanjay’? They said the ‘S’ actually stood
for ‘Sorkari’, if not something much worse. Yet others, the older people,
said if his name was indeed ‘Sorkari’ there couldn’t be a worse name than
that.
Now, if this was a different kind of story, the kind where people’s natures
are seen in their bodies, Patnaik would be a fat man with three chins, an evil
moustache and a squint. Not that a moustache by itself is evil, but some
moustaches fit that sort of person. But this is not that kind of story, so
Patnaik was as his mother expected him to be when he was growing up.
He was in his forties, dark and neither thin nor fat. He did have a
moustache, but it was brushy and trimmed and modest. It was the
moustache of a man who wanted to keep one but not make a big show of it.
What made him remarkable was how he saw himself in the world. It was in
his walk. It was in the way he looked at everyone. Here was a man who
knew himself, said the look, just as well as he knew everyone around him.
Sorkari Patnaik would find a criminal by looking at him and seeing inside
his head with all its secrets, whether they existed or not. Patnaik was never
wrong. He was never, ever wrong. Patnaik would have been a dangerous
man if a committee had elected him as the official Village Idiot. And he was
in charge of Balangir district.
 Sorkari Patnaik, in short, was why Korok preferred to walk from one end
of the Tel River to the other end, wherever it was, rather than visit the
office.
And so it happened that Patnaik strode into his office—it was the
government’s, but actually it was his—and saw Korok.
‘You! You … Gonds! It is not enough that the government gives you free
food all the time, now you want to steal chickens from your own village!’
Patnaik screamed and slapped Korok so hard that the boy would have fallen
if the police officer hadn’t been holding him by the shirt.
‘You, stop fiddling around with that Daily Diary and put him in the
lockup. Now these people can’t even wait to be eighteen years old to be
criminals. And you,’ said Patnaik, turning to a head constable standing at
attention in a corner, ‘get me a cup of tea.’
The inspector came off from his desk and rubbed his hands, unhappy. He
hated having to explain things to Patnaik in front of everyone.
‘Sir, um, this boy didn’t steal the chickens. Those two over there, they
had a dispute over the chickens …’
‘So where’s the thief?’
‘Sir, um, there is no thief … that is, the chickens were not stolen … that
is … they are … there …’ said the inspector, pointing outside.
Patnaik found a new point to take up. ‘What is this? I thought you had
caught a chicken thief. Don’t waste my time with these small problems.’ He
shrugged and turned to go to his office down the corridor, dismissing the
incident.
‘Patnaik-sir …’ said Korok, calling up every last bit of his courage. He
really did not like having to talk to Big People. He just did not know how to
do it. In front of Big People, he felt even smaller than he usually did. ‘I
have come about my father’s bicycle. It is in the yard and I was told I could
take it home …’
 Patnaik stared at Korok, amazed that anyone would keep him from his
tea. Then he reached out and shoved the boy. ‘These Gonds,’ he said,
smiling, to the inspector. ‘They think we are here to wait on them day and
night, “sir” this, “sir” that. Get my tea.’
The inspector looked at Korok and away in a smooth, practiced manner.
“Later. Come back later. Sir is busy. He will give you the permission letter
some other day. You two, will you sit on that bench all day? Make a
statement to the constable in the other room first. We have rules, you know
…’
Korok walked out of the police station, rubbing his cheek where the slap
had left a thin welt. He didn’t look at his bicycle as he walked to the chowk
to wait for the bus. It was afternoon, and he had to work in the epho’s
garden.
OceanofPDF.com
 2
APRIL

Anchita was sitting on the verandah of her house. She’d just returned from
school and had lunch. She was sitting here because, first, there was a
beautiful breeze around here at this time of the day; second, this was the
first house she had ever lived in which had a verandah and third, she had
the best view she could find of the most beautiful garden she had ever seen
in her life.
Back in Cuttack, where she’d lived most of her life before coming here,
from her parents’ apartment at Mahanadi Vihar she could get a good view
of the Mahanadi River as it flowed east to the sea. But a verandah is a
verandah, and apartments don’t have either them or gardens.
This was an old house, which might have put her off if it wasn’t so
different to her experience. It had been built, her father had told her, in
1935, the year Indian provinces were given the duty to take care of forests
in their area. He’d said Hari Singh, who had been a big conservator and
head of the Indian Forest Service when it was created had stayed here, and
in the 1940s, Verrier Elwin himself, the famous expert on Indian tribes, had
stayed here for many years, on and off, as guest. Elwin had been studying
both the Gonds and their forests back then.
 Anchita’s father was in charge of the whole forest division here, which
was a big area, and he had many forests to look after. It was a lot of work.
From this point to the north and south spread some of the thickest forests in
Odisha and, indeed, in the whole of India. To the west, from a line of forest
land between Patnagarh and Kantabanji, which was sixty-five kilometres
from Deogan, began the great forests of central India, crossing the border
into Chhattisgarh. But all that was only if you went up in an aircraft and
saw the land.
From here, from her verandah, what Anchita saw was the massed ridge
of Devi Hills, thick with trees. Although the DFO’s house was right next to
Deogan village, Devi Hills was not like other forests. The Gonds
themselves took care of the hill, because it was sacred for them. This was
how it had always been.
And this house, built by some colonial architect, was a government
residence, with a tin roof and walls that needed whitewash every few years.
But it didn’t feel like an old house, really, and a house like this, on an
afternoon in the early summer with not a murmur of noise anywhere, was
beautiful. Although why every government house was whitewashed with
pale blue or cream, without exception, Anchita couldn’t tell.
She wanted to get up and fetch her sketchbook and trying drawing
something, but felt a little sleepy.
The school she had joined in Balangir, well, it wasn’t like in Cuttack. In
fact, some of her classmates were weird. She hoped she would get along
with them and make some new friends. She hadn’t seen much of anything
else, though she wanted to.
The only problem here was the Internet. There was no broadband
connection, but Anchita had a dongle, which would have been good enough
if the cellphone network around here wasn’t as bad as it was. So here she
was, waiting for a page to load, while her mother was inside somewhere
reading, and here was that Gond boy in the garden again.
 When she first arrived at the house two weeks ago and saw the garden,
her mother had told her that they had a gardener too. Back in Cuttack, they
had three flowerpots in one of their balconies. One of the flowerpots had a
colony of ants and nothing else. Here, Anchita found an actual garden. One
side of it had flowers of all kinds and the other had herbs and medicinal
plants. These had been brought from the forest and were being grown so
that if scientists or anybody else were interested, they could experiment on
the plants, because the locals said they had many medicinal properties.
For her, flowers and shrubs were things that grew in neat rows at her
school. They weren’t really something that she could imagine people
working on. She could draw them, yes, but actually go through all the
trouble of planting and watering them and whatever else a gardener did?
No, what mattered to her was she was in an old house with a verandah and a
garden.
That was till she saw the boy Korok. One morning, when she stepped
into the backyard, he was on his knees digging under a flower bed. So this
was the gardener. And then she realised that this boy had been growing all
these flowers and herbs, and that was actually a lot of work.
Then her mother had told her that Korok’s father was in jail for timber
smuggling, although no one believed that, and Anchita’s father had asked
the police to see if he could be released. Korok’s father used to be the
gardener before, and Anchita’s mother was not comfortable making the boy
work there, but at least he could earn money, which he clearly needed.
And, as both her parents admitted, Korok knew everything about flowers
and herbs, because they had never seen a garden like that, nor anyone who
could work on a garden like he did, hour after hour, every single day.
So here he was, digging under a flower bed. The website would load by
the evening, perhaps not even then. So Anchita went out to see the flowers.
Korok was digging around a row of herbs. These had long and thin
stems, six or seven brown-yellow bulbs to a stem.
 ‘Ca-ssia An-gus-ti-fo-lia,’ said a voice slowly behind him, reading from
the discoloured bit of plastic on a cane stick. All the rows had these cards
with the names of flowers and herbs written in Latin on them. A proper
herbal garden would have more information on the cards, but even this was
a big thing here.
Korok looked up from where he was sitting, frowned and looked down.
He didn’t frown because he disliked people walking around in his garden; it
was just that the sun was directly behind the girl just then. Besides, this was
her garden, actually, although so far she hadn’t shown much interest.
The new epho, who had arrived a month ago, was a bit better than the
earlier one. At least he had tried to talk to the police about getting Korok’s
father released from jail. The earlier epho had just gone on with his work
after Korok’s father was arrested. Maybe he had just been lazy, or maybe he
had not wanted to upset Patnaik. Korok could understand that. Nobody
wanted to upset Sorkari Patnaik, not in Balangir district.
The earlier epho had only let Korok work in the garden after a lot of
pleading. Korok needed the money, but more than that, he needed the
garden. He had been helping his father here for years and years. The garden
was the centre of his life.
The new epho was different. He was still a government man, which
meant Korok had to be careful around him, but his family, particularly his
wife, had been kind to the boy.
‘What do you call this herb?’
‘This one? Senna. We call it senna. It grows all over the hill,’ said Korok,
pointing at Devi Hills in the distance.
‘It is a medicinal plant? What is it good for?’
‘Oh, many things,’ said Korok, still digging around the base of the plants.
Senna took nearly a year to grow and the plant was very difficult to tame.
You had to keep turning the soil around and make the top layer very loose.
‘Uh, old people use it for … joints, backache, hands and feet.’
 ‘So they eat it or something?’
Korok laughed. ‘You can eat the fruit and leaves. You can also crush the
plant and get oil from it, which you rub on the skin. You can’t drink the oil,
though.’
Old people weren’t the only ones who needed it. Senna oil was a
common gift at Gond weddings. People would give bottles of it to the
married couple with a lot of laughter and teasing. Of course, the oil, like all
the other gifts, had to be blessed by the pen, the local god first. But Korok
thought he shouldn’t tell this to the girl. She must be the same age as him,
but probably didn’t know anything about married people. Besides, she was
from a big city, and people there were different.
‘You get all these plants from the hill?’
‘All of them,’ said Korok, rising to get the sprinkler, with which he
briefly—and very carefully—sprayed the plants and watered the base.
Anchita saw he had a red welt on one cheek and wondered how he had got
it. ‘All the plants and all the flowers. Some of them you can find in other
places. But some, like that one—’ he pointed at a row of bristly red flowers
in the next bed, ‘you only find on the hill.’
‘And you know all their names that are on the cards?’
‘I know what we call them. I can’t read much.’
Korok did, at one time, go to school. Deogan had a schoolhouse on the
other side of the village. One school for the five villages around Devi Hills.
And he didn’t mind going to school. But one day four years ago, when
Korok was ten years old, the schoolteacher packed his clothes and left with
a woman he had met at Balangir and no one came to replace him. So Korok
hadn’t left school, if one looked at it. School had left him.
‘But … that’s not possible. There are dozens of flowers and herbs here.
How do you know which is which if you can’t read?’
 Korok didn’t know how to answer that question because it didn’t make
sense for him. He could identify a flower or herb from its seeds in the dark
just by touching them. He could read their names from their shapes, or find
them where they grew on the hill. Then he would plant them in the rows
where they were to be planted and put the cards beside them. If there was a
new herb, he would check the cards for the right picture under the words.
‘Uh …’ he said, smiling, ‘I can tell which is which. I will get some new
herbs from the hill today and you will see.’
‘Can I come with you? I want to see the hill.’
Korok hesitated. He went to meet his father every week, and he went to
see his bicycle every month or so. But he went to meet his mother on Devi
Hills almost every day. He wondered if she would mind if the girl went with
him.
Anchita saw him hesitate and thought perhaps the Gonds did not like
people visiting their sacred hill.
‘Uh… you can come if your mother lets you,’ said Korok.
He went off to store the sprinkler and the flat hand trowel in the room at
the back of the house. When he came out, Anchita was talking to her
mother. The epho’s family members talked to one another in English. That,
to Korok, proved they were important people. ‘Korok,’ said the epho’s wife,
smiling. ‘How is your father? Did you meet him today?’
‘I met him, nani,’ he said, using the Odia word for ‘elder sister’.
‘Didn’t you say you were going to get your bicycle? Did you get it?’
‘Uh … no, nani. Patnaik-sir was busy and said I should come later.’
Anchita’s mother could see the welt on his cheek and was very sure it
hadn’t been there yesterday.
‘Anchita, you come back before dusk, and be careful, okay?’
 Of course, thought Anchita’s mother, as the two children left, she did not
have to worry about Anchita walking around the village. Her main worry so
far had been that her daughter hadn’t been walking around. Deogan was
certainly safer than most neighbourhoods in Cuttack and the Gonds were
quieter than most people she knew, except during festivals.
She had to be careful, she reminded herself. No kind of life is perfect,
and it was easy for city-dwelling Odias like her to think of Gond life as,
somehow, happier and better than their own. What was the term for it? Yes,
the ‘noble savage’. That is, when more developed people who were not
very happy with their kind of life believed that people like the Gonds were
somehow perfect or better or less complex.
No one could be perfect, but the Gonds were, on the whole, such nice
people to live with. And even that was a blessing.

Korok had found a shrub with white flowers growing under a tree on the
side of the hill, which he said was chitrak, which he’d put in a plastic bag.
He seemed to have a strange way of walking, thought Anchita. He just
seemed to be wandering around, looking at the ground and the trees, with
no apparent direction. Perhaps that’s how he walked when looking for
herbs, but Anchita couldn’t imagine doing that all the time.
She should have come to the hill earlier, she realised. From here you
could have a beautiful view down to the Tel and the farms on the other side.
To the right she could see the bridge and the road to Balangir and, beyond
that, where her school would be. Near the hill was Deogan village, which
they had walked through. It was a group of houses not very far from each
other. There were people and farmyard animals around the houses. Some of
the houses had tin roofs, others had thatch.
The hill was thick with shrubs growing in the shade of trees. Anchita
could easily believe there must be dozens more of herbs and flowers
growing wild around here. The hill rose behind her and stretched into the
distance, an ancient mound. Fangorn Forest, she thought. It looks just like
Fangorn Forest.
And so, walking slowly around the side of the hill, she came to a flat
clearing. Two tall stones, about the height of two men each, stood side by
side facing the path the children had come up. At the base of the stones
were offerings of bel leaves and rice, and there were red markings on the
stones.
Surely the stones could not have been there by themselves, so they must
have been placed there, into the earth, at some point of time long ago. There
were six or seven saja trees in the clearing, and around them were more
stones, much smaller than the two at the entrance to the clearing. There
were so many of them, small ones not more than a foot tall, standing
upright but pushed into the ground, some with bel leaves or rice on them.
‘That’s my mother,’ said Korok, pointing to one of the stones on the left.
Not there’s my mother. That’s, thought Anchita, and wondered why he
said that. Perhaps his Odia wasn’t very good. Or perhaps there was a
difference. She knew Korok’s mother had passed away some years ago, but
didn’t know about this clearing or the stones. She began to realise there was
so much she should have known about her new neighbours but didn’t.
Anchita didn’t even know if she should be bothering him with questions
just then, but Korok didn’t seem to be very thoughtful or lost or whatever
people were in a place like this. He seemed to be perfectly at ease. She had
to think of a way to ask her questions without being rude. That was
difficult. Being rude is always easy.
‘What are the stones for?’ she asked, thinking that was a safe question.
‘They are for the hanal. The … when someone dies, their body goes
underground and becomes hanal. It is … like a ghost, but not a ghost. The
stones are for the hanal of the person.’ Soul, thought Anchita. The soul goes
underground.
‘But the life of the person goes up …’
 ‘But you said it goes down …’
‘No, no, the hanal goes down. That’s … something else. The life of the
person is what the person really is. What makes her happy, or sad, what
makes her live. I … can’t explain it,’ he said a little helplessly, but he
smiled. ‘If I die, that part of me which likes growing flowers and herbs, that
part goes up to Pogho Bhum. Yes, that is what happens. That is the life of
the person.’
That was the strangest thing Anchita had ever heard. If she was
understanding him correctly, what Korok meant was the soul went
underground but the best part of the soul went up. She wasn’t very clear
about souls to begin with. Ghosts she could understand and rather not meet.
But this was … interesting.
‘So the life goes up? To heaven? Good things?’
‘I don’t know. Just up. Pogho Bhum is just sky … I think.’
They stood among the stones and thought about it.
‘But for those who are left behind, the stones are where the person’s
memories stay. This is why everyone comes here, to the hanal kot. To talk
to them.’
‘Do you come here every day?’
‘Almost every day.’
They stood in silence for a while.
‘Korok, can I come here with you someday and sketch this?’
‘Sketch?’
‘You know, draw all this. I want to draw the hanal kot, and the view of
the river and villages. Everything.’
Korok smiled.
‘Yes,’ he said.
 They came down the hill a little while afterwards. On the way they
passed a short, thick piece of bamboo, split lengthwise and tied back
together, on the side of the trail, under a tree, where someone had left
yellow flowers. Korok said that was a pen, a small god, this one tied to the
tree. There was a thick piece of iron inside the bamboo, he said, and that
was for the pen. Anchita asked if they could open the bamboo and take a
look, but Korok looked horrified and said they weren’t allowed to touch it.
Only a priest or the mahji, the headman, could do that, and Anchita said she
was only making fun of him.
There were, Korok said, hundreds of pens on Devi Hills. Hundreds that
he had seen. There were some parts of the hill that even he hadn’t been to,
so there must be many, many more. But these were minor gods. Even the
holy saja trees were important, but it was the hill that was most important.
She was the goddess of the Gonds here. They believed this was why there
were so many medicinal plants on her. This was why the hanal kot here was
the most important for many Gonds around the district. The two streams
that flowed from the hill to Tel River were sacred water for the villages.
From the base of the hill a well-beaten trail led to the village, where it
divided into numerous roundabout lanes through Deogan. On the side of the
trail there was a thin cow with her calf, grazing.
And just down the trail were a group of men with some kind of camera
on a tall tripod. One of them was looking through it; another had a
clipboard on which he was taking down notes. Two other men were talking
to each other. Government people, thought Korok. They even stood like
government people.
Korok and Anchita stopped just a little distance away to see what was
happening. On the other side of the men, behind their car, a bunch of
Deogan’s best urchins, ranging in height from about one-and-half feet to
four, were shifting from one foot to the other and grinning broadly.
‘Ei, you,’ said one of the men, calling to Korok. Anchita was clearly not
a Gond and the men, not able to explain her presence, had decided to ignore
her. ‘Does this trail go around the hill?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Korok. ‘But the car won’t go, there are two streams you
can cross only on foot,’ he added.
Two of the men were unloading a thick sheaf of paper from the back of
the car. One of them took a sheet, which was made of some dense, shiny
material, and hammered it into a tree nearby. It read:

Property of Government of Odisha

‘What does it mean?’ asked Anchita. She knew all the Reserved Forests
around here, but she also knew Devi Hills, being important for the Gonds,
was for their use only.
‘Who are you?’ asked one of the men, who was a bit fat around the
stomach and was wearing sunglasses.
‘I am the DFO’s daughter.’
The man spat whatever he was chewing and smiled like someone who
has important things to tell.
‘This hill and surrounding areas has bauxite in it. You know, aluminium?
The government is going to lease it to a big Company. We are surveying it.
See that machine? It’s a survey machine,’ he said, pointing.
Anchita explained it to Korok, who didn’t quite understand what bauxite
or aluminium was. She said it was used to make boxes, cars and aeroplanes.
Korok didn’t seem to be interested, but he wanted to know what the
government was going to do.
On being asked by Anchita, Sunglass Man licked his lips.
‘It means the Company will dig the bauxite from the hill and wherever
else it is. A lot of things will happen, big machines, many, many people will
come and stay here. They will clear these villages, build roads …’
‘Clear the villages?’ asked Anchita, horrified. ‘Why?’
 “How are they going to dig up the hill otherwise? Look, we don’t have
time to talk to you. Go away. These people should be happy, they will get
jobs. Jobs, understand?’ he said and turned away to talk to his men.
Korok and Anchita walked away, thoroughly puzzled. Korok could only
remember the man saying something like dig up the hill with big machines.
He had forgotten the other part of what the man had said, that the villagers
would be moved. But that was what Anchita was thinking about. They
would both agree about this afterwards, at least. Big machines would dig up
the hill and the villagers would be moved.
As they walked in silence to Anchita’s house, neither of them was
thinking of aeroplanes.
OceanofPDF.com
 3
APRIL-MAY

One would imagine the village in an uproar with arguments, despair, loud
voices and commotion over news about the visitors and the mine. That is
what a movie would have shown, a story shortened to a hundred minutes of
action. Real life was different.
When Korok woke up the next morning with a medium-sized headache,
he wondered whether the previous day had been only a strange dream, after
all. He sat on his cot for a long time, until the headache had subsided to a
whisper, but all he could hear outside were his chickens. So he dragged his
feet out into the yard and went through his morning routine of finding
where they had laid their eggs. Sometimes the chickens ran up and down
the lane and he had to fetch their eggs from his neighbours’ houses; they
were kind to him and let him search for the eggs whenever he wanted.
These he took to the trader’s house down the lane. Six eggs a day, seven
rupees into an old tin of ghee behind the two half-bricks that supported one
of the legs of his cot.
Korok didn’t want to go immediately to the epho’s house and begin
working on the garden. He was never late for the morning’s round of
weeding and shovelling, but this morning he felt tired. There were questions
in his head and he wanted to begin asking them.
After walking around in the yard and staring at one of the chickens,
Korok walked slowly down the lane to the other side of the village, nearer
the hill, to a large clearing. This, at some time in the past, had been meant to
be the geographical centre of the village. But families grow, and sometimes
split. New houses are made. So Deogan had radiated outward like an
uneven potato and the clearing was no longer the physical centre.
But it was still the heart of the village. Here meetings were held, festivals
and weddings, or funerals. Here the new-born would be brought for
blessings, and the hanal for the departed would be chosen and washed
before being carried up the hill to the hanal kot.
Today, however, it was empty. Through the village there were the usual
sounds of a community setting about its daily business, but if it is possible
for a place to be quiet, Deogan was.
And in the northeastern corner of the clearing was the house of the
headman, the mahji, with its back to Devi Hills.
There is very little to distinguish one house in a Gond village from
another, except tin and thatch roofs. Most old Gond houses, however, have
a central pillar made of saja wood. It is the first pillar that goes up while
building the house, and the only one kept by the owners while rebuilding it.
The mark of a prominent Gond is how old the saja pillar in his house is.
The mahji’s house had been built, roofed and re-built many times, but it was
said the saja pillar was the oldest in all the villages here. Korok’s family
had been through hard times longer than anyone could remember, and if
they had a saja pillar before, it was long gone.
Korok found the mahji behind his house, brushing his remaining teeth
noisily at his water pump. There was a small vegetable patch beyond the
pump. Around the house, the mahji owned some potato fields, and along the
river, outside Deogan, some millet and cereal fields. At any time of the day,
he could be found either along the riverbank or here at his house, tending
his cows.
It was said that long ago, the mahji had had his fill of the dubious
delights of Balangir town and decided not to step out of Deogan if he could
help it. Korok could not remember a time when he had left the village. Nor
could he remember a time when the mahji looked any different than today:
a stick-thin man with a face like an extra-dry walnut. He never aged, never
changed and never lost his stubble. He could always be counted on for
advice, but also always gave the impression that he would rather spend time
with his cows and potatoes than with people. At village meetings, he would
always look like a trapped kitten and would be so relieved when official
business got over that he would invite everyone for mahua alcohol and stale
biscuits, as much as they could fit in.
Korok, seeing the headman, realised he had forgotten to brush his teeth,
but this was not a daily event and was of no importance to him.
‘Ei, Korok, how is your father?’
Korok assured the mahji that his father, as far as was possible for an
undertrial to be, was well.
‘Yesterday,’ said Korok, ‘I met some sorkari men near the hill. They
have put up a signboard and are saying they will dig up the hill and move us
away. What is happening, mahji?’
‘Oh, those people? And is Korok worried about a few sorkari men? Is
he?’ the mahji washed his face and his grey hair vigorously and dried
himself with a gamchha. ‘Come sit with me.’
He led Korok to the other side of the vegetable patch, to a thatched
cowshed, where his four cows were feeding. The mahji sat on the bare
ground outside and looked up at the sky.
‘It hasn’t started raining yet. I wonder when it will. How are your
flowers?’
 Korok told him that the flowers were doing well.
‘I keep telling my wife. Anyone can grow potatoes. Anyone can pick
wild flowers from the hill. But only Korok can grow wild flowers in his
garden. That’s what I tell my wife,’ said the mahji.
He looked up at the sky again and scratched his armpit.
‘Those sorkari people came to me also on their way to the hill. They said
they want to open a big khaan here. A big mine. I saw the signboard they
put up.’
He smiled the brightest smile a man with eighteen teeth can manage and
clapped Korok on his shoulder. ‘You don’t know much about the sorkar,
Korok. It is a big, big creature. It is so big it doesn’t even know itself. Those
people will find out this is sacred land and not part of the Reserved Forest,
and will go away. They will build their khaan elsewhere, wherever they
want to dig. The sorkar won’t bother digging up a sacred hill for a few
pieces of metals. You just see, they will even forget they put up a signboard
here in a few weeks.’
Now the mahji was scratching behind his neck. One of his cows mooed,
the sound amplified inside the dim cowshed.
‘You just see. That’s how the sorkar works. It forgets. Sometimes,
Korok, it is best if the sorkar forgets you.’
And after that reassurance, Korok was sent home with two ripe brinjals
and a handful of large potatoes to make lunch with.
Perhaps the mahji was right, thought Korok while cooking. After all,
what did he know of the government? He had only seen the police, the court
and the jail. If the sorkar was as vast and complex as the mahji thought it to
be, surely Deogan was not so important to be uprooted and dug up for some
—what was it—‘bauxite’? There must be enough land from here to
Kantabanji to dig any number of mines. And west of that, in Chhattisgarh,
there were more mines than anyone could count.
 Still, Korok knew a thing or two about government officials. The men
yesterday were clearly doing something that was important to them. The
way they were asking questions and looking at the hill, all that complex
equipment they had. They were serious people, and serious people didn’t
come to Deogan to forget it afterwards.
After a while, Korok got annoyed with himself for thinking about things
he could not hope to understand. He ate the last batch of hideous rotis he
had made from that pack of flour and swore to say a few colourful words to
the trader if he didn’t have rice the next time he bought provisions. It was
getting very hot and he too wondered when the rains would come. He felt
lazy and sleepy.
He dozed for a bit and woke up feeling guilty that he wasn’t at the
garden. The epho’s family had been so nice to him and he couldn’t just
spend his day napping, so he hurried over.
The amount of fuss some of the medicinal flowers made, thought Korok.
Leave them in the forest and they grew everywhere. Put them in a garden
and you had to keep watching them or they would wilt, or die overnight, or
grow everywhere and choke themselves. The soil would be too dense, or
the water too little or even too much. Dig, dig, turn the soil, loosen the
flower bed. Delicate touches. Just the right amount of water.
Sometimes, when he visited Balangir, Korok would loiter around outside
the houses of big officials or businessmen and watch their gardeners.
Clearly the people of the houses didn’t want to dirty their hands working
the soil, but also wanted beautiful gardens. The same way they wanted to
keep dogs but not play with them, he supposed. If he had a dog he would
spend all his time with it. Instead of a dog, he had a goat, and it wasn’t the
same thing.
So these houses had gardens, and the gardens had gardeners, and all the
gardeners had water hoses. And Korok would stand in the street watching
them attack the soil with great heavy streams of water from hoses or big
sprinklers. Some flowers could survive that kind of treatment, of course.
Some flowers could survive anything. But once in a while he would watch
these gardeners desperately trying to save a flower bed and nod to himself.
Some people never learned.
So, dig, dig, and the closer he worked to the thin roots of the wildflowers,
the slower he became, his fingers softly probing the soil and turning it
around. Pouring through his thin arms into his fingertips was what could be
termed ‘love’, because there isn’t really another word for it in most
languages. There is a word, in an ancient language, that comes close, but
Korok neither knew the word nor that such a language existed.
A trickle of water here, a drop or two there, a snip with the new scissors
the epho had got him for sick leaves. And with that, just a single flower bed
was ready for the day.
Now Korok had to prepare the next bed, this one of medicinal plants,
some of which he was to pluck the following week when they were ready.
He would place them in special polythene bags and mark them with stickers
from the epho’s office and someone from the epho’s team would send them
off to places where Korok imagined people dressed like doctors would
study them. Dig, dig, turn over …
‘Korok! Korok! There you are.’
Anchita was waving from her chair on the verandah. Korok raised his
hand—he had never been comfortable with waving because people didn’t
do that in Deogan—and smiled.
‘Come here,’ said Anchita.
Korok gestured to the flower beds to show he had a lot of work, but
Anchita waved again, insistent, so he went to her.
‘Your flowers won’t die if you ignore them for a few minutes, O Great
Flower-pen.’
Korok nearly choked on being called a god but realised it was funny for
Anchita, and just smiled. City people talked in a strange way.
 ‘You didn’t come in the morning. I know, I looked for you. Are you all
right?’
Korok said he was, and didn’t tell her about talking to the mahji. He
wasn’t sure someone like Anchita would want to hear the advice of a
toothless old man.
‘Cake?’ she said, uncovering a big steel box and handing it to him. ‘Maa
made it. Have.’
Korok, never one to refuse free food, took a rectangular slice, dark brown
with raisins on top, light brown and spongy in the middle.
It was sweet, and sticky, and smelt of orange and must have been made
of eggs and such. It was horrible, and stuck to his teeth and palate.
‘Delicious, isn’t it?’ said Anchita.
Korok, who did not know what a kek should taste like, imagined this
must be a very fine one, whether he liked it or not, and smiled horribly, his
teeth stuck together. He sat down on his haunches and tried to swallow it as
quickly as he could. He suddenly felt thirsty.
‘Have another. As many as you like.’
Korok took another, grinned again. It was still sweet, sticky and horrible,
but he could not think of a polite way to refuse it. The things city people
ate.
‘So is there one?’ asked Anchita.
‘Hmm?’
‘A pen for flowers.’
‘Umm-hmm,’ he shook his head and chewed rapidly.
‘It’s okay, eat your cake first,’ she laughed and waited for him to wipe his
lips after he was done.
 ‘A pen watches over a place, not things,’ he said at last, his throat dry. ‘If
the place has flowers, the pen watches over them too.’
‘So there is no pen for your flowers?’
Korok had to explain that pens could not just be created for places; they
had to have lived there for a very long time, in sacred sites, and there were
complex rituals for finding and binding them.
Anchita nodded, listening with interest, occasionally eating slices of
cake. She had the appetite of five grown men, thought Korok. How could
she like such sweet and sticky food?
‘Have those government men returned?’ Anchita asked.
‘I didn’t see them in the village today. The mahji says we needn’t worry
about the government digging a khaan here.’
‘You know, I have been looking, and I found something I wanted to show
you. Hold this, I’ll get my computer. Have more.’
Korok, left holding the box of cake, knew he should have expected the
kompitar to show up sooner or later. The girl and her machine were
inseparable.
No one could have guessed it, but Korok thought he knew a lot about
kompitars. He had seen quite a few in his visits to the sorkari parts of
Balangir. A few years ago, he had gone with his father and uncle for a
hearing in a criminal case against his uncle at a magistrate’s court in town.
Waiting for the magistrate to enter, he saw the record-keeper and
magistrate’s assistant busy on both sides of the great man’s high chair, busy
with their kompitars. Small cream-coloured TV sets they looked like, with
boards on which the clerks tapped away busily. Korok would see more of
them when his father was arrested and produced in court.
‘It is called a kompitar, Korok. It is a machine to write on, and do other
things,’ his uncle had said with a sad smile. ‘They tell me it is a wonder
machine. When I was small, they arrested your grandfather, and the
magistrate’s assistants used to write their records on paper. Then they
started writing on typewriters. Now they write on kompitars. But we Gonds
are still in court.’ Later he got five months in Balangir Jail.
Oh, yes, Korok knew a lot about kompitars. He knew a lot more about
courts and jails.
Anchita returned with the wonder machine. A coloured drawing of a
strange-looking horse with a horn on its head was stuck on the side. She
switched the kompitar on with a musical sound.
‘Do you know how to use this?’ she said, and immediately told herself,
Foolish Question of the Day No. 1.
‘You use it to write,’ said Korok.
‘That too. But for now I will use it to go on the Internet. It is a …
connection to a lot of other computers and people. You can find anything
you want here, any information. Wait.’
It seemed to take some time for this connection, as she called it, to work,
and Anchita seemed to be annoyed by it. Korok found it new and
interesting and didn’t quite understand why she was apologising for
something being ‘slow’.
‘Okay, now,’ she tapped the letters on the board, very fast, her fingers
flying with a dexterity Korok hadn’t suspected of her. ‘I asked my mother
but she hadn’t heard anything, so I searched for “bauxite”, that’s the ore of
aluminium those people want to dig up, and “Deogan”, and so on, and
found this. Watch.’
A few more taps and what she called a ‘page’ opened on the wonder
machine. A lot of words and photographs. Big machines, men in yellow
hats, smiling villagers.
‘I found news of a company that mines bauxite. This place has
information about them. They … Korok, this is very serious. They say here
that they will begin digging around here because Devi Hills has the biggest
store of bauxite in this part of Odisha. It could even be bigger than most of
their mines in Chhattisgarh. And they have a lot of mines. A lot of them.
Iron, bauxite, other metals. It is a big company and has mines in other
countries also. It is so complicated I don’t really understand this, but my
mother might explain to me later.’
Korok was really out of his depth here. The signboard and those men had
convinced him this was being done by the government, but now Anchita
was saying it was a company. He asked her.
‘As far as I understand, it works like this. The company digs its mines
and gets the metal out. The government gets land for the company. I have
been reading of other mines. In places where the metal is under villages and
so on, the government is responsible for moving the people. The company
pays the government from the profit it gets after digging up the metal.’
Korok still didn’t understand it. ‘But Devi Hills is not owned by the
sorkar. It is not a part of the Reserved Forest. It is sacred land, Gond land.’
‘It doesn’t matter. The government can move any people it wants to, if
needed.’
‘But you are saying this company will dig the mine, not the government.’
‘Yes, they’re saying that. See?’ She pointed to a lot of English words on
her kompitar screen.
‘But will the sorkar just make us go because a company wants to dig up
metal?’
‘I don’t understand much myself, but the company is saying it will start
digging by the beginning of next year. This means the government has
agreed to it.’
‘The mahji doesn’t know about this. Maybe the government doesn’t
know either. Maybe this company is just saying things …’
‘Korok, you don’t understand. This is a big company. It has offices
around the country and even outside. It is very powerful. If it says it is
going to dig somewhere, it will. Many people have protested against it, filed
cases against it. I read some of the news; I will read more and tell you. But I
will ask my mother to explain it properly.’
Korok was still puzzled. The government he could understand. A
company?
‘See,’ said Anchita, trying to think of a way to explain the problem to
him. ‘These people’—she tapped the screen full of people in yellow hats
and big machines—‘companies like this, they are like weeds. You can’t stop
them if they want to take over. They are united, determined, very powerful
and have a lot of money, my father says. If they want your flower bed or
your village or hill, they will get it. The government will make you move,
and give them the land. That has happened elsewhere too.’
She tapped a few more keys.
‘See, here is news about a company digging up a village in Chhattisgarh.
The people were moved somewhere else.’
‘But … but … this is our home. Devi Hills is sacred for us.’
‘I wish I knew what was happening, Korok.’
They were silent for a while.
‘I don’t know much about this, but I will keep searching and tell you,’
she said.
‘Maybe it is just a government survey.’
‘Maybe, but it looks very serious. What I don’t understand is why the
mahji hasn’t heard anything.’
‘Oh, he is not interested in anything outside the village.’
‘Still, he is the official headman, isn’t he?’ asked Anchita.
‘He says the government puts up signboards all the time and forgets
about them.’
 ‘I don’t know, Korok. But if I find anything more, I will tell you.’
Korok returned to his flower bed and dutifully raked through the
medicinal plants and watered them. They would be ready for next week’s
batch. But his heart was not in his work just then.
‘They are like weeds,’ Anchita had said. Ah, she was a city girl and
didn’t know much about gardening. Weeds don’t just take over a flower bed
or a garden. It might look like that to an outsider, but it is a complex
process. They don’t just appear one morning and choke the flowers. They
don’t make conspiracies and hide plans and things. And all weeds are not
the same. They do not grow or multiply or destroy the soil in the same way.
They are as different to one another as flowers are.
Still, in a way he knew what she was talking about. Weeds are never
good news for a garden.
Korok knew next to nothing about mining companies. The government
he thought he had some idea about, but what did he know of private
companies, leave alone a big one, a company so massive and powerful that
you had to call it a ‘Company’? The mahji had said that the sorkar forgot
more often than it remembered. But would the Company forget Deogan if it
wanted to make money out of it?
The world seemed very complex and Korok didn’t know how to think of
these things. So he worked away at the flower bed and hoped, as the mahji
had assured him that nothing would come out of all this. But, said a small
voice inside him, Anchita’s wonder machine had warned of serious and
complicated things about which he had absolutely no idea. And Anchita
seemed to have a lot of faith in her machine. What if the kompitar was
right?
OceanofPDF.com
 4
MAY

More than a fortnight passed before anything happened. Korok continued in

his garden, and the next batch of medicinal plants was particularly fine
according to the epho, who had returned home for a while. He told Korok
that a group of scientists in Delhi had thanked them for cultivating these
rare species.
Anchita kept up her search on the Internet, but there was no fresh news,
either from the government or the Company. Her parents, she said, also
believed it was a serious matter.
But life continued as it had, and Korok had almost lulled himself into
thinking it was over. Sorkari people had always visited Deogan, with
schemes and advice, only to move on to the next village, or next grand plan.
That was how the government worked, and Deogan carried on.
Once, he remembered, a group of officials and their assistants had visited
Deogan with a scheme for chicken farming. They went from house to house
with the mahji and handed out chicks to everyone. These chicks, they said,
would grow faster and would be much bigger than the average Gond
chicken, so the villagers would have more meat per chicken, and better
eggs. Half a dozen of these chicks were given to a few families, with
special feed that the officials said was brought from other countries.
The chicks did grow fast. What the officials and their busy assistants had
not realised, because they were not poultry farmers, was the chicks were
meant to be caged and fed their special imported feed. In Deogan they ran
wild, ate worms and fought with the local chickens, which might have been
smaller but were tough and could survive on anything. The feed got
finished and fresh supplies never came. As usual, the sorkar must have
forgotten about the feed. A particularly hard winter, and by the next spring
not a single sorkari chicken had survived. The Gonds went back to their
ordinary chickens, and the busy officials never returned.
That was how things had always happened, so Korok could ignore his
fears.
But when he took the bus back to Deogan one afternoon after meeting his
father and saw a line of official-looking vehicles parked on the road to the
village, all the fears he had ignored for a fortnight returned. Even Bishto,
who had seen more than his honest share of government vehicles, stared at
them with curiosity.
And among the cars was the distinctive dark green off-roader that was
Sorkari Patnaik’s official car. The might of the law had come to Deogan,
and Korok felt the fear in the village even before he got off the bus.
He raced to the village, passing a group of men. The hated tripod
instrument had returned, and with it charts and maps. The villagers had
gathered in the mahji’s clearing. The mahji himself, Korok saw over the top
of Deogan’s assembled heads, was talking to Rath, a fat little assistant to
Balangir’s Collector. The collector is the most important official in a
district, and is in charge of all government schemes and policies, just as the
Superintendent of Police, or the Senior Superintendent of Police, the head
of the police department in a district. Collector Behera and Sorkari Patnaik
were, therefore, the kings of Balangir. If Collector Behera had sent his
trusted man Rath, this was an important visit, although not so important that
Behera himself had to come. And why should a great man like Behera come
to a humble Gond village?
Between Rath and the villagers were a few policemen; others were
scattered around Deogan. Next to Rath stood Sorkari Patnaik, and even
from the other end of the crowd Korok should see his face shining with
sweat. With him were three or four constables with guns. Sorkari Patnaik
never went anywhere on his own. He could have sent one of his junior
officers, but Patnaik liked being seen in person by the villagers, so that they
would not forget to be afraid of him. That was his way.
The mahji had his official look on his face, the one which said ‘If I don’t
go to Balangir, Balangir should not come to me!’ But also, and this was
rare, he looked worried. Rath had just finished making an announcement
over a loudspeaker in his hand, and the Gonds were whispering to one
another. Around the mahji assembled senior villagers and headmen from
other villages looked puzzled or just shocked, or both.
Korok found his neighbours in the crowd and asked them what had
happened. In low murmurs, they told him of the events since the morning.
The sorkari men were everywhere, poking the ground and taking
measurements with brown sorkari tape. Some, as he discovered, had
walked around Devi Hills, fording the two streams to Tel River on foot.
Others had been up the hill too.
Rath and Patnaik had been visiting villages since the morning, so the
mahji came to know of them from other headmen who came calling before
the officials arrived. These headmen and other notable people of the
neighbouring villages were part of the gram sabha, the local authority with
which government departments usually worked. Each gram sabha was
responsible for several villages. In total, there were twenty villages around
the river for who Devi Hills was sacred.
So by the time Rath, out of breath from walking in the heat, arrived at
Deogan, a mostly puzzled but also fearful welcoming committee was
waiting for him. The news he brought was grim. The government was going
to start mining the area for bauxite. A big factory to process the mineral
would also be built there. Roads would be laid (Rath did not mention why
roads had not been laid before), even bridges would be built. The face of
the entire area would be changed. ‘Improved’ was the word the Collector’s
assistant had used.
The Gonds would have to go.
And not just the ones from around Devi Hills. All twenty Gond villages
around Devi Hills and across the Tel would have to be moved. It was, after
all, going to be a big mine.
After informing the shocked Gonds of this as quickly as he could, Rath
had produced the good news, or what he thought would sound like one. The
new place, wherever they would be moved, would be full of trees. As many
trees as they liked. It would be a better forest than the one around their
villages. They would be able to live their lives as they had. And, he had
added, they would be given jobs in the bauxite mine and factory. Surely it
was reason to celebrate?
At this point, Korok’s narrator said, the headmen interrupted Rath to ask
how the state government could take away forest land. This was exactly
what Korok would have liked to know. He didn’t understand much about
mines and factories, but working at the epho’s house had taught him all he
wanted to know about forests. Devi Hills and its surroundings were not a
famous wildlife sanctuary or even a humble reserved forest, but they were,
officially, a forest area. Of course, the Gonds had been living there before it
became an official forest, but they were allowed to, under the law. And the
government could not build anything in a protected forest area. That much
every Gond, down to the last infant, knew.
At this point Rath had brought out a tiny pair of spectacles, perched it on
his nose and read from an official document. According to this, the
government had removed Devi Hills from its list of forest areas.
 Korok did not understand what this meant, at first, and then he did. It
meant someone had decided that Devi Hills was not a forest any more, so
the government could build whatever it wanted on the land.
‘But it is sacred …’ Korok started to tell his neighbours, but Rath had
taken up his microphone once more.
‘Brothers, this is an excellent project by the government. It will bring
jobs to you and develop this place. And you can live your lives as always.
Let us work together on this. If you need to discuss anything,’ he turned to
the mahji, who looked like a stick-insect next to the fat man, ‘your people
are always welcome at Balangir.’
Rath and his assistants—who also seemed to have their assistants and so
on in decreasing order of fatness—held a long discussion before offering to
the assembly the kind of smile that terrified Korok to the soles of his feet.
Then they left for the other villages, Sorkari Patnaik and his men
bringing up the rear, the police officer glaring as he looked around the
crowd, not that he was expecting any trouble. Deogan was part of his area
and he knew just what to expect from Gonds. Which was—nothing. The
government, through him, told them what to do, and they obeyed. They
always did.
The villagers stood in the clearing as more and more people joined them,
waiting for the mahji to say something. He looked at the departing officials
and the documents in his hands, and called a meeting of the headmen in the
evening. Everyone who could, had to attend.

Evenings in Deogan were the same in every season, except during the
coldest part of winter. At the uncertain hour when even the most observant
can’t be sure if the sun has set or not, a quick breeze would blow through
the villages around Devi Hills. This was pleasant in spring and very
welcome in summer. In winter, not so much.
 By the time Deogan’s few important people—including the trader—had
gathered, the lone light bulb outside the mahji’s house had been lit, its harsh
yellow glow not enough to light the field beyond a few square metres.
Some of the headmen from other villages had stayed from the afternoon.
Deogan was important, and what was decided here would show the way for
them. It had always been so.
Korok’s uncle from two villages away had also arrived in the late
afternoon with some food for the boy. After Korok’s father went to jail, his
uncle, aunt or cousins would visit as often as they could. Korok did not
want to go and live with them, mainly because he didn’t want to walk all
the way back to the epho’s garden every day. Also, in some way Korok did
not want his father to think he had abandoned their house in his absence.
Jadob mastor, from a Gond village across the Tel, was also present.
Jadob was a celebrity in these parts. According to Korok’s father, he was
the brightest Gond in a long, long time. Jadob had been lucky to go to
school, and luckier that back then, about fifteen years ago, the
schoolteacher had not run away. So Jadob studied till high school, and
according to village tales, was so bright he got a scholarship to the
government school at Balangir.
So far it was a happy story. It took a turn for pure fantasy when Jadob
also got a government scholarship to study at a college in Cuttack. This fact
alone made it certain that every single Gond child born after him would be
compared, in intelligence or whatever made someone good at studies, with
Jadob.
At Cuttack, Jadob studied and studied. Then, to the dismay of Odias who
had heard of him, he returned to his village instead of getting a job in
Bhubaneshwar or Cuttack. His schoolteacher had retired and there had been
no one to replace him, so Jadob became a teacher at a school on the other
side of the river. But he also spent a lot of time working with the Gonds to
solve their problems. Over the last four years, he had helped villages on the
other side of the Tel to build an earth-and-stone embankment along the
river. They had quietly done all the work and just informed the government
at the end that the Tel would not be flooding them again during the rains.
When there was a big problem, you went to Jadob mastor.
This evening, the mahji’s big problem was he was expected to make a
speech, so he happily passed that responsibility to Jadob and sat on his
threshold. Jadob kept it short. He told the crowd that the sorkar wanted to
dig up the hill for a mine and send them away. He said not only was the hill
more important than any mine, the hill was also protected as a forest area by
the sorkar itself, by an old Act made more than ninety years ago. The Gond
headmen had not been told of this mine. It was wrong, and even worse, it
was being done too fast. Jadob was clearly suspicious and said the village
leaders should ask the sorkar to explain properly.
At this Korok, seated towards the back as always, saw the headmen,
grey-haired old Gonds all of them, nodding their heads and saying they
should meet Collector Behera himself at Balangir. Someone said the
Collector’s man, fat Rath, had already visited them in the afternoon. Jadob
made a rude remark about Rath and how he was just a clueless man who did
whatever the Collector told him to. The villagers laughed, remembering the
many times fat Rath had visited them with some brilliant sorkari scheme or
the other that always failed.
The meeting then broke into little groups, as it always did, discussing
what to have for dinner. The villagers invited their neighbours to eat with
them. Meetings at Deogan were often like weddings or funerals, with
everyone taking the chance to have a feast.
Korok excused himself from his uncle and went to the mahji, who was
giving orders to his wife and daughters about dinner.
‘Ei, Korok.’
‘Mahji, I have found something important about the mine.’
‘Important, Korok? Have you heard something?’ said Jadob, who talked
to everyone, young and old, with courtesy.
 ‘Yes, Jadob mastor, I was told by the epho’s daughter who has a kompitar
that a company wants the government to help them dig the mine,’ said
Korok, trying to express everything he knew in one neat sentence.
The sentence was clearly too complex for the mahji.
‘Korok, you stay and have dinner with us. Kompitar, you said? Jadob,
did you hear that? He said something about a kompitar.’
Dinner was grand and had many vegetables and pork and red rice. Korok
grinned and bobbed his head at every helping from the mahji’s wife and
three daughters, the youngest a few years older than him. Korok ate and ate
till he thought he could go without food for the next four or five days.
Jadob, keen of mind, had fixated on the kompitar.
‘You say the epho’s daughter has a kompitar?’
‘Yes, she showed me pictures on the machine. She read about a company
which owns mines in Chhattisgarh. The Company says it is going to dig a
mine here.’
‘You understand what this means?’ Jadob asked the mahji. ‘The
government is going to make us leave and give the land to the Company.’
‘But Rath did not tell us anything about the Company,’ objected one of
the headmen, a small old fellow who had eaten about half a pig by then and
looked ready to eat the other half.
‘That is what the sorkar does, isn’t it? It hides things and pretends no one
will notice,’ Jadob said.
‘Ei, Jadob, maybe it is not as bad as that. Who knows what one can find
in a kompitar. Our Korok knows as much about companies as about
bauxite,’ said the mahji. Korok pretended not to hear and continued eating.
Bauxite and mines and all could wait. The pork was delicious.
‘That may be so. Let us see what the Collector tells us. Then we decide.
Korok, you come with us to Balangir too.’
 Korok looked up, his mouth full, at Jadob and the mahji, in turn.
‘Why not? Your father would have come with us. He is not here, so you
should come,’ said Jadob.

The elders and Jadob turned up at the main road two days later, in the
morning, to wait for Bishto’s blessed bus. The mahji, looking sad that he
had to go to Balangir after all, had dressed in his cleanest clothes. Korok,
proud to be included in such a distinguished group, had taken a bath. With
soap. In his case, his cleanest shirt and trousers were not much cleaner than
his dirtiest, but they would have to do.
Bishto, on his part, made the driver handle the road carefully, with the
result that the group reached Balangir later than they would have, but some
of them were frail old men and glad to survive the bus.
At the Collector’s office in the cleanest part of Balangir town, the Gonds
waited outside the double-storeyed and whitewashed building patiently
until Rath, from deep inside somewhere, sent a minion to fetch them. Thus
Korok came to meet the great Collector Behera.
Korok had been around a few temples, including the new one which had
come up at Balangir chowk, although he hadn’t gone inside the Hindu ones.
The most sacred part of a temple is called ‘the holy of holies’. That’s where
the idol is kept. The feel in this inner room is different from the rest of the
temple. If you pay attention you can feel the difference in the air. Or
perhaps the difference is in the people when they enter this room.
That was what it felt to Korok when they entered Collector Behera’s
office. Here was the most powerful man in the district, the one to whom
everyone went. Big people with big problems, little people with problems
their size. Most Gonds never entered this special room, though. They had to
deal with much junior officials.
The room was clean. That was the first thing. The accumulated dust in
Balangir town could have been used to make a small desert with a camel or
two, but in here, it was clean. The walls were white. The visitors’ chairs
were black and shone so much that not one of the Gonds thought of sitting
on them. The desk was a large wonder of wood, topped by glass that
reflected the tubelight. There was a small inclined stand on the desk, on
which there were papers.
The Collector, Korok realised, had a table on top of his table.
And it was cool. The room was air-conditioned.
Collector Behera sat behind his desk. Here was another man with a neat
moustache and the clean complexion and good hair of someone who never
spent much time in the Balangir sun. A little fat but not as much as Rath.
Even his spectacles gleamed in the tubelight.
Faced with such official magnificence, the mahji would have turned tail
and run if there hadn’t been people behind him, and if Jadob hadn’t spoken
up first.
Jadob was used to dealing with officials and had seen the world. He was
polite and courteous, but in broad terms he asked the Collector to please
explain what was happening.
Behera’s first response was to repeat what Rath had told the Gonds two
days ago at Deogan, but in a slower and more bored voice. This, Korok
thought, was supposed to be impressive, but since the room had already
impressed Korok more than anything else he had ever seen in his life, the
Collector’s tone did not make any difference.
The mahji, picking his cue from Jadob, asked Behera how the sorkar
could make the Gonds leave when Devi Hills was officially a protected
forest area.
Behera coughed gently and continued being bored. ‘See, the state
government has announced that the area is no longer a forest. I have a letter,
a circular as we call it, which says so. Rath must have showed it to you.’
 ‘He did, but we have also heard that a company is going to dig the mine,
not the sorkar.’
‘Where did you hear that?’
‘On the Internet. The company has declared it on its website.’
Behera was quiet for a bit. ‘I see. Look, I can only tell you what the
government tells me. Everything I know I have already told you through
Rath. I can’t do anything about it. The state government has decided your
forest is not a protected forest. I can also tell you that the ministry of mines
of the central government in Delhi has told the state government that there
are bauxite deposits in Devi Hills. That is all I know.’
‘Is a company involved in this?’
Again Behera pretended to be very bored. ‘I do not know of this. But the
process has already started. The government wants you to leave. I am sorry,
but I have no say in this matter. If I get any more information or orders, I
will tell you.’
The room did not seem as clean and bright to Korok any more, for some
reason. The group realised that Behera was going to keep repeating this as
many times as they asked him questions, and there was nothing they could
do about it. Slowly, quietly, they left.

Every town has a local newspaper. If it is a small town, it might not, in

which case it has stringers. A stringer is exactly the same as a reporter,
except she is paid less. A stringer in a small town or district headquarters
waits for that one big story or event which can be sent to big newspapers in
cities, which will bring her fame.
Balangir town had a stringer who wrote for at least three big newspapers
in Bhubaneshwar. After the last big story about Maoists, which was more
than a year ago, nothing much had happened in Balangir. The Stringer
usually hung around the magistrate courts, Patnaik’s office or Behera’s
office and sniffed for news.
Which is how he got to hear of the delegation from Deogan, and the
mine, and the Collector. Interesting, he thought. It had not yet become
news, but it might. He had to keep an eye on Deogan. Nothing interesting
ever happened in that part of the district, but that did not mean nothing ever
would.
OceanofPDF.com
 5
MAY-JUNE

Jadob might have left behind the wonders of eastern Odisha, but he still had
a lot of friends and well-wishers in the big cities like Cuttack and
Bhubaneshwar. Some of them visited him from time to time, and knew the
villagers. Therefore, one evening a fortnight later, he got a call on his
cellphone. He kept a cellphone, although reception was not too good, and
he had to charge it at the headman’s house in his village, which had an
electricity connection.
The call sent him running to his headman, who in turn rushed to
Deogan’s mahji. A group of experts from the Ministry of Mines in Delhi
was coming to take a proper look at the great bauxite treasure lying under
the Gonds’ land. This was the moment. The villagers could either accept
what was happening, or let the government know that they no longer
believed its word.
After years of dealing with the government, it was an easy choice.
A moderately good playwright could have written a play on the events
that followed. It would have been a rather good play, too, told from the
point of view of Sorkari Patnaik. The playwright might even have called it
Sorkari Patnaik’s Summer of Sorrow, which has a certain ring to it. Because
the most feared man in Deogan was about to see the beginning of his
troubles.
The group of experts arrived at Balangir a week after Jadob received the
phone call. The task of taking them to the site and back to town fell on the
police, and Sorkari Patnaik was more than happy to do it. Government
officials very rarely needed his direct help.
There were three kinds of officials to be found at Balangir. The first, the
local ones, belonged there and knew the area and therefore did not need a
guide or interpreter. The second type was rare. These were senior officials
from the east, and so important were they that Collector Behera would do
the bowing and scraping by himself whenever they happened to arrive at
Balangir. The third type were mid-ranking officials from the east, and it was
not always clear exactly how important they were and, therefore, how much
importance they should be given by those who ran Balangir district. Taking
care of them and showing them around was done on what is known as a
‘case-to-case’ basis. That is, if Patnaik was told by his superiors in
Bhubaneshwar to be nice to them, he would. Both Patnaik and Behera were
used to getting calls from important people in Bhubaneshwar telling them
how to run their district. That, too, was how government worked.
But this bunch of experts, Patnaik had been told, were to do a very
important job. They would take a good look at the proposed location of the
mine and tell the government, through a long document filled with long
words, how valuable the place was.
‘Site’. That was the word everyone was using about Deogan and its
neighbouring villages, so Patnaik thought it was the word to be used. Not
villages, or hills or forest anymore. It was a site for a proposed mine, and
although everyone knew how valuable bauxite was, the visitors would be
officially making the discovery. On a case-to-case basis, they were, thus,
important visitors.
 But there was a small problem. As the summer grew hotter every day,
Collector Behera disappeared inside his air-conditioned and very clean
office and was rumoured to come out only at night when he went to his
official home (which, too, was very clean and air-conditioned). He was,
after all, a bureaucrat, which means ‘ruler of the desk’, literally, so he was
happy to rule from his desk and leave the outside, very sunny, world to
other people. So Patnaik gladly took the responsibility.
The day arrived and so did the experts in a long convoy of cars. They
were put up at Balangir’s circuit house, which was a much prettier and more
comfortable place to stay at than the town’s best hotel. Not that such
important people would be made to stay at hotels. The government was
paying all their expenses.
The circuit house is an interesting building to be found across India, at
the headquarters of districts or sub-divisions and other such important
places. Before new hotels started being built in these towns, circuit houses
were the best places to stay at, and some of their cooks were really very
good. Most of these old houses have many interesting stories from their
past. But you had to be a really senior government official to get special
treatment at a circuit house, and that has never changed. Balangir’s circuit
house was as comfortable as any other, and Patnaik was sure the visitors
would be happy.
There were about a dozen of these experts, some from Bhubaneshwar,
others from Delhi. And they had their assistants and so on. The bauxite
mine was the biggest thing to have happened in Balangir in years.
Patnaik took them under his wing and also took pity on them. They might
have been experts on mines, but were not miners, and one or two were
already feeling a little wilted in the summer heat. He would have to be very
careful. The slightest problem for them and his senior officers might even
believe that he had personally made the sun shine brighter just to annoy his
guests.
 And so they set out on the road to Deogan; Patnaik was in the lead with
about forty policemen, the experts with their equipment following. Patnaik
expected it would be a short day in the field and they would all be back in
Balangir by the evening.
That was till Patnaik’s car reached the bridge on the Tel and he saw
something he would have never expected in a dozen years. On the other
side of the bridge several hundred Gonds were sitting patiently by the road,
waiting for the convoy.
On hearing about the arrival of the experts from people in Balangir town,
Jadob had quickly called on the villages around Deogan to send as many
people as they could to block the approach to the bridge. So the Gonds had
sat down on the road to wait for the government team.
Unfortunately, as the day progressed, and the sun increased in strength,
the road became a bit of an oven. Korok and the others were used to sitting
on hard surfaces. Korok’s bed had a thin blanket on the wooden boards, not
a proper mattress. But even the toughest backside is no match for furnace-
level heat. They couldn’t very well go on sitting on the road. They would
get baked alive before Patnaik arrived.
The elders held a hurried discussion, and it was decided that perhaps they
could block the road just as well if they sat on its verge, on the cooler grass.
The villagers found this an excellent idea, and said the elders were very
wise.
So when Patnaik and his minions arrived at the bridge, they found the
Gonds blocking the road. In a manner of speaking.
The Gonds quickly spread across the road, and those who were barefoot,
which was most of them, had to do quick hops on the blazing tarred surface
to prevent the soles of their feet from being toasted. It was a swaying, but
firm, human barricade.
Patnaik’s first reaction was the expected one. Disbelief.
‘Eh? What is this?’ he said.
 To which Jadob, a natural spokesman, said it was a blockade.
‘Blockade for what?’
‘We will not allow these people to dig up the hill.’
‘They are not here to dig up the hill. They are here to survey it,’ said
Patnaik.
‘Then we will not allow them to survey the hill and then dig it up.’
The surveyors, who had never dug anything in their lives, were
thoroughly puzzled. With the bridge blocked, the only way to their
destination was if they jumped into the Tel and swam across.
But Patnaik was on top of the situation. Patnaik was on top of most
things at most times. In his head.
‘Eh, look, you people. You talked to Rath. You talked to the Collector. I
don’t know what you have been hearing, but this is a government team,
doing government work. So you will have to step aside and let us pass. I
have never heard of something like this. What do you think you are doing?
Move. Just move.’
Patnaik had never heard of something like this in Balangir because there
is always a first time for everything.
The Gonds did not move.
‘Okay,’ said Patnaik, slowly, sweat beginning to trickle down the side of
his head.
There was silence, except the sound of the Tel flowing under them.
‘Okay,’ said Patnaik, again. ‘So this is how it will be, will it? Okay. You
men, forward, now.’
The policemen, all forty of them, got off their vehicles and lined up.
Patnaik gave the order.
 A lathi charge is an important thing. It is a very specific action that
policemen carry out, and only when given the order by an officer. Not every
time a policeman whacks someone with a stick is a lathi charge. There are
entire paragraphs in police manuals in Indian states, which mention the
right way to do a lathi charge. You form up like this, then you advance like
that, slowly, batons raised. Then you hit the other side.
What is truly frightening is that more time has been spent thinking about
the right way to carry out a lathi charge than all the ways for a policeman to
speak politely to people.
For Patnaik, the lathi charge was one of the most important parts of being
a police officer. A lathi charge, to him, was the solution when facing a
disobedient crowd, and his men had a lot of practice in it. They knew the
right places to hit people with sticks. Just the right places, and in just a way
so that nobody was seriously injured, but hurt so much that a crowd would
break up and the people would run away.
So Patnaik’s men charged the Gonds, who did not expect it. They thought
Patnaik would ask questions, wait for some time, perhaps call the Collector.
After all, he had important guests with him, didn’t he? But he didn’t wait.
Lathi charge. So the mahji, and Jadob, and the elders in the front line got hit
first, and then the next row, and so on, until the mass of people was
physically pushed into smaller groups, and a path was cleared. Korok, in the
second row, got hit a few times in the back and ankles, and a vicious jab at
his left foot by a policeman’s boot opened a small cut, making him hobble
with pain.
The surveyors quickly got into their vehicles, and were taken through the
crowd towards Deogan, although some were heard muttering about how all
this was completely unexpected.
Several of the elders and Jadob were rounded up and pushed into some of
the police cars. In the confusion, Korok too found himself arrested, or
detained, or whatever it was. Nobody knew exactly what was happening,
except Patnaik, who ordered them sent back to Balangir police station,
where the Gonds were pushed around some more and made to sit on the
floor in a small room, without water, for the rest of the day.
Some of the elders were in a lot of pain, but the policemen on guard did
not listen to them. Korok sat in a corner nursing his foot, completely dazed.
The mighty hand of the government had fallen on the Gonds, and for the
moment nobody knew what to do except hope they would be let off so they
could get treated. In all this, the villagers forgot that Korok, being younger
than eighteen years and therefore a minor, should not have been detained
with the others inside the police station. But Patnaik made the rules, so
perhaps he remembered only those rules that he wanted to remember.
The Gonds were finally allowed to go home late at night, but not before
Patnaik returned from Deogan and gave them a long lecture on the
importance of following sorkari orders.
Then the group was pushed out into the street. How they would go home
was not important to the sorkar. But Bishto and his bus magically appeared
down the road, and the villagers were taken home for free, Bishto saying he
had earned enough for the day and didn’t need their money.
Meanwhile, the surveyors had gone and taken a look at Devi Hills, and
made some measurements and so on, and had returned to the circuit house.
They were to go back to Deogan in a day or two for a more detailed study.

‘Are you there?’

Korok, who was lying on his bed staring at the ceiling, looked towards
the door.
‘It’s me. Can I come in?’
And Anchita being Anchita, walked in anyway, before he could think of
a reply, carrying several bulging bags and a backpack.
‘Do not try to get up, do you hear me?’ she said sharply, and Korok, who
was quickly trying to get off the bed, froze, his back comically in midair.
Then he sat back down slowly. And tried to get up, again, when Anchita sat
on the bed, that being the only piece of furniture in the room she could sit
on. But she glared at him, so he backed into a corner and folded his legs.
‘Maybe you should pull your legs up,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘You won’t be scared if I told you?’
‘I’m never scared.’
‘My goat is under the bed.’
Anchita gasped, and lowered her jaw dramatically, as she did when she
was pleasantly surprised. Korok had never met anyone who actually did
that. But she did.
She bent over the side of the bed. A black-and-white horned face peered
back at her. There was a short staring contest. Anchita won. Satisfied, she
sat back.
‘What’s his name?’
‘It’s a she.’
‘But … it has horns! And a beard!’
Korok thought this was the funniest thing he had heard in a week, so he
laughed a bit.
‘What’s funny about that?’
‘All goats have horns and beards,’ he said.
‘Really?’
‘All the ones I have seen.’ Which was a big feat in logic for Korok.
Because it was possible there was a beardless and hornless goat somewhere
he hadn’t seen.
‘Hmm. What’s her name?’
 ‘I don’t know. I don’t call her anything.’ Then he thought maybe he
should have given the goat a name. It made him feel ignorant of the ways of
the world.
‘So, does she have, you know, baby goats?’
‘Not this year. We had one, I gave it to a neighbour some time ago.’
‘That’s sad.’
‘He lives down the street.’
‘So your goat lives under the bed, does she?’
‘Sometimes she crawls in during the summer. Sometimes she stays in the
kitchen, but not when I make beans.’
‘Doesn’t like the smell, does she?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Will she come out if I call her?’
Korok laughed again and said it was a goat, not a dog.
‘How is your leg? Show me.’
So Korok reluctantly extended his bandaged left foot. One of the mahji’s
daughters had bandaged it up for him and given him an ointment for his
back and ankles, which hurt all over. If Korok had been lighter-skinned,
Anchita would have seen the blackening welts from the police sticks on his
ankles.
‘I’m now going to change the bandage. Don’t run away. Okay, Korok?’
He looked a bit doubtful.
‘You won’t run away, will you?’ asked Anchita.
He looked even more doubtful and shrank a little, saying it was all right,
and the bandage didn’t need changing.
 ‘You think I can’t bandage as well as the mahji’s daughter, is it? I have
been trained in first aid. I am good at this, probably better than her, too.
Now stay still.’ And Anchita remembered to add a ‘please’.
So she peeled off the bandage, poured some antiseptic on the wound on
his foot, and wrapped it up.
And she actually did it well. Korok hadn’t been to a hospital after his
mother died, but he knew a properly-wrapped bandage when he saw one.
Then Anchita took a tube of ointment, squeezed some of it on a wad of
cotton and wanted to put it on Korok’s ankles, but he could not have that,
no he couldn’t, so he took it from her and rubbed the ointment on his ankles
himself. The ointment stung a little, but he supposed it was good for the
pain, so he thought maybe he could put some on his back later, if Anchita
left the tube with him.
‘The tube is for you. You won’t let me put the ointment on your back, so
you will have to do it yourself. And now,’ she said, opening the bags, ‘I
have things for you.’
She took out a tiered tiffin box, a plate and a spoon, and placed them on
the bed. ‘Rice, dal and vegetables. I ate, so now I am going to stay here and
watch you eat. Which you must. You haven’t eaten today, have you?’
Korok hadn’t been able to get up in the morning to cook, so he had been
lying in bed wondering what he would do for food for the rest of the day.
‘I knew it. Sorry I could not come earlier than now. So you must eat. And
don’t worry about washing up. I will take them home,’ said Anchita.
Korok opened his mouth to protest, but she glared at him again, and he
shrank a little more, and said, okay, he would eat.
‘And after you have lunch,’ Anchita said, bringing out another steel box,
‘there is this.’
Please, thought Korok, praying to all the gods he knew, and he knew a lot
of them. Not kek. Anything but kek. Please.
 ‘Cake!’ said Anchita, triumphantly. ‘Maa made. I told her how much you
liked it the last time, so she baked this for you specially. Although I had half
of it already. So eat.’
And Korok, trapped, had to.
Anchita opened another bag and took out a pair of slippers.
‘I got these for you. We didn’t go to Balangir to buy them, okay? Just my
old pair. They’ll fit you. And I am just lending them to you. That’s all. I will
take them back sometime.’
Korok bent over and looked at the slippers. The stickers had been freshly
removed, and they were not old at all.
‘And some t-shirts and shorts. I haven’t worn them. Maa says I have far
too many of them, anyway. They might be a little big for you. Anything
would be big for you. But take them, please?’
And Korok, stuffing his mouth with the best vegetable dish he had had in
a long time, nodded. Yes, he would. Although he did not know if the clothes
were actually old ones or the epho’s family had gone to Balangir for him
and wouldn’t tell him. So many new things had never been given to him at
the same time, or in total, before in his life, so he was still thinking about it.
‘Did you sleep well?’ said Anchita, feeling the hardness of the bed and
realising there was no mattress underneath. ‘I mean, do you sleep well, on
this bed?’
Korok thought about it. He had been sleeping on the bed for a long time,
and hadn’t really asked himself why he shouldn’t be sleeping well. He
could sleep better than most people he knew, almost anywhere he was asked
to. So he nodded and shook his head, and went back to eating as fast as he
could.
Anchita got off the bed and looked around. It was the barest room she
had ever been in. She had gone to an installation art exhibition once with
her mother in Bhubaneshwar. This was when Anchita’s mother still thought
her daughter would be interested in that kind of art and culture, because she
could draw so well. As it turned out, Anchita had her own ideas about art.
The artist at the exhibition had wanted to show, in his words, ‘The
Simple Life’. So it had been a bare room, with some furniture, a bed, some
food on a table, just one spoon for some reason, and some paintings on the
wall. A stack of books in a corner. From what Anchita understood, it was
about the important things in life. Then the artist had started talking about
people with French names to her mother and Anchita had immediately
fallen asleep on her feet.
That room wouldn’t have stood a chance against Korok’s house, which
was just this one room and the kitchen. There was Korok’s bed, a small
chipped mirror on the far wall, a wooden shelf on another wall, and some
clothes heaped on a knock-kneed stool in the corner. That was it.
It was the barest room she had ever seen, but also, in a way she thought
she should try to understand, the most complete. Like Korok. He was sitting
there, with his bandaged foot hanging over the bed, eating, in a room with
all his possessions, which she could put in a single bag and take away in a
minute, and he seemed perfectly calm and content.
Then Anchita thought she should ask Korok why he didn’t have flowers
inside the room, but didn’t ask him. Which reminded her of something.
‘Also, Korok, I watered all the flowers, so you need not worry about
them,’ she said.
Korok dropped the morsel he was trying to stuff in his mouth, and on his
face there spread such a look of complete horror that Anchita began
laughing but stopped.
‘No! I was just joking. You know, a joke? Something funny? I am so
sorry. I would never touch your flowers. Okay? But if there is something
that needs to be done today in the garden, something very simple and easy
to do, please tell me. I can help. You can come back to the garden tomorrow
if you feel like, and eat with us.’
 Korok thought about the many complex things he had to do around the
garden, and whether he should take her help. Perhaps with a few things here
and there. Only the simple things.
‘And after you have lunch, you must eat the cake.’
Not the kek, please, Korok thought. But he couldn’t run away now.
Besides, with his injured foot, he wouldn’t reach very far.
‘Korok?’
He looked up.
‘You don’t have a bathroom. Where do you take a bath?’
‘We go to the river.’
‘Every day?’
Korok didn’t take a bath as far as he could help it, so if he said ‘yes’, he
would be lying. But he didn’t want Anchita to think he was strange because
he didn’t like taking a bath, so he just nodded.
‘Umm, what about, you know, toilet?’
Korok grinned. Nobody talked about such things with him.
‘We go to the river,’ he said again.
‘Every day?’
‘Yes.’
Anchita thought about it. She had never really considered the fact that
there were people in the world who did not have a bathroom or toilet of
their own. Of course, she knew about it, but hadn’t really thought what it
would be like to live like that.
‘You know, the government is building toilets for everyone, all across the
country. We were taught this in school. It is a very important project,’ she
said.
 Korok had heard about it too. It was a little strange. The mahji had said,
and he knew of these things, that the sorkar was building toilets for
everyone. Toilets were being built everywhere. But Korok hadn’t yet seen
one, at least in the villages. The mahji, being who he was, had a toilet, and
the trader, being the richest person in the village, also had one. Nobody else
in Deogan had a toilet. So wherever the toilets were being built, the sorkar
had not yet started it in the Gond villages.
‘Jadob mastor says they are useless,’ said Korok.
‘Toilets? How can they be useless?’
‘No, he says they won’t help if there is no water. He says first villages
must get water supply, and then toilets.’
Jadob had been trying to get water supply in the Gond villages. So far, he
had not had much success.
‘Oh, what is this?’ said Anchita, holding up a nearly empty tube of
toothpaste lying on the wooden shelf with a few other things.
‘It is toothpaste,’ said Korok, wondering what big city people used to
clean their teeth. What did he know?
‘Uff, I know it is toothpaste. But, see, the name is wrong. This is very
strange. I use the same brand … I mean, toothpaste with a name written in
the same way on the tube, but a different name. The shape of the letters is
exactly like mine, but the name is different. I wouldn’t have noticed if I had
not looked closely.’
Korok had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. He had been
using this toothpaste all his life, as far as he could remember. This was the
only kind of toothpaste found at the trader’s shop. Nobody in any of the
villages for miles around used anything else.
‘See,’ Anchita said, taking the tube to the bed. ‘The colour of the tube,
the design of the letters, their size, even their colour. They are exactly the
same, but the name is slightly different.’
 Anchita’s mother used to work for an advertising company, so she knew
all about brands, and marketing and advertising.
‘I knew it!’ she said, turning the tube around and reading the fine print.
‘This one was made in Chhattisgarh, by some local company. It is a fake
toothpaste brand. I don’t think it even has all the things it says it has. Korok,
you have been using this all your life?’
Korok nodded, and hobbled out of bed to wash his hands and mouth
outside. He stepped into the kitchen next door and took out a small tumbler
of water from the clay pot in the corner, which he took to the other end of
the courtyard, near the fields, and washed his hands.
‘Where do you get water from?’ asked Anchita.
‘There is a well down this lane. We share the water, all the houses on the
lane.’
‘But it isn’t safe, is it? Do you boil it?’
‘Sometimes, when there is enough firewood.’
Anchita went into the kitchen. Its walls were of twigs and mud, and there
were holes in it, high up near the ceiling. She couldn’t tell if they were
made on purpose, like vents, or the kitchen walls had cracked over time. It
was dark inside, and there was a faint smell.
‘What is that smell?’
Korok came back in.
‘What smell?’
‘That one. Can’t you smell it too?’
Korok sniffed a little.
‘Um, it could be the fermented beans I made some days ago.’
‘Some days ago? So how does it smell when you make it? No wonder
your goat doesn’t come in here.’
 It must be a very strong smell, Anchita thought.
There was an old empty tin of soya chunks lying next to a cooking pot on
a mud hearth. She picked it up.
‘Oh, look! This one too! I know this brand, and this one is fake as well.
Who are these people who make fake products like this? Korok, is
everything that you eat or use fake? That can’t be. Is it?’
Korok thought about it. The tins and tubes Anchita was talking about
were all he had ever seen. He had never actually gone to the trader’s shop
and asked for a specific brand. He only asked for products, and these were
what he got. That people could choose what to eat or use, he had never
really thought of.
‘The trader brings these to the shop from the fair price dealer in Balangir.
All of us here use them. We have been using them forever.’
Korok hobbled back to his bed and sat on it.
‘Don’t even think of doing the dishes.’
Korok smiled, suddenly shy and grateful.
‘I won’t,’ he said.
Anchita nearly stamped her foot. She knew a girl in her old school who
would actually stamp her foot in rage. It was very funny to see. Nobody
could take someone like that seriously, she had always thought.
‘I don’t understand you, Korok. You got beaten up and injured by those
… those horrible policemen yesterday, the government is going to dig up
your hill and send you away somewhere else, your father is in jail for
something he didn’t do, you have been using fake products all your life
because you don’t get any other products in these parts, you have been
sitting there all bent and hunched because your back hurts. And you are
smiling! Not a word of complaint. Not a single whine. They even took your
bicycle. Aren’t you angry? You should be, shouldn’t you? Don’t you ever
get angry?’
 Korok began to smile at this little speech, but he saw Anchita was
furious, so he kept quiet. He did not ever get angry, not even a little bit. He
knew happiness, in his garden. And he knew sadness, when his mother
died, and he knew confusion, when his father was sent to jail. He knew
hunger almost all the time. But anger? Not really.
‘So what should I do? What can I do against Sorkari Patnaik?’ he said.
‘Something. Anything. I never let anyone hurt me like that.’
‘Really? What do you do?’
‘If someone annoys me, I put chewing gum in their hair. I read a book
once; it’s one of my favourites. There was this very special girl whose
parents were mean to her. So she took some glue and put it on her father’s
hat, and it was stuck to his head for days and days. You know that horrible
Patnaik’s son studies in my class in school? He’s an idiot. Thinks he knows
everything, like his father. All the other children think he is the prince of
Balangir. Someday I will put chewing gum in his hair.’
‘So you got the idea of putting chewing gum on people’s hair from the
book?’
‘Uff, no, Korok. I am saying, if someone hurts you, you give it back to
them. You don’t sit in a corner and stare at the wall. Then what is the
difference between you and your goat?’
There was an awkward silence.
‘I am sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I am sure your goat is very nice.’
‘She is very nice.’
‘Even if she doesn’t have a name.’
Korok’s limited imagination was at that moment filled with visions of
Anchita in a big city in the east, going around the streets putting chewing
gum on the hair of anyone who had ever annoyed her or been mean to her.
Then he had another vision, of Patnaik’s son, a fat and very fair-skinned
boy Korok had seen a few times in Balangir. Korok imagined him walking
around town, with two constables protecting him, with chewing gum in his
hair.
‘Now what are you laughing about?’ said Anchita. She sat on the bed.
‘But seriously, Korok, think about it. You can’t go and stand at the bridge
every day. Those surveyors will be back. They are still in Balangir. My
father called his office to complain about Patnaik. He was told that this is
not forest department business because Devi Hills is not under the
department. So these people will keep coming back. What are you going to
do, get beaten up again? Do something.’
‘What can I do? Even Jadob mastor says he is not sure what can be
done.’
There was a long moment of silence.
‘Anyway, you must rest now. And see,’ Anchita said, this time opening
her backpack, ‘I got my computer. Do you want to watch a movie?’
The last time Korok had seen a movie was four months earlier, at a
village on the other side of the Tel. A travelling group had put up an open-
air screen, and showed some new Odia movies. With songs and fights and
great dialogues. The villagers had had a wonderful time. Some had liked a
superhit movie so much they had thrown their footwear at the screen when
the hero had been beaten up. But there was a happy ending to it, which they
had expected.
‘But I have only English movies. I will explain if you do not understand.’
A shadow darkened the door. Anchita looked up, and nearly screamed. A
completely round face was suspended in midair, with the biggest grin she
had ever seen on anyone. The face had the whitest, most beautiful teeth.
‘I thought you were alone,’ said a shy voice. The head continued to bob
up and down at the door.
‘Come in, come in,’ said Korok, smiling. ‘That is my sister, my uncle’s
daughter from two villages away.’
 The girl was around Korok’s height, when the rest of her appeared at the
door. She smiled, and Anchita realised it was the most beautiful smile she
had ever seen. The girl looked at the tiffin box, the clothes and the computer
on the bed.
‘My mother sent some food and curd for you. I will keep it in the
kitchen,’ she said.
‘Please stay,’ said Anchita, ‘We are going to watch a movie. Have cake.
Korok likes it very much. What is your name?’
But the girl was very shy, and told Korok she would come back
afterwards. Then she grinned and disappeared.
‘Did I say something wrong?’ asked Anchita.
‘No, you didn’t. They are just shy around you, because you are the epho’s
daughter. She did not expect you to visit.’
‘I would like to visit her house too. Will you take me there sometime?’
‘Okay, but she will run away from there if you visit, I know.’
‘Do you have a cat around here? What if it enters the kitchen and eats the
curd? The room doesn’t even have a door.’
‘There is a cat. I don’t know where she is. She comes and goes.’
‘Unlike your goat, which doesn’t have a name and just sits under the bed.
The cat doesn’t have a name either, does she?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t know if she will lick the curd. I don’t think
she likes curd. Milk, maybe. Not curd,’ said Korok. He was thinking of
something and staring at Anchita’s kompitar.
‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.
‘That horse of yours.’
‘Horse? Oh, that one,’ said Anchita, turning the machine around and
looking at the sticker. ‘That is not a horse! That is a unicorn. It’s a magical
animal. Not a horse at all.’
‘Does it have a name?’
‘Of course it does.’
‘What is it?’
‘That’s my secret,’ said Anchita, and laughed. ‘Do you want to watch this
movie? It is very good, I am told.’
‘Okay.’
‘Don’t sit in the corner. You can’t even see the screen.’
‘Okay.’
‘Aren’t you going to eat the cake? Eat.’
There was a long pause.
‘Okay,’ said Korok, quietly.
Anchita started the movie.
‘You know what?’ she asked.
Korok looked at her.
‘I am thinking of that horrible Patnaik. I wonder what he is doing.’
OceanofPDF.com
 6
JUNE

At around the time when Anchita was winning the staring contest with
Korok’s goat, Sorkari Patnaik’s summer of sorrow was starting. The
previous night had actually been good. He had gone home after his lecture
to the arrested Gonds, and gone to bed very satisfied with the events of the
day. There was no problem, according to him, that a good lathi charge could
not solve.
He woke late the next day. His wife and son had gone to her parents’
home in an eastern town. He got ready for work. He thought of visiting the
circuit house to see if the surveyors were well-fed and happy. And maybe
doing a round of the Gond villages, just to see if everything was all right.
He did not think there would be any problems. So the Gonds had wanted to
protest, and had felt the might and majesty of the law on their ankles. That,
he thought, should be the end of it.
His phone rang.
At the other end of the call was a Person so Important that Patnaik, alone
in his living room, nearly stood up and saluted the phone.
‘Is this Patnaik?’
 ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Huh?’
‘I said, yes, sir. This is me.’
‘Speak louder, then.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So, Patnaik. Have you read the newspaper today?’
Patnaik hadn’t. Two newspapers, one in English, the other in Odia, were
lying just in front of him on the living room table.
‘You haven’t read the newspapers, have you, Patnaik? That is, the Odia
newspaper you get there?’
Patnaik swallowed.
‘See the front page, Patnaik. Go on. Read it.’
Patnaik slowly drew the newspaper towards him, and spread it out.
And that is when his summer of sorrow began.
On the right, in a corner, but a big corner, a headline said: ‘Police attack
defenceless Gonds over sacred hill!’
Patnaik did not have to read the story. Because there was a photograph
with it, showing his men swinging their sticks at the running Gonds. Photo
and story: done by Balangir’s own Stringer.
Patnaik’s head swam a little. What black magic was this? How could the
Stringer know of the lathi charge? There had been no traffic on the road, not
even a stray truck. And how did that little fellow get a photograph of the
incident? Did he even have a camera of his own? Patnaik had heard of
photographers using drones to take pictures from high above, but those
machines must be expensive, and the Stringer sometimes didn’t even have
money to buy tea and pakoras for Patnaik’s constables.
 So how did the fellow do it? From the angle of the photograph, it seemed
to have been taken by someone standing behind Patnaik, whose face could
be clearly seen from the side. So the photographer must have been standing
with the surveyors behind the police team.
A horrible thought struck Patnaik. What if the Stringer had been
disguised as a surveyor yesterday? But that was impossible. He would have
been caught in two minutes. So how did he do it?
‘Patnaik, are you there?’
‘Sir! Yes, sir!’
‘Patnaik, how educated are you?’
‘Sir?’
‘You must be very well-educated. You are the Superintendent of Police of
a district, aren’t you? What I mean is, have you heard of the word
“imbecile”? It means a foolish person. Someone who does not understand
the simplest of things. The Odia and Bangla words for this sound even
better. Perhaps you know them?’
‘Sir?’
‘Patnaik, you had a simple task. You had to take the surveyors to that hill,
wait for them to survey it and bring them back. A simple task. They would
have done their job and gone home in a few days. Then the government—
that is you and Behera, Patnaik—would have asked the villagers to leave,
and our work would have been done. A few months. That is all.’
‘Sir, the team started the survey yesterday …’
There was a long sigh, and the sound of someone setting down a fine
porcelain cup on a glass table.
‘No, Patnaik, the survey can’t be done now. You know why? Because of
this story.’
‘Sir, it is only a small report …’
 ‘A small report, is it? Are you aware of what has been happening here in
Bhubaneshwar since this morning? How many phone calls I have got from
some very important and very angry people over this small report? Patnaik,
there is nothing you can do about it now. You will not go looking for that
Stringer. You know why?’
Patnaik, who had decided to do just that after the phone call, didn’t say
anything.
‘Because, Patnaik, now every reporter and TV news channel in western
Odisha is camped in your town. Maybe they are already lurking outside
your house. In a few days, reporters from Bhubaneshwar and Cuttack will
arrive there. Then the politicians will visit, and give speeches. Because
everyone will be talking about this for some time. That is why.’
And so serious was the voice of the Important Person that Patnaik
thought the reporters had already arrived and found his house. He crept to
his front window, parted the curtains a little and looked out. There weren’t
any reporters to be seen, but one never knew.
‘So here is what you will do, Patnaik. You will stay in Balangir town for
now. You will not go to the Gond villages. You will not beat up the
protesters, or arrest them. You will not even cross the river. Do you know
what I have with me here, Patnaik?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Of course you don’t, Patnaik. I have a map of your area here, Patnaik,
and I can see everything. You will not cross the Tel, you will not go to the
Gond villages, you will not go near that bridge. For now. Is that clear,
Patnaik?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And you will not chase that reporter. You will be nice to any other
reporters who turn up there. Do not make this worse than it already is.’
‘Yes, sir.’
 ‘What is going to happen is that the circus will come to Balangir. You
know what I mean?’
Patnaik immediately thought of a circus, with clowns and lions and
elephants and acrobats.
‘No, Patnaik, not that kind of circus,’ said the Important Person, sighing
again.
Patnaik decided that he must stop thinking entirely and just follow what
the voice said. The Person was so Important, he could even read Patnaik’s
thoughts!
‘What I mean is, Patnaik, now politicians, the press and other people will
be interested in what happens in your district. They will visit. The
politicians will make speeches. People will support the Gonds, or they will
say they support the Gonds. For now, the Gonds are the good people, and
you are the villain. In the middle of all this, if you do something idiotic, it
will mean bad news for the government. Do you understand?’
Patnaik understood, immediately.
‘So don’t do anything for now. We may have to bring someone in, a
specialist, to help you out there. I will now have to discuss this matter with
the Higher-ups. You know what that means, Patnaik, don’t you?’
Sorkari Patnaik knew. The Higher-ups of the Important Person were very
high up, indeed, in Odisha. Maybe even in Delhi.
The Person hung up. Patnaik stared at the phone, stared at the Odia
newspaper, and then called the constable who was his driver for the day,
and was standing outside. Then Patnaik yelled at him for a minute about
something or the other.
It did not solve his problems, but it made him feel better. Then he went to
his office.
At around the same time, Jadob was sitting at the mahji’s house. Jadob was
happy. The mahji, however, had fever after being beaten up by the
policemen. He was telling Jadob a long story about what his uncle had told
him when he was a boy. The story was from the Independence movement,
when the Gonds too had marched to the call of Gandhi, against the British,
and had been beaten up in several lathi charges. The mahji was telling
Jadob he now realised what they must have felt.
‘It is not the same thing,’ said Jadob, who always wished the mahji
would keep his stories short.
‘Eh?’
‘I said, it is not the same thing. Have you gone deaf, too, mahji?’
‘How is it not the same thing, Jadob?’
‘Being beaten up by the British and being beaten by your own policemen,
by your own government, is not the same thing.’
‘I think I know what you mean, Jadob.’
‘What I mean is, it hurts more when it is your own people beating you.’
‘The police are not my people.’
‘That’s not what I meant, mahji. Anyway, see, here is the newspaper. I
don’t know how the Stringer got the news. And I really don’t understand
how he got the photo. Unless he was dressed like one of Patnaik’s
policemen.’
‘Nobody does that kind of thing, Jadob.’
‘I know. It is very mysterious. But this is really good news. This means
the state government in Bhubaneshwar can’t ignore us now. This means
reporters, maybe even TV people, will come here. We will have to talk to
them, we must explain that the government is doing something wrong.’
‘Do you think they will come?’
 ‘The reporters and TV people? Of course. This has become an important
story. My friends in Bhubaneshwar and Cuttack have been calling. People
there are talking about it. A single news report and a photograph have done
this. Now imagine the impact of TV stories, and more such news reports.’
‘Yes.’
‘So we must continue what we are doing. We have to make banners, and
hold them up, and sit somewhere, and talk to these reporters when they visit
us. We have to tell them our story. People must know. But other people will
also come.’
‘Politicians?’
‘Yes. I have been told some people from Balangir will visit this evening.
Leaders of political parties will also visit. This is a good chance for them to
make speeches. Everyone will come.’
The mahji was looking trapped.
‘Mahji, you will not run away, will you? We need you. I can talk to these
people, but you are the headman. You are our leader. Don’t run away,
please. If we lose, we will lose everything. The hill, the village.’
The mahji said he would stay right where he was, even if the world was
coming to Deogan and he didn’t like it.
There was silence while Jadob drank tea and looked at the photograph. It
was actually a very good photograph.
‘I have been dreaming,’ said the mahji.
His dreams were very important for the people of Deogan. Not because
they had a deep meaning, but just because the mahji was old, and thought to
be wise. And the dreams of a wise person must be wise, too, mustn’t they?
‘What have you been dreaming of?’
‘Potatoes.’
Jadob mastor tried his best to stay calm.
 ‘You always dream of potatoes. Will you stop doing that, and think of
what is going to happen next? I am quite sure the surveyors will not return.
The government will try to pretend everything is all right here. But I am not
sure what Patnaik will do. We have to be alert. And you have to meet with
the other headmen, and decide on how, and where, we will have people
sitting down with banners, in protest. Now rest. We will talk in the evening.
And please, if you can, stop dreaming of potatoes and start dreaming of
your people. They need you.’
That evening, a group arrived in Deogan from Balangir. They belonged
to the organisation that had built the new temple in the town. They had
suddenly remembered their ‘tribal brothers’, and told the mahji that they
supported the Gonds. No god or goddess could be insulted like this, they
said. The hill was sacred, and the government would not be allowed to
remove the Gonds.
Jadob mastor did not really like these people. He later told the mahji not
to trust them, because they thought only of their own interests. The mahji
was quiet. Later at night, Jadob and the mahji met the headmen of the other
Gond villages. It was decided that at least two hundred people would sit
with banners at the entrance to Deogan, so that visitors would know that the
Gonds were still protesting. People from all the Gond villages would take
turns sitting at the place. Nobody could sit there all the time, because they
had crops to cultivate, cows and goats to milk, and fish to catch. And there
had been no rains. It was turning into a difficult summer, but the Gonds
knew all about difficult summers.
The next day, Korok limped slowly to the epho’s house in the morning
and started work on the garden. The flowers and plants, he was relieved to
see, had survived without damage the one day that he had been absent, but
he just couldn’t take chances. He had a slight fever, and his back hurt.
The epho’s wife, who was waiting for just something like this, caught
Korok hiding behind a row of plants. She did not raise her voice (she never
raised her voice) but she was very stern. She told Korok not to come to the
garden until he had completely recovered. She said he was being very
foolish if he thought he could help his plants and flowers when he was
injured. She told him to think about what would happen to his garden if he
fell really sick and couldn’t work for days.
The epho’s wife was very clever, and knew that the only way she could
make Korok stay at home was if she told him to think about his garden. So
Korok slowly watered some rows of flowers, and went home. The epho’s
wife told him Anchita would visit every day with food, and that he should
not worry about anything.
That afternoon, the first of the newspaper reporters from the big cities on
the coast arrived in Deogan. They talked to the people sitting in protest, and
with the mahji, and took a lot of photographs. Over the next few days, even
TV news crews came to the Gond villages, as did some local political
leaders.
Korok stayed at home and rested for two more days. Anchita visited him
every day, and brought cake as often as her mother baked them. Anchita
would return home every evening and tell her mother that Korok was
getting better, and the cakes were really helping. The two children would
watch movies, and Anchita would explain most of the dialogue.
Korok returned to his garden, and went back to his plants. They were
doing well, despite the heat. There were still no rains, and the ground was
drying up, but the plants and flowers were local, and tough.

Behera, the Collector of Balangir, the most powerful person in the district,
sat at his desk. His hands rested on the small desk atop his big desk. It was
afternoon, ten days after Patnaik had ordered his men to charge the Gonds
at the bridge. It was blazing hot outside, but the air-conditioner was bravely
keeping Behera cool. The only noise in the room came from the big wall
clock opposite Behera’s desk. He was thinking, and his assistants in the
rooms outside were as quiet as mice. He was an important person, and he
was not to be disturbed by noise.
A few minutes after Patnaik got the call from the Important Person on the
day after the lathi charge, the Person had called up Behera too. The
Collector had known he would get a call the moment he saw the newspaper,
which, unlike Patnaik, he made a point to read every day. Behera was a
clever man. He had to be, or he would not have become the Collector. So,
as soon as he saw the newspaper, Behera knew somebody much more
important than him would call him up.
The Important Person had first told him, in long sentences with long
words, what an idiot Patnaik was. Behera wanted to agree, but did not say
anything. You could not trust an Important Person. Someday Behera might
make a mistake, and the Important Person might call Patnaik to tell him
what Behera thought of him. And Behera did not want to make an enemy of
Patnaik, the second most important person in Balangir.
The caller had told Behera that it was not his fault, and all he had to do
was keep an eye on things, and report about everything, including what
Patnaik was doing, to the Important Person. The Collector was also told to
stand by, that somebody would be sent to solve the problem. A specialist.
Behera had nodded. He understood.
On the morning of this day, Behera had got another call from the
Important Person. Balangir had become famous in the state, and even in
Delhi. Reports about the Gonds and their sacred hill were in all the
newspapers, big and small. TV news reports talked about the villages, and
the bauxite deposits in the hill. Politicians were just starting to arrive.
The Important Person had orders for Behera. Very specific orders.
So it was afternoon, and Balangir was slowly roasting under the summer
sun, and Collector Behera was sitting at the desk, thinking.
Then he stood up and walked to his safe, a small piece of steel furniture
to his left. He opened it, and took out a slim booklet. It was not a secret
document. Every collector in every district of the country had this booklet.
It explained what needed to be done in case of drought. Behera had
memorised it, and dozens of other documents like it, long ago when he was
giving the exams that would get him into the civil service. He just wanted to
hold the document in his hands, and take a look. Some of the rules had
changed since then.
Drought can be imagined as a picture of a dry, cracked piece of land, but
that is not the whole story. There are three kinds of drought, according to
the government and people who know these things. Meteorological,
hydrological and agricultural.
Meteorological drought happens when an area gets a small fraction of the
rain it is supposed to receive in a certain period. Hydrological drought
happens when the water underground, in what is called the water table, falls
below a certain level. Handpumps, which draw water up to the surface, no
longer work and wells dry up. People may not see hydrological drought,
because it all happens underground, but it is very serious.
Agricultural drought happens when, because of very low rainfall, or less
water underground, farmers can’t grow crops. This is very serious indeed,
because this means the farmers can’t feed themselves or anyone else.
Balangir had received no rainfall that summer. Not a drop. Behera, as the
Collector, was responsible for officially declaring the district as drought-hit,
and sending a report to the government in Bhubaneshwar, the state capital.
Behera looked at the rainfall figures on his desk. He looked at the
hydrological report, which showed that the water underground was drying
up, too. Very soon, farmers would not be able to grow their crops, if there
were no rains. The government has to help farmers and people in an area hit
by drought.
Slowly, carefully, Behera prepared his report on his computer, tapping the
keys two or three at a time. He was telling the government that his district
was hit by drought, and the government must help.
 But he also mentioned something else.
Behera wrote that while the whole of Balangir was hit by drought, a
small area, by some miracle, had not been affected. The water table there
was normal, and farmers there would not need government help.
That area, on Behera’s map, was in a rough circle, and covered Devi
Hills, all the Gond villages including Deogan, and dozens of other Gond
villages across the Tel.
No government help would come to these villages. That was what the
Important Person had told Behera to write.
The Gonds were on their own.
OceanofPDF.com
 7
JULY-SEPTEMBER

Afterwards, when all these events were past and had become part of a story
told and re-told, the strangest episode, according to Korok himself, was
when he appeared on TV. Briefly, as extra in his own story, but that is how
TV works.
And so one morning in July, around when the people realised the rains
might never come this summer and some of the protesters had returned to
their villages for a bit, Korok was sweeping his yard before looking for a
missing chicken when the mahji visited him. The mahji by now had the
look of a man being swept along by events he could not control, and so no
news surprised him.
On this morning, the mahji was accompanied by a small mob of busy-
looking men. One or two Korok recognised to be from Balangir, local
politicians, the type who turned up with bigger people during election
campaigns. These were dressed in rural India’s universal political uniform
of white kurta and pyjama. Some others, similarly dressed, seemed to be
from the east and were therefore bigger leaders.
 But the actual important people in this crowd, as it turned out, were about
half a dozen young men and women in formals, sunglasses and the kind of
leather shoes that should be the last kind of footwear in a Gond village in
high summer. But this, too, was a uniform, and just as a politician’s white
kurta remains magically unmarked through the dust and mud of rural
campaigns, these pinstriped people, though a little sweaty, seemed used to
the discomfort.
Descending on his yard, the mahji now informed Korok, in a quiet voice,
of events far away. It seemed one of the country’s biggest political leaders
had heard of the Devi Hills agitation and would be visiting the villages
shortly. He would also be meeting the Gonds at their homes. The pinstripes
were there to take a look around before the visit. And with that introduction
the mahji fled to other parts of the village along with the rest of the crowd,
leaving Korok with a young man carrying a notebook and a young woman
with the rarest expression in the world.
This, the rarest expression in the world, is not that of happiness or
sadness or the other usual ones. It is close to the expression seen on the
faces of lottery ticket sellers at village melas: the look of a salesman who’s
telling his customers he is doing a favour for them.
And this couple was full of questions, beginning with:
‘Where is your father?’
‘He is in prison.’
To which the man looked at the woman and said perhaps they should not
mention Korok’s father when the big man visited.
‘And your mother?’
Korok, as usual, pointed towards the hill and they seemed to be satisfied.
Of course, they did not understand what he meant, but thought they did.
Stepping inside his house, they took a look around—not that there was
much to see—and asked about the kitchen. Korok, by this time a little
hypnotised by their sunglasses, led them around to the backyard and the
thatched room. On their way, the woman stepped on some dried earthworm
castings in the yard and jumped around a little. For some reason she thought
it was dog poop.
Inside Korok’s dim kitchen his two visitors recoiled a bit from the smell.
Korok had cooked fermented beans the previous night and they did not
seem to be used to it. The man was scribbling notes in his book and
discussing them with his colleague.
They were very interested in water and where Korok got it from. He
pointed to the big old earthen pot in the kitchen and told them there was a
well down the lane he shared with a few other families. His visitors shook
their heads and whispered some more. Then they told him they would
return soon, but meanwhile, he was not to cook anything fermented. Then
they walked away.
Korok did not think much about it till a week or so afterwards, when half
the world descended on Deogan. Long convoys of cars started arriving from
the early morning, workers finished putting up a small stage next to the
mahji’s house and party flags were everywhere. The local politicians from
Balangir returned, and so did Korok’s two visitors. To his secret joy, they
even remembered his name and everything else about him, except the
earthworms in his backyard.
They also set about changing his house, or at least his kitchen. First his
goat was pulled out from under the bed where she had been hiding, as
usual, and taken to Korok’s potato field and tied up under a shrub. The
animal spent the rest of the day eating the leaves of the shrub and did not
complain.
The old beaten pots and plates were taken away from the kitchen, but
Korok managed to hide them under his bed. These were replaced with shiny
new aluminium utensils bought from Balangir. The only casualty of the day
was Korok’s old clay water pot, which was cast aside to a corner of the
backyard where, Korok discovered, someone had trampled it to bits in the
rush throughout the rest of the day. It was replaced with a new clay pot
which looked out of place to anyone familiar with a Gond kitchen, because
it was bare. All water pots had to have a decoration of opposite facing
triangles over wavy lines, done with white plant sap, running around the
neck of the pot. But everyone was in a hurry and Korok was once again
hypnotised by the sunglasses so he forgot all about this.
But there was more. His new friends had got fried vegetables, which they
made him put in the new pot and get a fire going, but only a low fire so the
kitchen would not fill up with smoke. They also had warm rotis, which
were stored neatly till the time came. They filled the water pot from mineral
water bottles of a type Korok had never seen before. He was also warned
not to dip his hands into the pot while they weren’t looking.
And then, around late morning, the big leader from Delhi arrived in a
whirl of dust and greetings in a big convoy. Just behind him, Anchita saw
from her perch inside her house and later told Korok, were TV crews in
their special vans. Thus Deogan was noticed by the outside world in a big
way for the first time.
The leader gave a speech from the stage near the mahji’s house, although
the villagers’ opinion remained divided on what it was about. Half of what
he spoke, being in Hindi, was a little difficult for the assembled Gonds to
understand. The other half of his speech, said some who knew of these
matters, the great leader did not himself understand. But it was
entertainment for the young people. Most of the old Gonds, having seen this
before, mysteriously vanished and did not reappear in Deogan till the
evening.
Korok, being under the eagle eye of his pinstriped friends inside his
house, missed all this. A while later, a huge crowd washed up his lane,
trailed by cameras, and the leader came to his house. It was the fourth or the
fifth he had visited by then at Deogan. This time, the guides and speakers
were the local leaders of Balangir, because with the coming of the television
cameras, the pinstriped gentlemen and ladies had vanished like the Gond
elders.
The leader was shown around the house and told Korok’s mother was no
more. He smiled in a distant, fixed way at Korok and nodded at the local
leaders’ words. He was one of nature’s odd ones: he had the sort of face that
on camera appeared much younger than he was. Standing close to him,
Korok could see the wrinkles around his eyes and the greying stubble.
The new plates in the kitchen were brought out under the eye of the
television cameras, and the leaders, big and little, ate some of the rotis with
the vegetables. Korok even got to ladle water into a new aluminium tumbler
for the big leader, who asked him questions, which the locals translated. Not
very difficult questions, mainly on the lines of whether he went to school
and so on. When Korok said the school was closed, something must have
been lost in translation because the leader’s smile and nods stayed
unchanged.
And then, the tide of humans swept away up the lane. Some of the
television crews stayed on and asked Korok some questions in Odia. They
asked him what he thought of the bauxite mine project. Then they, too, left.
Anchita told him later that evening that some of the news channels did
show the leader eating at Korok’s house. But she also added, with not a
small amount of joy, that the part where Korok answered the reporters’
questions had been edited over with the reporters’ own words. ‘So only
your mouth moves like this: yip, yip, yip,’ she laughed, with her fingers and
thumb forming a bird’s snapping beak. Korok hurried over to her house to
see if this was true. He did manage to see for himself the next day, but it
was a much shorter clip.
At any rate, he was left with the new utensils and the water pot, which he
decorated on his own. As for his pinstriped friends, they vanished with the
rest of the visitors, and so did their sunglasses, never to be seen in those
parts again.
 That was not the end of Deogan’s fame in national politics. After the
news spread of the leader’s visit, a rival party got very interested in the
Gonds and the bauxite mine. About three weeks after Korok appeared on
television, a new set of local leaders and volunteers arrived. Among them
were members of the organisation that had built the new temple at Balangir.
Not all of them were welcome in Gond areas. There were some,
particularly volunteers from outside Odisha, who had a lot of strange views
about Gonds. They thought Gonds were some kind of lost people who
needed to be brought back and taught how to live properly. They frowned
on some old customs. They also did not like it when Gonds ate beef. Korok,
like most others in Deogan, was too poor to afford beef or any other meat
all the time. If asked, he would have confessed he had only eaten beef at
weddings. But it was custom, and it had caused problems.
The other party workers were professional politicians, which meant they
were there to make the most of a news story and did not much care about
anything else. Another stage went up, this one in a field outside the village,
the area around the mahji’s house being too small for what party leaders
said would be a big crowd. The mahji sank further into sadness, and party
flags appeared this time around, too.
This time the television crews arrived before the big man and set up
around the stage. Buses of people were brought in from around the district.
It was said that they even tried to get Bishto’s bus, but Bishto, magical
creature that he was, promised to bring it around on time and told the driver
to take it up the road. Then the bus and Bishto vanished, not to be seen
anywhere in the whole district till the next day. How he managed it was
anybody’s guess.
Once again a big convoy pulled up and the big man was set upon by
fawning local leaders. The mahji and other notables had polite words with
him before he took the stage.
He was a grim-looking fellow, full of what the cadre called ‘purpose’. He
began by telling a story of some tribesmen in mythology and said ‘our tribal
brothers’ were the rock of rural India. But now, he said, his voice rising and
falling like a stage actor’s, this rock was being eroded by enemies. One of
them, he said, were those who tried to change the way of life of ‘our
brothers’. Outsiders. People who had different gods and systems, a different
way of life. These people, he warned in a stern voice, were everywhere, and
the Gonds had to beware of them. Korok immediately thought of the
gentlemen who wanted the Gonds not to eat beef, but it seemed the big
leader was talking of other people. It was a bit confusing.
A few of the elders had actually not managed to repeat their disappearing
act from earlier and were sitting towards the back, on the ground, looking a
little bored and trapped. The only thing they had to look forward to was the
bottles of mahua beer the mahji had promised them. He had even told them
that if this kind of thing continued, he would take to the bottle permanently.
Korok wondered whether he should ask these old men what the leader
was talking about, but around then the leader made his first mistake. He was
continuing about this mysterious first enemy of the Gonds when he raised
his voice and said ‘there are those who encourage our Gond brothers to eat
pork’.
Korok thought that was a very strange thing to say, for if there is any
common universal love among the Gonds, it is for pork, although it was just
as difficult to get for someone poor like him as beef was. But if this
mysterious enemy, according to the leader, was plotting to make the Gonds
eat pork, why, he must be an idiot. No one had to make them eat pork: they
could do it on their own.
This was followed shortly after by the leader’s second mistake, when he
said this enemy was also plotting to get them drunk. The elders, who very
much looked forward to this, began grinning broadly and shaking their
heads. Whoever had been advising the big leader about the Gonds didn’t
know the first thing about them.
Across the crowd a silence began to spread, replaced by the beginnings
of smiles. The local politicians, who were there to make sure the crowd
remained enthusiastic, started getting puzzled.
But the big leader had moved on to his next theme. The second enemy of
the Gonds, he said, were those who tried to uproot them from their homes.
He said he wanted the Gonds to progress; he said he would create jobs for
them. This, once again, puzzled Korok because Collector Behera’s men had
been saying the same thing: that the Gonds would get jobs when the mine
came up. But for this to happen the villagers would have to give up the hill.
What the Gonds wanted was to continue as they were, and if the police
stopped arresting them all the time, that would be a great favour.
The big leader however cleared this bit up with the next part—his plan
for Deogan and its neighbours’ way of life. ‘Not everyone understands how
our tribal brothers live. We will build a big temple to the goddess on that
hill, where the Gonds can pray to her.’
Across the crowd a frozen silence fell, followed by at least a thousand
Gonds trying not to laugh. Korok, towards the back and well hidden, joined
in the brief laughter that followed. The leader had made his biggest mistake
of the day.
The Gonds did not worship a goddess of the hill. There was no idea of a
statue or a painting or whatever it is that temples have. The hill was a
goddess, but she had no physical form. For all anyone knew, it could have
been a god too. The party volunteers who had in earlier times tried to make
the Gonds worship at temples had probably given the wrong sort of idea to
the leader. Whatever it was, his speech was dead in the water.
The leader himself did not realise this and talked at length about a lot of
things, including selling tribal clothes outside. Korok hadn’t seen a hand-
woven jacket or lower wear in his village and doubted anyone in Deogan
knew anything about weaving. The cheap shirts and trousers of Balangir
market were what sold here, so who would make these clothes, he did not
know. He got bored and sneaked away.
 A short while afterwards, the big leader left and the smaller ones,
relieved they did not have to make awkward explanations to the Gonds, also
swiftly departed. This time around, the television cameras did not find
Korok, although when the footage was shown on news channels, he claimed
to Anchita that he could be seen towards the back of the crowd.
The summer, for the villagers, turned into an endless series of days in a
furnace. The ground hardened; the water level in Korok’s well fell so much
he couldn’t see the water very well unless the sun shone directly on it. The
crops wilted. One of his chickens died. The chickens stayed mostly in the
shade, and pecked at the hard ground, but the earthworms had disappeared,
burrowing into the soil.
Korok found a chicken sitting in the shade of the kitchen roof. It wasn’t
moving.
At the entrance to Deogan, the villagers sat patiently, ready to tell their
story to anyone brave enough to visit them in the heat. Korok did not visit
them as often as he would have liked. He was too busy trying to save his
garden. The air was still and there was no wind. The sun beat down on the
rows of flowers and plants. Korok watered them, and tried to loosen the
hard soil. He touched the leaves, gently. When he was sure nobody was
looking, he talked to his plants, telling them to hang on, to wait just a few
more days. The rains would come and the soil would soften.
But the rains did not come. People came, and politicians kept telling the
villagers everything would change. But the government was silent.
The Gonds heard of how other villages in the district got money to help
them in the drought. But no help came to the Gonds. Jadob understood. He
went to town and asked the government officials to show him the figures
for the water table in and around Devi Hills. The figures showed everything
was normal. Jadob knew it wasn’t, but the government only believed what
was on paper.
 The Gonds told newspaper reporters of how much they were suffering in
the drought. But still the government was silent.

It was a short while after the two big leaders came and went that the tourists
appeared. If the leaders were a brief respite of circus and comedy for the
Gonds, the tourists were, in one word, a nuisance.
These were not the usual kind of tourists who visit places and such, take
pictures and occasionally leave litter behind. These were political tourists.
Unlike the big leaders from Delhi, they did not arrive in a rush and with
fanfare. They arrived singly or in small groups, over days. Some had even
arrived before the big politicians.
They were young and tended to look similar. The men had wispy beards
and wore clean new t-shirts with drawings or English words which Korok
could not read, but Anchita could and she said some of them were funny.
Some had long hair, other had shaved heads.
They were from big cities across the country and had similar intense
looks on their faces. They had heard of the Gonds and the mine and were
there to protest, among other things. They came by road, by train and some,
Korok was told wonderingly by other villagers, even by air. Imagine,
people travelling by aeroplane to visit Deogan.
These young people were there because they were concerned. This
concern of theirs was a little vague. They seemed to Korok to be concerned
about everything and at the moment the Gonds seemed to be on top of their
list. Like the proverbial butterfly, they flitted from issue to issue. Like the
butterfly, they travelled light and were curious.
All of this would not have been a bother if it hadn’t been for how these
tourists thought of the world. First, a lot of them had arrived with some kind
of idea that a little village was being besieged by a big company and there
was a physical fight going on. Anchita and her mother one evening showed
Korok an illustrated book written in English, which they said was very
funny. It showed colourful and strange-looking people fighting what they
said were other strange-looking soldiers dressed in metal armour and skirts.
On the first page of this book, Korok was shown a map of a village
surrounded by four tents. He was told this was some kind of army besieging
the village and the whole thing was supposed to be so funny that Anchita
and her mother laughed just talking about it.
The young people who descended on the village seemed to have a similar
idea about Deogan, so they were a little disappointed when, by the time
they were in large enough numbers towards the middle of July, neither the
police nor the Company’s men had made an appearance. The flower was
wilting and the butterflies got restless.
But there were others among these tourists who were so odd that Korok
thought they were making fun of him. One morning, when he was waiting
for Bishto’s bus to take him to Balangir to his father, a group of men and
women came marching up the road. A little breathless and dusty—they
didn’t seem to be in good health—they asked him where the dam was. Poor
Korok had no idea what dam they were talking about, so they left him and
went farther up the road. He later saw them camped at a field near Deogan.
They must have gotten over their disappointment at not finding a dam but a
proposed mine instead.
As their numbers grew, however, so did the tourists’ boredom, and that’s
when the nuisance started. The cellphone network was almost non-existent
and so was the Internet. Electricity, they discovered, was optional, so they
were left to fill their time in other ways. They would pop up in people’s
fields with questions and cameras or disturb some harmless old fellow
taking a bath at the river. They even walked over the mahji’s potato fields in
the dark. A few went up the hill, smoked marijuana and disturbed some
pens on the other side of the peak. This incident caused a bit of an uproar,
although the Gonds behaved with a great deal of dignity and those
particular young people left.
 The only person immune to the dangers of these tourists was, not
surprisingly, Bishto. The more sensitive among them, after a single journey
or two on his bus, wisely decided it was not good for their bones or
stomachs, and either got bicycles or hitched rides on trucks to Balangir.
Over time, realising Balangir was little better than Deogan from their point
of view, they stopped visiting the town much and limited themselves to
walking around the neighbouring villages. To add to the mahji’s woes was
his fear that someone would go swimming without knowing how to and
drown, but that, at least, did not happen. This was of little comfort to the
mahji who by then had become a committed pessimist.
Some decided to help the villagers whether they wanted to or not. Korok
had an endless stream of tourists watching him catch his chickens or search
for their eggs. A few tried their hand at cooking with firewood in his
kitchen, laughing between coughs at what, for them, was a funny
experiment. They tried to live on local produce and drove the trader insane
asking for food brands he had never heard of. Some went native and drank
well water. Not blessed with the iron stomach Gonds have, they usually got
dysentery and left.
A few got together and decided to teach the children of the neighbouring
villages at the schoolhouse. The way they did this was no less odd. They
got everyone of different ages and made them sit together in the yard.
Korok himself was half-abducted while walking out of the epho’s garden
and taken to school.
There, it turned out none of the young men and women knew how to
write in Odia. So they settled for English letters. One among them was
elected for this task. Two days later, he got a phone call from his mother in
a city in western India and packed his bags. He said his mother had told him
to get a job. Yet another, the loudest among them, also received a phone call
and left for another country on behalf of an international organisation that
worked with poor children. Korok went back to his garden.
 Around this time, one of them gave Korok a t-shirt with the face of a
young bearded man on it. He wore it for some time till it had become as
ragged as the rest of his clothes. This man seemed to be very popular
among the tourists. Korok even saw his face on a mug one of them carried
everywhere.
Not all of these tourists were totally clueless. Some, to give them credit,
were really concerned about mines and tribes. But even these few did not
know much about the people they were living among. And they had other
work, other places to go. They brought their flags and banners and posters
of famous men and women. They brought their organisational skills. They
did their street theatre in languages neither Korok nor the other villagers
understood, on issues which did not always concern Gonds. Some stayed on
and behaved. Some got sick as the land got drier.
Over time, the tourists mostly left. Only a handful of the most committed
remained when Sorkari Patnaik returned to Deogan.
For weeks, he had been lying low and waiting for the right moment. He
had not been allowed to enter the villages in his own district, and he never
forgave the Gonds for what he saw as an insult. He watched the politicians
come and go from Deogan. He waited for revenge.
OceanofPDF.com
 8
AUGUST

If he had known how bad the roads in western Odisha were, he would have
asked for a helicopter. Not that he would have got it. Ghosh had taken a
chopper from Raipur, the Chhattisgarh state capital, to a small helipad
owned by the Company near one of their mines on the Odisha border, from
where he had gone ahead in a small convoy of SUVs to Balangir. Not
comfortable, but his work took him mostly to such places.
Ghosh was what everybody called him. Very few knew his first name,
and nobody dared to be so familiar with him that they would ask.
The convoy was for show, because nobody travelled without one in
eastern Chhattisgarh’s Maoist areas. Ghosh didn’t even think twice about
Maoists on his journey. He knew how to deal with them. He had dealt with
a lot of people with guns.
If, in real life, people looked like who they were inside, Sorkari Patnaik
would have an evil moustache. But Ghosh would look like a super-villain.
But since this rarely happens in real life, Ghosh looked like an absent-
minded professor. He had spent the previous year in a hot African country
and grown a beard for it, so he looked even more like a teacher, and
‘medium’ was a good way to describe him: medium height, normal weight,
hair now going salt-and-pepper. A bit sunburnt from all his travels.
But Ghosh was not an average man, and his specialness came from
something he had lived with all his life. From his earliest years in Delhi, he
never seemed to notice people. Persons, individuals, groups of people, they
did not seem to exist for him. They were present, but he did not see them as
others did.
Ghosh saw minerals. He saw metals; he even saw numbers. As he grew
older, he saw systems, like governments and companies. He saw structures,
like business, or the stock market (at which he was a bit of a genius). He
saw ideas. But he never managed to see people.
When Ghosh looked at a map—and his job made him look at maps all
the time—or at photographs of landscapes, where others would see hills or
rivers or trees or villages, he saw the iron ore, bauxite, natural gas, the
crude oil underneath. That African country he spent a year in, he read
somewhere it was one of the last homes of a nearly extinct wild dog. An
interesting fact, but his mind stored it among the unimportant trivia,
because he was buying land for iron ore for a Chinese company.
He combined in a rare mind this singular focus with a genius at dealing
with systems, in this case, governments. Companies lined up outside his
door to get projects pushed through or useless people moved away. To get
problems solved.
Which was why he was travelling over the bumpiest roads of western
Odisha to Balangir. Through the tinted windows he saw farmers’ houses
glide by, thick forests and fields. The big pile of reports he had read were
still on the seat by his side, though he didn’t need to read them twice, given
his memory. This was a simple problem and hardly required his skills.
Africa, now that had been a problem.
It was strange, Ghosh would sometimes think. It was … ironic, that’s
what it was. The most valuable resources were usually found under the feet
of people who didn’t seem to need them. Even worse, these were usually
people who needed the land more than what was inside it. And if that did
not complicate matters, sometimes the land meant more to them than just
space for farming and living. Sometimes it would be ancestors buried there,
other times it would be gods and legends. But, and no less ironic, the best
veins of these resources were under tribal lands. Take Chhattisgarh, or
Jharkhand, or this place. Invisible people who no one was interested in.
He sometimes wondered what the people of New York or Delhi or
Shanghai would do if rich veins of crude oil and iron ore were found under
their houses and streets. They wouldn’t just get up and leave, even if the
iron ore and bauxite would be needed to build their cars or aircraft, and the
crude oil would be needed to run their cars or aircraft.
Not that it mattered to Ghosh. The companies would come to him, and he
would find a way to get rid of the people. He always got the job done.
And this time he was not just about to remove a people. He was to
remove a goddess. And her family. It wouldn’t be the first time for him,
either. For a man for whom people did not exist, gods were a strange idea.
Useful, sometimes. Useful if you wanted to make the followers do
something in the name of their gods. Your god wants this to happen, or that.
Not useful in other cases, like this one. Even gods had their ranks and Gond
gods, like Gonds, did not matter. But bauxite was holy for other, more
powerful people, like the Company, and these people would win.
Crossing Kantabanji and heading east, Ghosh referred to the massive
files in his head. In a neat little folder next to the one about bauxite was a
file marked ‘Gonds’. Strange that there were so many in Balangir. Kandha
tribes, now there were a lot of them, perhaps a million in Odisha. Mundas
too, but who knew there were so many Gonds in Balangir that they could
create a problem?
He ran a mental checklist of the details of this problem. Gond villagers,
sacred hill, resistance, protests. The usual problem. The Company had the
government and its resources on its side. The hill and its surroundings were
a bauxite treasure, better than any the Company had at present. All Ghosh
had to do was get in touch with the local officials and see that things were
done quickly. And quietly. The Company was firm about that. The last thing
they wanted was more publicity about the way they got land for their mines.
And if anyone was to be blamed in case of problems, it was to be the
government. The Company wanted to be what people were to Ghosh—
invisible.
Balangir, he saw as he entered through a crowded and noisy street, was
yet another central Indian town. The only good hotel (built with money by
another company, this one a steel giant) was not even worth looking at, but
Ghosh had been in worse. The water in the bathroom sink smelled but he
tried to not think about it. He took a small document bag with him as he
walked out. He didn’t take his car; it would be faster on foot to the
Collector’s office. And then the office of the Superintendent of Police.
Ghosh was supposed to work with these two people.
They were just parts of the government, and he had to show them how
things were done. Very well, he would show them.

Sorkari Patnaik was having yet another bad day. It was almost impossible
for him to have a bad day, usually. His word was law in Balangir and
beyond. Even traffic left the streets when he wanted. But ever since that
lathi charge he had ordered, things had not gone well for him at all. Every
day some higher-up was calling from the east. ‘Patnaik, is everything under
control?’ ‘Patnaik, I heard there is curfew in Balangir, what is going on?’
Not a word of praise in all these years when Balangir had been quiet, but a
few bruised Gonds and Patnaik was to be on his toes.
Also, since he got a severe lecture from the Important Person, his wife
had started asking him again why he didn’t take a transfer to Jajpur, in the
east. She had family there, and it was a quiet place, and there wouldn’t be
any Gonds or other tribals and he wouldn’t be lectured by his bosses.
 Patnaik could not explain why Balangir was important for him. The
timber smugglers, the businessmen, the companies, they all relied on him.
In Jajpur nobody would bother to bribe him, and then what would he be?
Poor, that’s what.
But also, and this was the key: here in Balangir Patnaik was important.
He could walk into a tribal village and the people, even the babies, would
stand up and salute. He was the Law here. In Jajpur he would be a nobody.
And if he wanted to remain in Balangir, he had to show the Gonds of
Deogan what power actually was.
Also, he had to make everyone happy, which included the Collector, who
had taken to hiding in his office from the summer heat. Which is why
Sorkari Patnaik was sitting in the biggest oven on wheels in Balangir
district—his car—under a blazing sun, on the road to Deogan, talking to
this strange bearded man. It was evening, but the heat radiated up from the
ground.
Small streams of sweat ran down Patnaik’s temple, over his cheeks and
down his neck. Occasionally he wiped his face with a small saffron towel.
The rains were late, and it was humid like never before. Collector Behera
had officially declared the district drought-hit, and the farmers were being
given help by the district administration. Except the Gond villages, which
were not drought-hit. Patnaik was happy when he heard that. The Gonds
thought they could fight the government. There was no harm in that.
Anybody could fight the government if they wanted to.
But nobody could ever win against the government.
Patnaik looked at the bearded man. This Ghosh, the Important Person had
called to tell the police officer, was special. The Company had brought him
in all the way from some foreign country. Ghosh was extremely powerful,
and very clever, and would solve the problem. Just help him in any way he
wants, Patnaik was told.
 Ghosh sat in the front passenger seat, looking at the bridge a few metres
away. The Tel, very dry now, flowed underneath. The two men could see
the Gond villages across the river, and the sacred hill far away. Two months
had passed since the lathi charge, but Patnaik was still not allowed to cross
the river. A prisoner in his own district! He would never forgive the Gonds
for this.
Ghosh sat perfectly relaxed, as if he was in an air-conditioned car, which
Patnaik’s vehicle was not. The bearded man just didn’t seem to notice the
heat. He wasn’t even sweating, Patnaik noticed with wonder.
‘They will stop coming, you know,’ said Ghosh, after some time.
‘Who?’ said Patnaik. He wanted to add a ‘sir’. Usually, just to be safe,
Patnaik would call anybody important from Bhubaneshwar ‘sir’. He wasn’t
sure what he should call Ghosh. But Patnaik also guessed that what he
called Ghosh would not make the slightest difference to this strange man.
‘The politicians. They came because the reporters and TV people were
here. News moves in cycles, you know. People chase a big story and write
everything they can about it. Then they go to other places. They move on.
Politicians move on with them. All these people will stop coming here.’
Patnaik nodded. He understood that part. Nobody, except the Gonds,
would remain here. Even most of those young people who were camping in
the villages had started leaving. But that had a lot to do with the heat, too.
‘Another week, maybe ten days. We just stay quiet and don’t do
anything. The Gonds will keep sitting in protest. They don’t know what else
to do. It is good your policemen have not gone there.’
Patnaik, who had been wanting to ‘go there’ with his policemen for two
months, didn’t say anything.
‘So, here is what you will do. In a little more than ten days, Maoists will
come to these Gond villages,’ said Ghosh.
Patnaik looked at his guest. He had not heard anything about Maoists.
 ‘There won’t be any Maoists,’ explained Ghosh. ‘But you will announce
that they have been here because the villagers want to start a war with the
government. You will take your men, enter the villages, and arrest the
leaders of this protest. The village headmen, the other people who have
been talking to reporters. Anybody in the villages who is educated. That is
very important. The educated ones are the dangerous ones. Bring them back
to Balangir. If there are still any reporters in town, tell them these Gonds
have been arrested because they were in touch with Maoists and were
planning something violent. Then you put them in jail.’
Ghosh was speaking as if he was reciting from memory or giving an
answer to a mathematical problem. Solution to tribal protests: accuse the
leaders of being in touch with militants and arrest them. But Patnaik did not
think much of this idea.
‘How will that help? They will all come out of jail. There will be no
proof.’
‘Of course they will come out. That is not the point. The point is image.’
‘Image?’
‘See, right now, people in places like Bhubaneshwar and Delhi, people
who read these newspapers and post things on social media are supporting
these villagers. Why? Because these villagers are the good guys. Innocent
people who were sitting at home till the government and the Company
came here and tried to kick them out. But what happens when these
innocent villagers are shown to be working with the terrible Maoists,
militants who want to destroy the country?’
‘People won’t like that,’ said Patnaik.
‘Of course they won’t. So the villagers will lose their image of being
innocent and good, whether or not they are actually in touch with militants.’
‘They are not.’
 ‘It doesn’t matter whether they are actually in touch with militants or not.
What matters is image. So, that is what you will do. Arrest all the leaders.
Then we will get some people to write in newspapers that these innocent
villagers are perhaps not so innocent. That is how you change public
opinion. Not by beating people up. That is the old way.’
Patnaik thought it was a little harsh, this strange bearded fellow insulting
him inside his own official car and telling him how to do his work, but
didn’t say anything. His safest option right now was to follow everything he
was told.
‘You know how much bauxite is under those hills, Patnaik?’
The police officer had seen the report, but didn’t remember the number,
and didn’t know much about mining anyway. So Ghosh told him.
‘It is going to be a huge mine. One of the biggest the Company has ever
had in this part of the country. Your district is going to change forever.’
Ghosh turned to look at Patnaik.
‘Nothing is going to stop it. The Company never loses, you know.’
Patnaik was thinking exactly the same thing about the government.
Two small figures were walking across the bridge towards them. Three,
actually. A boy, a girl and a goat. On reaching the end of the bridge, the
goat went off the road and started nibbling at the dry grass nearby.
Ghosh stared through the windshield at the two children on the other side
of the road.
‘That’s interesting,’ he said.
‘What is?’
‘Those two. That girl must be the DFO’s daughter.’
Patnaik was actually amazed. Was there nothing this man didn’t know?
He wondered whether Ghosh knew about his son. But he had to ask.
 ‘How do you know?’
‘She is clearly not a Gond, and goes to school. She is dressed better, so
she is from a well-off family. And she is from a big city. People like her
move differently. Anyone can see that. How is her father?’
‘The DFO? He is useless.’
Which meant Anchita’s father was an honest man who would be of no
use to Patnaik or Behera.
‘He must keep getting transferred,’ said Ghosh.
‘He does.’
On seeing Patnaik’s car, Korok immediately wanted to go back across the
bridge, but Anchita refused. She was poking the dried mud on the side of
the road.
‘We are not running away. And I will climb down to the river and look
for crabs,’ she said.
‘You won’t find any crabs in the riverbank at this time. It is too dry. They
are all hiding underwater.’
Korok was still getting used to the fact that Anchita knew next to nothing
about the natural world.
‘What will you do with a crab if you catch it?’ he asked.
‘I don’t want to catch it. I will take a picture of it with my phone, and
then I will make a drawing.’
Korok didn’t know why she wanted to draw a crab.
‘If you could, what would you draw?’ she asked. ‘No, wait. I know. You
would only draw flowers.’
But Korok kept glancing at Patnaik’s car, and Anchita knew he was
afraid. And she was starting to get angry. Her right hand was digging inside
the pocket of her jeans, trying to find a chewing gum she was sure she had
with her. She popped it inside her mouth and started chewing it.
‘I want to go back to the village.’
‘We are not going back, Korok. I will show you how I deal with these
things.’
And before Korok could say anything, she had crossed the road and
approached Patnaik’s side of the vehicle.
‘You are not supposed to be here,’ she told him.
Patnaik didn’t know how exactly to respond to this. First, he hadn’t
expected the girl to walk right up and talk to him like this. Second, now it
seemed everyone in the district, even the children, knew he had been told to
stay away from the bridge. The mighty Superintendent of Police of Balangir
had fallen on hard times.
‘Is that how your parents taught you to talk to your elders?’ was the best
he could manage, and even he knew it was very weak. So he tried again.
‘Does your father allow you to walk around with these Gonds?’
Both questions were absolutely the last things Anchita wanted to hear.
And because she hated ‘your father’ and ‘allow you’ together in any
sentence, she simply ignored Patnaik and stared at Ghosh.
‘And who is your new friend? A surveyor? A miner? I have never seen
him before,’ she said.
‘And I haven’t seen you before either,’ said Ghosh, very quietly.
Anchita continued to stare at Ghosh, and he stared back. Neither of them
blinked. Anchita had never lost a staring contest, not even against cats. And
she was not going to let Patnaik or any bearded friend of his frighten Korok
back across the river.
‘Please, we should go,’ said a small voice next to her.
 ‘No,’ said Anchita, through gritted teeth, as the staring match continued.
‘Not till these two leave.’
‘Please. Let’s go back.’
And after a long, long time, Anchita looked away. The two of them
started walking back down the bridge, Korok dragging his goat by a short
length of rope.
‘I would have won, you know. Nobody can stare longer than me.’
‘Yes.’
‘You shouldn’t be frightened of Patnaik. I would have chased him away,’
‘I am not frightened of him. I just didn’t want to be near him.’
‘That’s okay. Did you see what I did? I stuck the piece of chewing gum
to his door.’ Anchita started laughing.
‘How will that help?’ asked Korok.
‘It won’t, but it makes me feel good. Sorkari Patnaik came to the bridge,
now he is going back with a piece of chewing gum on his sorkari car.’
And when she explained it that way, Korok thought, it was a bit funny.
But he could never imagine arguing with a government official like that.
They had long memories, and his father was not the epho.
OceanofPDF.com
 9
SEPTEMBER

Sorkari Patnaik crossed the bridge ten days later. He brought fifty
policemen with him in several vehicles and a small truck, and drove into
Deogan early one morning, before the sun had really started blazing.
People in Deogan had almost become used to not seeing Patnaik in the
last two months, although his men had kept turning up, particularly when
the big politicians visited the villages. But the Gonds had always known he
would return. This was his district. Sooner or later, the hand of the sorkar
would fall on them.
Patnaik led his men straight into the village, ignoring the dozens of
Gonds sitting at the protest site. He had a list of the leaders of the agitation,
and knew most of them would be at their homes at that time of the day. He
first knocked at the mahji’s house, entered with some men, and quickly
arrested the mahji.
Ghosh had told him several times not to beat up the Gonds. This was
supposed to be a quiet and swift job. Patnaik had thought his men were
experts at beating Gonds quietly and swiftly, but followed the orders this
time.
 The police team worked down the list of names, going from house to
house, arresting almost all the headmen in all the villages around Deogan.
Jadob, too, had to be arrested. As was every other Gond who was educated
to any extent, and who had been seen on TV talking to journalists.
The Gonds didn’t make any noise. Policemen turning up in their houses
was normal for them. It had been happening for generations. Some, like the
mahji, were surprised when they were told they were being arrested because
they had been talking to Maoists. The mahji told Patnaik that he had never
seen a Maoist in his life, and wasn’t even sure what they stood for, which
was true. But Patnaik did not listen. At each house, the other members of
the family quietly stood by while the policemen went through the few
belongings and pieces of furniture. The few cellphones which some of the
headmen possessed and Jadob’s old phone were all seized, put inside a bag
and taken away. The team also took some books and papers from Jadob.
Most of the books were of Odia poetry, but Patnaik had told his men to take
any papers or documents they wanted to. It was a serious raid, he had told
them.
The Gonds were all pushed inside the truck and taken back to Balangir.
In less than two hours, the protesters did not have a single leader left in the
villages.
Korok was sleeping at home when all this happened, and was shaken
awake by his neighbour. They hurried to the mahji’s house, but by then
Patnaik and his men had left. The mahji’s daughters were huddled in a
corner, crying. He had never been arrested before. He was the headman of
Deogan, the most respected of the Gonds. But all the elders were gone.
Korok sat outside. He could have crossed the river and gone to Jadob’s
small house in the village nearest the road, but there was no point. Korok
had first felt fear when his father was arrested, but Jadob, the mahji and his
own uncle’s family had been with him. Everyone knew his father would
come back. But this morning, Korok felt really, really alone. Without the
leaders, there was nothing anybody could do. The government would make
the villagers leave their homes. The epho’s house and garden would stay. Or
maybe not. The government could even make the epho move to a new
house, and tear down this one. Korok’s garden would be swallowed by the
mine. He could not even bear to imagine it. And besides, when the hill was
gone, there would be no more flowers for him to grow.
Korok listened to the conversation among the villagers assembled
outside. The elders had been arrested because, the police said, they had
been in touch with Maoists and were planning to attack the police and
Collector Behera. Korok didn’t know much about Maoists. He had heard of
the Red Brothers. They were fierce fighters in the forests of Chhattisgarh,
and the police and other people had been battling them. Nothing like that
had ever happened in Balangir. Korok didn’t know much about Maoists or
why they were fighting. They were supposed to be on the side of poor
people, which must mean they were on his side, because he was certainly
the poorest person in Deogan. But he did not know much beyond the few
things he had heard.
If Korok’s father had been in jail for months because of timber theft, the
mahji and Jadob could be sent to jail for years. Maybe they would never be
let out. And what would happen to his mother’s hanal, and all the others?
Some of the villagers decided to go and meet the arrested men in
Balangir Jail. Korok walked home slowly. He wasn’t sure if he should go to
the garden. Later in the day he thought he must, so he went and poked
around half-heartedly among the plants. The ground had become even
harder, but the plants were holding on. Anchita had gone somewhere with
her mother and the house was empty. Korok returned home, made khichdi
with red rice and ate some of it. It tasted really bad. He didn’t know if he
had forgotten to put something in it or if he had lost his appetite.
In the evening, Korok went and sat outside the mahji’s house till the old
man’s wife came out and asked him if he was all right. There was more
news from Balangir. Patnaik had acted very fast. He had produced all the
arrested men in court, where the magistrate allowed Patnaik to keep them at
Balangir police station and question them for two days. There was no point
in asking them questions, because they had absolutely no idea why they had
been arrested, but those were the rules, and Patnaik wanted to show the
judge that this was a very serious matter. The mahji’s wife asked Korok to
stay for dinner, but Korok told her he had food at home and he would
manage. Then he returned home.
Two days later, the mahji, Jadob and the rest were produced in court
again, and sent to jail for two weeks. The police was supposed to use this
time to find proof that the Gonds were involved with Maoists. Korok knew
there would be no proof, so he did not understand what Patnaik would get
by putting the men in jail for two weeks, except happiness. News of this
came back to Deogan, and those who still remained in the villages didn’t
know what to do.
Over the next few days, some things happened across the country, which
the Gonds had absolutely no idea about and would not have understood
much if they had known. Some newspapers and TV news channels carried
stories, with a lot of photographs, about the arrest of the leaders of the
agitation for being in touch with Maoists. That was expected. But there
were also some articles, or columns, in newspapers by some people who
were supposed to know these things. These experts wrote that if the
villagers were actually working with the Maoists, this was a very serious
matter, and perhaps the villagers were not so innocent, after all. Maybe the
government was right in starting a mine in the area, so the villagers would
get jobs, and would not have to join Maoists.
Other experts mentioned something else. They pointed out that one of
every five Gonds in most of the villages around Devi Hills had a police
record. Some had been arrested and been to jail several times, others had
been in prison for weeks or months.
‘There are clearly a lot of problems in the area. This is not a simple story
of the government taking away the rights, or land, of innocent villagers,’
wrote an expert. And many people who read him agreed. Other experts
appeared on TV and said much the same things.
Ghosh had been right. The police could beat up as many Gonds as it
liked, but a few such expert articles or TV interviews were far more
effective. While the Gond leaders stayed locked up in Balangir Jail, a lot of
the support they had started to get in the rest of the country gradually died
down. Only Jadob’s friends in Bhubaneshwar and Cuttack, who really knew
the truth about Balangir district, refused to believe the news.
A few days after this, some rain fell in the area. It did not help end the
drought, but the water level of the well in Korok’s lane came up by a foot-
and-half, perhaps more, and the villagers were thankful for that too.
But with the rains came Korok’s greatest enemies, and for the next few
days, he nearly forgot about all the troubles of the villagers.
Korok never understood where weeds came from. In the dry season, or in
winter, there weren’t that many of them, and the harder the soil became, the
less weeds there were. But as soon as the rains arrived, the weeds would
poke their way out of the soil. It was as if they slept, or hid, just below the
surface, waiting for the soil to be perfect for them to come out. And they
grew fast. Korok did not know of a single plant or flower that could grow as
fast as a weed.
But good gardeners, like Korok, also know that the real damage weeds
do is twofold. First, their roots take away all the nutrition that plants are
supposed to have. Because weeds grow so fast, and are so hungry, they eat
up everything good in the soil, and other plants don’t have a chance.
Second, some weeds also destroy the quality of the soil. All the effort
that Korok had put into creating just the right kind of soil for his plants
would be fruitless if the weeds took over. And they were competitive
among themselves too. A big and strong weed would gradually push out
even the smaller ones, while their roots curled up and dried.
 Cutting them from the top would be of no use, because their roots would
remain. And the roots went much deeper than other plants’. So Korok
attacked the weeds with a certain kind of fury, turning over the soil
carefully and pulling out the roots of the weeds one at a time, while trying
not to harm his own plants. It was very careful work, and took a long time,
and he could never afford to relax. One after the other, he took the weeds
out, and re-arranged the soil, and checked if his plants were healthy.
And that was not enough, for one batch of weeds could be uprooted, but
more would replace them. So Korok kept at it, from morning to evening,
day after day. The rainfall was not enough at all, and this was the end of
summer, but the soil was just wet enough for the weeds to thrive, so Korok
fought a bitter and lonely battle among his flower beds. For eight days, he
uprooted his enemies and tended to his friends, until the rains stopped and
the lower layer of soil hardened just a little bit, and his flower beds were
safe.
Anchita sometimes came out into the garden in the early evening, and
sketched Korok, hard at work. Sometimes she sketched detailed drawings
of some weed or the other, showing its complex roots which curled and
twisted everywhere.
The fortnight passed, and something surprising happened. The arrested
Gonds were all released and came back home. Korok heard of this from the
epho’s wife while he was walking around in his garden, still keeping an eye
on the soil to check if a surviving weed was trying to poke its head out. In
the evening, he went straight to the mahji’s house.
Some of the elders were still present, as was Jadob, and they were talking
gravely with the mahji. None of them appeared much damaged by their stay
at Balangir Jail, Korok saw to his relief. Patnaik had clearly not been
treating them the way he usually dealt with arrested Gonds. With their
return, Korok thought, the villagers could go back to defying the
government.
 But on everyone’s face, particularly on Jadob’s, was despair. From what
Korok understood by overhearing the conversation, disaster had struck.
Since he did not understand much of this, he caught hold of Jadob when the
older man was leaving for his home, and asked him what had happened.
‘Korok, we have lost.’
The boy still did not understand it. What could have happened to knock
the heart out of the agitation? Korok had not heard of anything.
‘Will we have to leave?’
‘Not right now, but no matter how long we sit in protest, we have lost.’
They walked on a bit in silence. Korok still did not understand, and Jadob
realised he was too embarrassed to ask for an explanation.
‘See, Korok, after we were arrested, people across the country, important
people, started talking about us on TV or writing about us in newspapers.
They said we were thieves and bad people, because so many of us are or
have been in jail.’
Korok, whose father, uncle and grandfather had all been in jail, and for
crimes he knew they hadn’t committed, didn’t understand how this
mattered. Going to jail was not the same thing as being a criminal, was it?
But there were many things about the outside world he didn’t understand,
and probably never would, so he didn’t say anything.
‘And those people also said we have been in touch with Maoists, so we
are a danger to the government. There was some support for us in the big
cities earlier. Now there won’t be much. Don’t you see? We can sit in
protest here for as long as we like. Sooner or later, the government is going
to do what it wants to, and we will have to leave,’ said Jadob.
They walked on some more in the darkness.
‘You know, Korok,’ said Jadob, although he was talking to himself. ‘I
don’t understand how they did it. Behera and Patnaik, I mean. They are
important people in Deogan, but nobodies in the rest of Odisha, and less
than nobody in the whole country. There is somebody else behind this,
somebody who knows Deogan very well, but also knows powerful people
in other places. Maybe the Company is involved. I’m sure of it.’
They parted ways where Korok’s lane began, and he went home
wondering what was going to happen.
Jadob went home and thought a lot about what had happened. But no
matter how he looked at it, the Gonds were in a difficult spot, and there was
no solution. How could Jadob or his friends in Cuttack rescue the Gonds’
reputation as honest, hardworking villagers in the eyes of the whole
country?
Jadob went to bed very late that night, and did not sleep well at all. The
next day, his friends called him, and he held several discussions with them,
but everybody seemed to have run out of ideas.
The Gonds continued sitting in protest at the usual spot on the days that
followed, and one or two reporters turned up once more, this time to ask the
leaders if they knew any Maoists. The mahji very patiently explained that
they were innocent people happy to live by themselves, and had no interest
in politics or violence. He spoke like a wise man, but the reporters were
looking for a different story.
Some of the remaining young people, the tourists, also realised Deogan
and its neighbouring villages were not as popular as they used to be, and
left for other parts.
Korok went back to his garden, and kept an eye out for the weeds,
although they had not returned lately.
Some days later, he got aboard Bishto’s bus and travelled to Balangir.
This was another big ritual for him, and usually the only other time he left
the village, apart from the time he went to meet his father in jail.
Before his father was arrested, Korok knew almost nothing about the law
or courts or any other part of the legal system. He knew about the police,
and had been told enough to stay away from them. Some of his neighbours
had been arrested at different times, and policemen had come to their homes
and searched for things which were never found, but that had been different.
After his father was arrested, Korok was introduced to the most complex
machine in the country: the legal system. It took ordinary everyday people
and ground them down, slowly. After years and years of a court case, a
normal person could go quite insane. People would have to keep visiting a
court while the case dragged on. They had to learn patience, and spend
money on lawyers, on documents which the court needed. It was a big,
massive wheel that turned at its own pace, grinding the innocent and guilty
alike. There was even a blessing in these parts: ‘May you never have to go
to court.’
After his father was arrested, Korok turned up in court with his uncle and
Jadob, to see if the man could be released on bail. The judge was not
surprised to see another Gond accused of something. Most of the accused
criminals at Balangir court were from the tribes. But the police said Korok’s
father was part of a clever gang of timber thieves. They not only cut down
valuable trees, they also took them away in trucks without anybody
noticing.
The judge asked: Where was the truck?
The police said: It hadn’t been found.
Where was the timber?
In the truck. Which hadn’t been found.
Where were the other members of this clever, clever gang?
They hadn’t been found either, the policemen told the judge. And, they
added, Korok’s father had refused to tell them where the rest of the gang
was.
This, said the judge, was a serious matter. Korok’s father was clearly a
dangerous gangster and could not be given bail. Even if he was set free,
because the stolen timber was so valuable, the amount to be paid if he was
to get bail was so high that Korok or his uncle could just not afford it. So
Korok’s father went to Balangir Jail and stayed there. He would sometimes
be brought to court, but no progress was made in the case, and police kept
saying the man refused to tell them where the gang or the timber was.
Korok knew his father knew nothing about this. But there was a court, and
there was the law, so that was how things remained for months and months.
And because Korok’s father was so poor, he could not afford a lawyer of
his own. So the court appointed him a lawyer, to be paid by the
government. This lawyer was called ‘friend of the court’. This was a
translation of a term from another language, a very old one, which Korok
didn’t understand at all. But he had discovered that this language was used a
lot in the law, and by the judge. It was the same language in which the
scientific names of his plants and flowers were written, but for Korok it was
as alien as English.
Korok’s father’s lawyer was, for a change, a good man, and was kind to
the boy. He would occasionally feed Korok after the father was produced
before the judge. The lawyer did not earn much, because ‘friends of the
court’ were not paid much by the government, but he had a shop selling
electronic goods at Balangir chowk, so he did not mind.

And so that morning after he took the bus and reached Balangir, Korok sat
on an old bench towards the back of the court while the judge waited for
Korok’s father to be brought in. When the man was finally brought in, the
prosecutor, that is, the lawyer who was speaking on behalf of the police and
the government, stood up and told the judge that the police wanted another
date, a month later. Police had been very busy over the Deogan agitation,
and had not been able to investigate the timber theft.
The judge nodded. Policemen were busy, and the criminal had already
been arrested, so this was not a problem.
 ‘Okay,’ said the judge. ‘Produce this man at the next hearing of the case
on 10 October.’
Korok’s father was taken away. His lawyer did not ask for bail, because
there was no point.
The lawyer walked out of the court and Korok followed him.
‘This is how they keep stretching the case,’ the lawyer told Korok. It was
not the first time he had said this. The lawyer didn’t much like the way
things worked, but he couldn’t do anything about it.
They walked along the row of rooms in the court, and went outside.
Under a tin roof which did not have walls, sat some of the lawyers. It was
their office as well as the court canteen. A man was selling tea and samosas
in a corner. In another corner, some people sat with typewriters, working on
documents which people had to submit in court.
‘Come, we will have samosas and tea. How are things at the village?’
Korok told the lawyer that everybody was all right, now that the leaders
had been released, but Jadob was worried that the government was free to
do what it liked because the villagers had lost their reputation.
‘Hmm. Yes. You can’t fight the government. You can talk to them, and
wave banners and signs at them, but ultimately they do what they want. I
am sorry about your father also. The judge knows there is no proof against
him, but he doesn’t care. He works for the government too.’
They sipped the very sweet tea from dirty glasses under the tin roof.
Korok usually never drank tea, because he didn’t have any at home, but
didn’t mind free food anywhere.
‘You know, Korok, there are some countries in the world where people
can vote for what kind of judges they should have. In some countries, they
can even vote for what kind of government lawyer they should have. Here,
the government lawyer doesn’t need to worry because he has the job
already, so he will keep getting his salary no matter how much time he
wastes.’
Korok didn’t know much about voting. Once in a while, there would be
elections, and grownups would vote for MLAs or MPs or other Big People.
The idea that one could vote for government officials had never occurred to
him.
‘I don’t see why we can’t have it in India. If people don’t like something,
or someone, they should just vote. Government lawyer is not doing his job,
vote him out. Judge is corrupt, send him away. But we are never going to
have that,’ said Korok’s lawyer, smiling.
Korok walked off to the chowk and waited for Bishto’s bus. Rattling
back to Deogan, watching the villages and people go past on the road, he
thought about Patnaik returning with his men to the Gond villages and
asking everyone to leave. The Gonds would protest and protest, and nothing
would happen. That is what Jadob had said. Nobody would listen. Not the
police, or the Collector, or a government official or…
And that was when Korok got his first really good idea.
Why not? He thought, as he turned it over and over in his head.
Why not?
So he got off the bus before the bridge, and walked away to search for
Jadob.
OceanofPDF.com
 10
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER

Jadob lived in a small house in the village nearest the road. His door was
always open. There wasn’t much to steal, and no thieves here. Except when
the police said they had caught one.
Jadob was sitting at a small table, reading from a book. The table was
usually full of books, mostly in Odia. There were not that many books to be
found in the Gond languages. Jadob read anything he could get, and his
friends from Cuttack and Bhubaneshwar, who sometimes visited, would get
him all kinds of books. Stories and poems and non-fiction. Patnaik’s men
had taken away most of them, but couldn’t find anything suspicious in
them. The books hadn’t yet been returned, and were still under arrest at
Balangir. These things took time. So Jadob’s table was mostly bare. He
looked up as Korok entered.
‘Come in, come in. Have you eaten?’
People were always asking Korok if he had eaten, mainly because he was
so thin everyone thought he had gone for days on an empty stomach. This
was sometimes true.
 Korok said he had eaten a samosa at the court. Then he shuffled around
nervously. Korok being Korok, the best idea he had ever had in his life so
far came out not as an idea, or even a suggestion, but as a question.
‘Can the villagers vote for the mine?’
‘Vote?’ said Jadob.
‘Yes.’
‘For the mine?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Can there be an election where the villagers can say whether they want
the mine or not? And also if they should move out or not?’
Jadob sighed. It was a long, tired sigh.
‘Korok, that is not how elections work.’
The boy immediately regretted his idea. Of all the people in the area, he
did not want Jadob to think he was a fool.
‘See, this is how elections work in India. People are supposed to vote for
other people. Such as, for an MLA, who goes to the state assembly at
Bhubaneshwar. Or an MP, who goes to Delhi. That is what the law says.
Mines, or buildings, or other such things do not work that way. The
government says, this is where a mine should be, and that is what happens.’
‘Okay,’ said Korok.
Jadob was silent for a while. He knew Korok, so he decided to question
the boy some more.
‘You thought of this idea on your own?’
‘No. The lawyer in court today said there are some places where people
can vote for judges and lawyers. If someone doesn’t do their work, people
can vote for someone else.’
 Jadob nodded. ‘That is true. But they are still voting for people. Why did
you think we could vote over a mine here?’
‘Because I thought …’
‘Yes?’
‘You said this was a forest area, and the government shouldn’t ask us to
leave, and start a mine. So I thought …’
‘Go on.’
‘I thought, we should be asked to vote if we want a mine. If we vote
against it, the government shouldn’t ask us to go.’
Jadob leaned back.
‘I wish that was possible. Then everyone could see this is not what we
want. The government keeps telling us this is for our own good. But if we
could vote, yes, people would see we don’t want this. It is a very good idea.
But that is not what the law says, Korok. So it can’t happen. It has never
happened like this. But it was a very good idea.’
Korok burst into a smile. He began edging out of the room. He had to go
back to his garden. At least there he knew what he was doing.
Jadob sat back in his chair after Korok had left. That boy had an
interesting mind. Hardworking too, spent the whole day in the sun in his
garden. And now he had thought of voting for the mine. Who would have
come up with an idea like that? It was a pity that Korok had never had a
proper education, and probably never would.
It was also a pity, thought Jadob, that the mine was decided by some
distant government official, instead of being decided by voting. Why could
the villagers not decide whether they wanted the mine or not? Why could
they not be allowed to choose? After all, it was their home, their farms,
their goddess.
Jadob sat up with a start. What if it could work? What if the villagers
asked the government to allow them to vote on the mine? Even better, what
if the villagers went to a court and asked for the right to vote? It was true
that, as far as Jadob knew, this kind of thing did not usually happen. But
surely there was no harm in asking a court? And what was the worst thing
that could happen? The Gonds were already being called all sorts of things
by the TV channels and newspapers.
As Korok walked slowly out of the village, he heard a shout. Jadob was
running towards him. He caught up with Korok and began dragging him
along by the hand, towards the main road.
Jadob was muttering to himself as they walked very rapidly towards
Deogan. Halfway down the bridge, Jadob stopped and stared at the sacred
hill. And smiled. Then he looked at Korok.
‘We’re going to meet the mahji,’ Jadob said.
They walked into Deogan, going past the four policemen who had been
posted at the village entrance ever since the elders had been arrested. The
policemen were there, Patnaik had told newspaper reporters, to keep an eye
on the ‘suspects’, and to see if any Maoists turned up. Jadob said they had
been posted in Deogan to spy on the Gonds.
The mahji was sitting against the wall of his house, in the backyard,
looking at one of his cows tied up in the field nearby. He looked up as
Jadob and Korok rushed in, breathless.
‘Mahji, are you awake?’
‘Yes, yes, Jadob. Come and sit here.’
‘Now listen. Our Korok here has a wonderful idea.’
Korok beamed once again and shuffled his feet. He was very
embarrassed. The mahji’s wife came out.
‘Korok, have you eaten something?’ she said.
Everyone just wanted Korok to eat.
 ‘Mahji, listen. He says the villagers could vote about whether they want
the mine or not. And whether they should stay here or leave.’
The mahji stared at Jadob and Korok. Then he started laughing.
‘Yes, yes, why not?’
‘Just listen, old man …’
‘I am listening. Jadob, elections are for MLAs and MPs. Not for mines or
anything the government wants to do. That is the law.’ The mahji started
laughing again.
‘I know. That is what I told him. But then I thought, we could ask them,
we could request the government to have an election. We could go to a
court and ask the judge to order an election.’
‘Jadob, have you been drinking? The government itself wants us to go.
They will not listen to us.’
‘We could ask the courts, not Behera or his senior officers, or some
politician. It is not the same thing.’
‘It is always the same thing. Which judge in Balangir has ever treated a
Gond any differently than Behera or Patnaik treat us? And now, as you have
said, people think we are Maoists and want to fight the government.’
Jadob’s enthusiasm was beginning to die down. He was silent for a while.
Korok sat down next to the mahji. He was actually beginning to get hungry,
and was thinking he should go home and cook something.
‘There must be a way, mahji. Let me talk to my friends in Bhubaneshwar.
We could go to the high court there. That is not the same thing as the court
here in Balangir. Perhaps the judges there will listen to us? We aren’t doing
anything else, anyway,’ said Jadob.
The old man swatted an invisible fly and looked away.
‘You do what you want, Jadob.’
‘I will.’
 And Jadob went away and got busy. Over the next few days, Korok got
to hear, mainly by visiting the mahji’s house, about what had been
happening. The first thing that Jadob had told the mahji was this: what the
Gonds had decided to do must remain a secret as far as possible. Which
meant only the headmen of the other villages were to be told, until such a
time when an announcement could be made.
But things had never worked that way in Deogan, so one day Korok’s
neighbour caught up with him on their lane and, smiling broadly, said that
he had heard from someone that Korok had come with a wonderful idea.
The neighbour wasn’t very sure of what this wonderful idea was, but he was
certain that it was wonderful because his cousin from the next village had
told him and so on and so forth …
Korok didn’t know what to do with this newfound attention, so he hid in
the epho’s garden as much as possible for a few weeks. Since this was what
he did on most days anyway, nobody commented on it, although Anchita
noticed the hunted look on his face. But her offer of cake to him made him
look even more hunted, so she was really puzzled about the whole thing.
Jadob spent the next week calling his friends in Cuttack and
Bhubaneshwar. They would mostly call him back—to save him the
expense, and have long conversations. They really liked the idea, Jadob told
the mahji one day. They also said they would very much like to meet the
young fellow who had thought of it.
The first thing that was needed was documents. Courts needed
documents to work on. People couldn’t just walk into a courtroom and
demand things. So Jadob had to hunt for all kinds of documents. There had
to be papers to show when Devi Hills had been declared a forest area, and
proof that the Gonds had been living there since before anyone came up
with paperwork. There had to be proof that the hills were sacred to the
villagers. And, of course, proof that the villagers owned land around the
hills and lived right there.
 Jadob’s biggest fear was all this paperwork could only be done at the big
offices in Balangir. Which meant he had to walk back into the lion’s den, or
Patnaik’s den, and everything would fall apart. Patnaik could make the
papers go ‘missing’ with one phone call. Even worse, Behera could just say
the papers had been sent on holiday to Bhubaneshwar or somewhere. The
government could say anything it liked, and what could the Gonds do about
it?
As it turned out, Jadob needn’t have worried. All these documents were
also stored neatly at the mahji’s house, and at the houses of the other village
headmen, so Jadob could just walk around and gather them up without
going anywhere near Balangir.
Meanwhile, his friends in Bhubaneshwar kept talking and advising him.
They also talked to their other friends in Delhi—people who were very
interested in the matter, and knew a lot about the area, but had not been able
to do much against the government’s might. This new idea gave them all
some kind of hope. They knew a lot of good lawyers—some of them were
lawyers themselves—and one thing everyone agreed on was the Gonds
needed to file their request for a vote in a very big court. It wouldn’t do to
go to the Balangir court and ask the magistrate to decide. For one, the
magistrate would probably immediately call Patnaik or Behera and ask
them for orders. For another, the case would then go to a higher court
anyway.
Finally, they all decided to go directly to the highest court in the land, the
Supreme Court in Delhi. One reason was time. If the Gonds went to the
High Court in Bhubaneshwar, and won, the Company could go to the
Supreme Court and fight it there. The Gonds needed to win, and quickly.
Jadob’s friends put in a lot of money—fighting a case in the Supreme
Court would not be cheap—and got a team of very good lawyers, including
their friends. This team guided Jadob and his friends in deciding which
documents were important, and how to write the request in a way which
would make the judges of the Supreme Court at least listen to the Gonds.
Jadob explained this process in detail to Korok, who was very happy with
it, even though he could not understand it completely.
One day, very quietly, two of Jadob’s friends visited Deogan. It was a
very short visit, and they had to take all kinds of routes from Bhubaneshwar
to make sure Patnaik, or the policemen he had posted everywhere, did not
know of them. They met Jadob and the others at the mahji’s house and
discussed the plan. Korok had also been invited, and had taken another of
his special baths and looked very shiny.
Jadob’s friends were a man and a woman. The woman had grey hair and
a frown, but she had very kind eyes and looked like an older version of
Anchita’s mother. The visitors shook hands with Korok and said, very
seriously, that they were very pleased to meet the person who had come up
with the idea of voting for the mine. They said it was a wonderful idea and
they wished they had thought of it themselves.
Korok burst out into one of his rare grins. He got even more embarrassed
when the mahji told them the boy was the best gardener in these parts. The
mahji was still not sure that the idea would work at all, but since the young
people including Jadob were so keen on it, the headman thought he should
go along with them.
The visitors went through all the documents and said this was the best
chance the Gonds had, and they were all ready to fight it out in the highest
court of the land.
Some days later, Jadob packed a small and battered bag and left very
quietly by road to Koraput. From there he travelled to Bhubaneshwar and
met his old friends. A group then left for Delhi. Korok was told all this by
the mahji, who was the only link between the group outside and the Gonds
now.
The Supreme Court is a very important place, and only serious matters
are put up here. As with every other court in the land, judges are few and
cases are many, so it takes a long, long time for anything to happen. But
Jadob and his group filed their request, in what was called a ‘petition’.
It was a very simple request, really. It told the court that the government
wanted to take away the Gonds’ sacred hill, and march them out of their
village, and wanted to give all the land to a company for a bauxite mine.
The Gonds, said the petition, were not denying that there could be valuable
metal under their hill. They had not much use for such things, but they were
not denying the metal was actually there. In discussing the petition with
their lawyer friends, Jadob had explained that they should not deny the
importance of the bauxite, or that it was present under the hill. The judges
were not fools, so there was no point in telling them the bauxite did not
matter. What the judges needed to be told, said Jadob, was that the Gonds
should have the chance to decide if they needed the mine or not.
All they wanted, said the petition to the Supreme Court, was a vote on
two questions. The Gonds of the villages around Devi Hills were to be
asked: first, do you want to move out of your villages and go live
somewhere else? And second, do you want Devi Hills to be dug up for a
mine?
If they were allowed the vote, and if the answer to both questions was
‘yes’, the petition said, the Gonds would listen to the government and move
out. Here, again, Jadob had specified to the lawyers who were writing the
petition that they should explain to the judges that the Gonds were willing
to follow everything the court decided. Jadob wanted the highest court of
the land to understand and believe that the Gonds were law-abiding, honest
people, happy to farm their land and keep to themselves. Jadob knew the
judges had heard about the Maoists and the arrest of the headmen. He did
not want the judges to doubt the honesty of the villagers.
To make it easy for everyone, Jadob’s friends had also written down how
they would like the voting to be done. Who should get it done, who should
watch over the process to see it was fair, and who should vote, and how.
 About a few minutes after the mahji got the phone call from Delhi that
the petition had been filed, the headmen made formal announcements in
their villages, and everyone got to know.
Then they settled down to wait.
OceanofPDF.com
 11
OCTOBER-NOVEMBER

‘How? How did they do it?’

Ghosh and Patnaik were sitting in the car at their usual place near the
bridge, looking across the river at Deogan and the hills. Patnaik could now
go wherever he wanted, but after weeks of sitting here they had become
used to it, so they would often come and wait in the evenings. For Patnaik,
this was still a part of his district, and he was still the lord and master of it.
For Ghosh, the hills reminded him that his job here was not finished.
It had been almost finished, he thought. After his suggestion to arrest the
Gonds, and all those expert articles in newspapers, he thought it was
finished. Another month or so, and the government would be free to throw
the Gonds out, and everyone would cheer. Ghosh even got several phone
calls, including from the big people in the Company, congratulating him for
sorting out everything in Balangir.
Then the petition had happened. It was extremely strange, in Ghosh’s
experience. Wherever he went, people tended to lie down after they had
been kicked. They didn’t usually fight back, and not in court. And they
certainly did not come up with ideas like voting on mines or factories.
 Now the Supreme Court had accepted the Gonds’ petition, and agreed to
have a hearing, where both sides—Jadob and his friends on one side and the
government’s clever lawyers on the other—could present their arguments.
But no matter how interested the Supreme Court was, it was busy, so the
hearing could only be held in December.
‘The petition, you mean? Oh, they just went to Delhi and …’
‘No!’ said Ghosh. ‘I mean, how did they think of it? Who thinks of
something like this? People don’t vote for mines. Next thing you know,
people in cities will be demanding to vote if someone wants to build a
flyover, or a speedbreaker, or a dustbin. Only somebody who doesn’t
understand how voting works, or democracy works, would ask for
something like this. Only someone illiterate and … and simple-minded. Or
somebody who wants us to think they are simple. I am sure the idea came
from those busybodies in Bhubaneshwar who have been supporting the
Gonds.’
Ghosh knew a lot about democracy. In some ways, he really liked it. In
some ways, he didn’t. He always thought fondly of the old times, when the
world had kings and queens. Things were much simpler then. The big man
or woman gave an order, everyone jumped around getting it done. Simple
and quick. Someone like Ghosh could get a king to make a country do
whatever he wanted.
Democracy, now that was different. But Ghosh liked it too, because of
the way it had turned out. He had been to most countries in the world, and
to some places which wanted to be countries of their own. Only a few
countries were really democracies, he had found. Most other people just
didn’t know how it was supposed to work. They thought they knew, but had
absolutely no idea.
In India, people had been given the right to vote, and they lined up and
did just that, when they were asked to. Did it make any difference? People
were told democracy meant they ruled, and they were very happy about it.
But they thought that was all there was to it. That being in a democracy just
meant lining up and voting. That citizens of a democracy had rights, duties
and responsibilities, that being in a democracy meant more than just voting
in elections, was not something most people thought of.
Ghosh had realised, after travelling around the country, that people had a
different idea about what a ‘majority’ was. In elections, people voted for
whoever was from their caste, or religion, or even language. People thought
a majority, in a democracy, was a group based on who they were born as,
not what ideas they believed in, or what work the candidate could do. And
Ghosh had also realised that people thought voting in elections was the end
of their responsibilities as citizens. Actually, that was where a citizen’s
responsibilities started.
But Ghosh had read about the people who had written the Constitution,
and he knew they had been thinking of something completely different. A
vote was supposed to stand for some ideas, or principles that the voter
agreed to. But in India, it had come to stand for the identity of a person
based on who the person was born to, or what gods he was supposed to
believe in.
For Ghosh, this was wonderful. It meant an election would not result in
the best person, or the smartest person, or the more qualified person coming
to power. It only meant whoever ate exactly what most of the people in his
area ate, or a person with the same surname as most other people in the
area, would win. So it meant the companies who paid Ghosh so much
money only had to be friends with whoever was in power, and the people
who were usually elected were not the right kind of people. For the country,
that is. They were very suitable for the companies, and people like Ghosh.
Very useful. And it was so easy to be in power …
‘Anyway, this only pushes things back a little, you know,’ said Ghosh.
Patnaik looked at Ghosh, and as always, wasn’t sure if he was expected
to reply or the strange bearded fellow was just talking to himself. Patnaik
still wasn’t sure if he should be calling Ghosh ‘sir’. With all that power, he
thought he should be. But Ghosh wasn’t in the government, and Patnaik just
couldn’t call anybody ‘sir’, unless it was a politician. And yet this Ghosh
was clearly more cunning than twenty politicians from Bhubaneshwar.
‘Yes, only a small delay. It won’t matter in the end,’ said Ghosh. ‘The
Company will win. The Supreme Court may have taken up the petition, but
that doesn’t mean anything. The judges will probably throw it out anyway. I
don’t see why not. And in a way I am glad these people went directly to the
Supreme Court. It saves a lot of time. And once the court throws it out,
what will they do? They will just return home with their tail between their
legs and pack their bags. And their friends, those useless people in
Bhubaneshwar and Delhi, they will go find something else to do. It doesn’t
matter.’
‘So the Company will not ask the court to ignore the petition?’
‘Patnaik, nobody can ask the Supreme Court to do that, not in so many
words. But the government will have to reply to the petition, and tell the
court why this so-called voting can’t be done. And the Company doesn’t
want any delays, so the government will reply quickly, and the case will be
finished soon.’
‘So the Company has not told the government to delay it?’
‘Not at all. The Company has, in fact, told the government to not make
any excuses and try to finish it as soon as possible. That is what I told them
to do, after all.’
Patnaik decided he had to start calling Ghosh ‘sir’ very soon. This little
fellow, sitting here in Balangir, was controlling how quickly a case could be
finished in the Supreme Court in far-off Delhi!
‘Just a few more weeks, Patnaik. Courts can move very fast when they
choose to. A few more weeks, and you can celebrate as much as you like.
We will be finished here.’
Ghosh wanted to leave as soon as he could. This little matter had delayed
his plans for the rest of the year. He was supposed to be in Australia by
December. Now it looked like he would have to postpone it. In Australia at
least he could have the kind of food he preferred, not the horrible hotel food
in Balangir—and there would be no smelly water in the sink in his room. In
Australia, Ghosh was supposed to go help a big company, an Indian
company actually, deal with a coal mine. The locals there didn’t want the
mine. Why couldn’t people just roll over and be meek?
But if they did, Ghosh thought, he wouldn’t get paid. So he was glad they
fought. As long as they didn’t fight very hard, or for very long.

And while Jadob and his friends went over the case and discussed every
part of it in Delhi, and the mahji went back to dreaming of potatoes, and
Ghosh lurked around Balangir dreaming of Australia, and Korok lurked
among his flowers keeping an eye on the weeds, Anchita went to school in
November.
Anchita’s social studies teacher had asked her students to prepare and
speak on something of importance to them. They could even bring objects
and show them to the other students, as part of the presentation. Some of
the students were really excited about it.
Today was Anchita’s turn, and she was smiling softly to herself from the
morning. People who knew her well would have recognised the warning
signs, but she was new in this school, so nobody noticed.
Her turn came, and she stepped up to the teacher’s desk with a folder of
papers. Anchita’s smile widened.
‘Today I am going to talk about my neighbours. They are an …
interesting people. I have got some drawings which I made, to show you.’
‘That is very good, Anchita. We would all like to see your drawings,’
said the teacher, who was also smiling, although it was not Anchita’s kind
of smile.
‘But first,’ said Anchita, opening her folder and taking out two sketches,
‘I would like to show you something else. Here is an aircraft.’
 The students craned their necks to look at the two-seater propeller driven
aircraft Anchita had drawn. It was a very good sketch. She hadn’t wanted to
draw a big passenger aircraft. A small one would do.
‘And here is a rocket with a spacecraft on top. Isn’t it interesting? This
one takes astronauts to the International Space Station. How many of you
want to be astronauts? I know you do.’
There are always astronauts in every class. Five or six hands went up and
stayed there for some time.
‘And how many of you want to be pilots?’
A lone hand went up. Anchita was surprised. The owner of the hand was
a bit poor in mathematics. But enthusiasm was what counted, she supposed.
‘Great. As you know, aircraft and rockets and cars and such things are
made of aluminium and other metal. Aluminium in nature is found as an
ore, called bauxite. It has to be mined, and refined, and mixed with other
metals to make aircraft and rockets and spacecraft and other cool things,’
said Anchita. Her smile was beginning to hurt her jaws, but she continued.
She had to do this properly.
‘Now, a little about my neighbours. I live on the other side of the Tel,
near a village called Deogan. Here it is,’ she said, showing a neat sketch of
the hill towering over the village. She had even got the trees right, and their
leaves, and was very proud of the sketch. She had spent a lot of time trying
to get the leaves right.
‘And this is my friend, working on his garden. He lives in the village. He
can grow anything he wants to. You should see the flowers and plants he
has grown.’
The class obediently looked at the sketch of Korok working away among
his flower beds.
‘Very good, Anchita,’ said the teacher, without looking up. She was
examining the sketch of Deogan.
 ‘And this is the sacred spot on the hill where the villagers bury their
dead. They call it the hanal kot. Look at the big stones at the entrance. This
is very important for them. They have an interesting set of beliefs. They
also have these little local gods, called pens. A lot of them can be found on
this sacred hill,’ said Anchita, holding up the piece of paper.
This sketch had also taken some time. Anchita had worked hard on it,
sitting under a tree near the hanal kot while Korok had wandered off to
collect flowers. It had been a good day, with a cool breeze through the trees.
‘Now this one is interesting and I really wanted you all to see this,’ said
Anchita.
The class peered at the sketch she was holding up. It showed a rundown
thatched house. A cow poked its head out of a window. Two goats, one of
them sitting, could be seen at the open door.
‘What is it? Quiz question! Is it a cowshed, or a goat pen? Go on. Take a
guess.’
Anchita’s smile was about to burst out of her mouth.
There were faint murmurs in the room. One or two of the students said
‘cowshed’.
‘Wrong answer! This is the school in Deogan. There was a time when it
had a teacher, but he ran away, so now there is nobody to teach the children.
Besides, they work in their parents’ fields, or, like my friend, in his garden.
So now you will find only cows and goats in the school.’
The teacher was looking outside. Another teacher was in the corridor and
wanted to talk to her. Anchita was counting on this, because this had
happened during some of the earlier presentations also. She did not want to
be interrupted, and had been hoping the teacher would leave for a few
minutes, which she did.
Anchita let out her breath. Here comes the rest of the presentation.
 ‘And this is Balangir Jail, in the town. I am sure some of you have seen
it.’
Patnaik junior, a lumpy boy, had been sitting on his bench, looking bored
and sleepy. That was how he usually looked during presentations. His
expression was mainly to show to the other children that he was absolutely
not interested in whatever the presenter was talking about. But now he
opened his eyes. His group of loyal friends, who always sat around him like
security guards, began glancing at each other.
‘A lot of Gond villagers are in Balangir Jail. They have been accused of
many things, but most of them have not been convicted by the court. My
friend’s father, too, is in jail. My friend lives alone and cooks for himself.
When he has food, that is. You should try cooking for yourself,’ said
Anchita, waving the sketch around. Her smile had frozen on her face.
‘And here are some of the villagers, sitting under banners. As you can
see, they are protesting. What are they protesting about? The government
wants to move them out and give their villages, and their sacred hill, who is
a goddess, to a company. The company wants to dig up the whole place
because there is bauxite underneath.’
‘And here,’ said Anchita, ‘are some objects I found in my friend’s house.
This, as you can see, is toothpaste. And this is a tin of soyabean. Look
closely. They are fake brands. All the villagers there are sold these fake
brands all the time, and they don’t know because they have never had
anything else. There are businessmen in Balangir and other towns here who
have been making these products and fooling these people because nobody
cares about them. And when all the bauxite is dug out and taken away, do
you think the villagers will ever get to sit in the cars, aircraft and spacecraft
that will be made from all that aluminium?’
Anchita, after glaring around the class, had moved on, and was now
looking at Patnaik junior, who was staring back at her, his eyes narrowed.
 ‘And you. You know about everything your father does. You know he is
a thief. You know he makes money by letting thieves take valuable timber.
Then he goes and arrests innocent people like my friend’s father. Now he is
working with the Company to throw out my friends from their villages, and
dig up the hill.’
There was a brief silence. Then Patnaik junior and his bodyguards rose
up and began shouting at Anchita. So Anchita, who was prepared for this,
just shouted louder than them.
‘Your father is a thief! Doesn’t matter how much you deny it, or what
your chamchas say. And you know of all this! And the rest of you knew
what has been going on in the Gond villages, but did nothing. Have you
even been to the villages? You live next to them and don’t care what
happens to them, do you? You are all responsible …’
There was sudden silence. The teacher stood at the door, looking shocked
and puzzled.
So Anchita was taken to the principal’s office, and her father was called
the next day. A serious discussion happened, and Anchita was asked to stay
away from school for a week. She was not exactly suspended, as she was a
very good student, but the principal told her father the other parents would
be satisfied if she did not attend classes for some time. She would still get
to give the exams at the end of the year.
Anchita’s father drove her home from school. They started the journey in
silence.
‘Why couldn’t Maa come?’
‘As in?’
‘Why didn’t the principal call Maa? Why you? Is it a father-is-better-
than-mother thing?’
Anchita’s father knew the way her mind worked. She could notice these
things.
 ‘No, Anchita. It is a Balangir thing.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, I was asked to come because I am a government official. Your
mother is not. The principal would find it easier to explain to your
classmates’ parents that she met Anchita’s father, who is a DFO. It helps.’
‘Okay. Politics.’
‘Umm, yes. You could say that.’
They drove on. The school was fifteen kilometres west of Balangir, so
they had to pass through town on the way to Deogan.
‘You know, Anchita, I have been meaning to talk to you about this. You
can’t go around calling people thieves.’
‘I didn’t call that boy a thief. I said his father was.’
‘Yes, but …’
‘Isn’t he? You know he is.’
‘Who, Patnaik? He is not a nice person, yes, and …’
‘And he is a thief!’
‘He is corrupt, yes. There are different kinds of corruption, you know.
Sometimes people take money to do things. Sometimes they use their
official power to get things done for other people …’
‘Like Patnaik is helping the Company.’
‘Umm, yes. But you still can’t go around talking to your classmates like
that.’
‘Why not? I was just telling the truth.’
Anchita’s father sighed. One of the good things about talking to his
daughter was she was really intelligent and could notice things. You did not
have to explain a lot, and you didn’t have to hide things. But it was
sometimes difficult to have a conversation with her because she could be so
direct.
‘Anchita, there are different kinds of truth. People don’t always see
things the same way.’
‘Maybe, but I just don’t like him. He’s polite.’
‘Really? That is a good thing. I wish you were.’
‘I mean, he is polite, but not in the way you think. He just talks nicely to
people, but you can see that he is just being nice to them even though he
thinks he is better than them. He looks down on them. He … I don’t know
exactly how to explain it …’
‘The word you are looking for, I think, is condescending.’
‘Yes, that one.’
‘You should have known the word.’
‘I knew it. Of course I did.’
‘You can’t do anything about people like that.’
‘But there are all these other boys, always hanging around him and
treating him like royalty. It’s like a gang …’
‘He is popular because of his father. But you can’t punish him because of
who his father is, or what he does. And you can’t yell at your classmates to
show some interest in the Gonds. Yes, it would have been nice if they had
shown some concern for all the things that have been happening. But you
can’t change everything, Anchita, and you certainly can’t change things just
by getting angry. So hang on in there, and try not to lose your temper,
please?’
A goat stood right in the middle of the road and refused to move as the
car approached it. Anchita’s father slowed down and drove around it before
picking up speed. Anchita could see the goat staring at them in the rearview
mirror as they sped away. There was hardly any traffic.
 ‘But why is everyone here ignoring the Gonds? Except the other tribes,
that is. Why don’t my classmates care?’
‘Maybe they don’t know. Maybe they don’t read newspapers, or watch
the news, or talk to other people. Maybe their parents don’t talk about it at
home. That makes a lot of difference, you know. Or maybe your classmates
are just not interested.’
‘That is not right, is it?’
‘No, it isn’t right. But that is how it is. And you can’t fight it like this.
You see, an honest person doesn’t have many friends. But an honest person
who speaks her mind, she has no friends. I am just saying this because you
will have to be in class for some time, with these kids. You can’t fight with
them every day. So maybe you can try explaining things to them in a gentle
way. Who knows, perhaps some of them will agree with you? But please,
don’t pick fights with them.’
Anchita, who was quite willing to fight anyone all the time if she had to,
was silent. Then she thought of something else.
‘You said I have to be in this class for some time. Does that mean you
will be transferred soon?’
Now her father was silent.
‘Again?’
‘You know how it is. I’m not sure when I will be transferred, but it could
be soon.’
Anchita’s father was transferred a lot, because he was honest, responsible
and did his work in the right way.
‘I like this place,’ Anchita said, looking out of the car window.
‘Of course you do. But you will need to be in a good school for your
Class X exams. Till then, as long as you are here, will you at least try not to
pick fights with the children?’
 ‘But it is wrong! Nobody cares about the Gonds, even when they live
next door. In all this time, none of the children mentioned it in class, and
none of them have visited Deogan.’
‘That is true, but shouting at them will not help. You have to choose your
fights, Anchita. Otherwise you will just get tired. And now you have got a
holiday. I guess you are happy about it.’
Anchita was actually very happy about not having to go to school.
They drove through Balangir and raced on down the empty road to
Deogan.
‘How is Korok? I have to talk to him about some flowers the scientists
want me to send them.’
‘He is well. They are all waiting for the result of the court case. Do you
think they will win?’
‘I hope so.’
They approached the house and her father slowed down.
‘You should go and visit him. And now that you have some time, will
you think about teaching him something?’
‘Teaching him? Korok? What can I teach him?’
Anchita’s Odia was not very good, although it was taught as a subject at
her school.
‘You could teach him English, at least. Or computers.’
‘Okay,’ she said, unsure. She wasn’t exactly designed to be a teacher. An
artist, yes. MMA fighter, perhaps. But teacher?
‘At least you could do something else apart from watching movies with
him.’
‘What is wrong with movies? He likes them, and I explain the dialogues.
Korok likes movies as much as he likes cake.’
 ‘Okay. I’m sure he does.’
Anchita got off and ran inside for her computer. Then she walked to
Deogan to find Korok.
She made the best of her holiday from school. She sketched a lot, and
walked around Devi Hills with Korok, and tried to find all the pens in the
forest. For Anchita this had become a kind of Pokemon quest.
One day, when Korok was digging away at a flower bed in the garden,
Anchita called him and announced they were going to watch a movie, and
that he simply had to see it. It was such a special movie, said Anchita, that
they shouldn’t watch it on her computer, because the screen was very small.
So they had to watch it on the TV. It was a big rectangular thing, and flat. If
it was any bigger it would be a small cinema hall screen as far as Korok
was concerned.
The movie, he was told, was called Obotar. Anchita launched into a long
and complicated explanation about the story before she started the movie,
because Korok needed to be told all this, at least for some movies.
Otherwise he got confused. She told him it was about a world on a different
planet, and then had to explain a bit about planets. Korok kept nodding and
trying to keep up.
He had heard of obotars, of course, from what little he knew about Hindu
beliefs. He knew of two obotars, at least: Krishna and Rama, both blue-
skinned. One of them had a temple in Balangir. The Muria Gonds around
Kantabanji had a blue-skinned god too, but that was different from the
Hindu obotars. Korok was very sure about that part.
This movie, however, was different. There were normal white people—
Korok had seen one or two in Balangir sometimes, so he knew who they
were—but there were also these tall blue-skinned people and they lived in a
huge tree. And, as Anchita explained, there was a company trying to dig up
the sacred tree because there was a precious substance underneath it. Now,
that part Korok could understand very well. It seemed these companies
were digging up everywhere, even on other worlds. Suddenly Deogan’s
residents didn’t seem to be the only sufferers.
Korok was sternly told to sit on the sofa, but he kept wanting to slide
down to the floor.
‘I’m sorry there isn’t any cake,’ said Anchita.
‘Okay.’
‘But wait, I will just go and check. There might be some …’ and Anchita
went off to the kitchen.
Please, not kek. Not kek, please …
‘I’m really sorry,’ said Anchita, returning, ‘There isn’t any.’
‘Okay,’ said Korok, trying to slide down to the floor again.
But what a movie it was. Korok had never seen anything like it. Strange
and terrifying animals and flying creatures (he couldn’t even call them
birds)! Plants and flowers made of light! Floating mountains!
He wasn’t very sure about some of the story, although Anchita tried to
explain to him. Something about a man on a wheelchair entering the body
of one of the giant blue people. But it was great fun, till the fighting began.
And he really didn’t like it when the flying machines brought the huge tree
down. He nearly cried. And later, the blue people started attacking the
flying machines with arrows and spears. Korok didn’t much like action
movies and covered his face with his hands when the fighting became too
much.
‘Look at you. Are you afraid of the fighting? It’s just a movie.’
‘Okay.’
But the blue people won in the end and it was all well and happy. Korok
liked a happy ending as much as anyone else.
‘It was wonderful, wasn’t it?’
 ‘Yes.’
‘We must watch it again. Father said I should teach you English.’
Korok’s face registered honest alarm.
‘A little bit. We can’t watch movies all the time, he says.’
‘Okay.’
Anchita brightened up. ‘You know, Korok, I have got a wonderful idea.
Just now. You have to listen to this. I think it would be great if we wrote to
the director of this movie. He is a very famous man. People all over the
world know him.’
‘Okay. Yes.’
‘We could tell him about what is happening here. I’m sure he will help,
or talk about it, at least. Anything will help. Maybe he can get other
important and famous people to talk about us and support us. What do you
say?’
Korok smiled and said yes, it was a good idea. Although he then
immediately thought the man who made this movie must live at the far end
of the world, so if they posted a letter to him, it could take, who knew, years
and years to reach him …
‘Uff, no Korok. We will email him.’
Korok nodded. A letter through the kompitar. Okay. He knew of that
from Anchita. She had even shown him her Facebook profile and explained
that a number on the screen was the number of friends she had. He could
count a bit, and was amazed. She had more than 640 friends! Almost as
much as a small village. But Anchita explained all of them were not really
her friends in the way he understood the word. Then she said some of them
were people she hadn’t even met. Korok nodded and didn’t tell her he
didn’t understand how it worked. It must be a city thing.
‘So we will mail him, on behalf of everyone in the villages, and ask him
for help. He must be a busy man, but I am sure he will reply.’
 Korok nodded and smiled. Anything that helped them was good, wasn’t
it?
He hadn’t smiled so much in a long time, so it was good to do it.
And then the Red Brothers arrived, and Korok stopped smiling.
OceanofPDF.com
 12
DECEMBER-JANUARY

Gardening is waiting. The good gardener waits patiently for the plant or
flower to grow, taking its own time. She knows most of what really matters
happens deep underground, among the roots sucking in food and water from
the soil. She waits for nature to do what it knows best, and just helps things
along, a little at a time.
Korok had no idea about the Supreme Court or the complex mechanism
at work in far-off Delhi. He would only know from whatever the mahji
explained to him. So he waited patiently for things to happen, and for the
results. He was good at waiting.
An unexpected result of Anchita’s fight with her classmates was, on the
following Sunday after she was asked to stay away from school, six or
seven of them visited Deogan. They called Anchita first and asked if they
could come. They were very polite, and even said they were sorry for not
visiting earlier, and Anchita was quite surprised by all this, but she behaved
very well with them. Although she also very clearly told them not to visit
with blankets and clothes and such. This was not a village hit by floods. It
was a people hit by other people, so they could just come and visit. Of
course, she told herself, she could give Korok anything she liked, if he
accepted it, because she was only lending things to him, and they were
friends. Her classmates were not.
So they visited, and saw Korok’s garden. He was present, and showed
them some of his best flowers and was very proud when they asked him
questions. They walked up the hill and saw the hanal kot, and looked out at
the river, and visited some of the other villagers. They told Anchita they
would visit again, and thanked her for talking about it in class, and said they
were sorry about everything. They also had lunch, which Korok avoided by
saying he had some work at the mahji’s house. He was afraid there would
be kek, but Anchita’s mother hadn’t made any, so he could have had lunch
with them if he had known. And the week passed and Anchita returned to
school and Korok went back to waiting for news.
Winter settled in. The sun stopped blazing, and the nights grew cold.
And then, weeks later, the Red Brothers arrived.
It was the coldest day in December. Korok didn’t have anybody to tell
him the temperature, but he felt it in his bones that day, beneath the thin
sweater with the three holes in the back, and under the thin blanket with the
one hole through which his toes would poke out when he was sleeping.
It was late in the evening, and he had just finished making dinner—some
red rice and thin dal. The mist had thickened, and had curled into the
kitchen, where the lantern gave a soft light. This was not the dense fog of
the northern Indian plains. This was the gentle mist of the high Deccan
plateau, which settles in and takes its time and is thickest in the hours after
midnight. Korok could hardly see the end of his courtyard.
And through the mist, five persons walked in. Four men and a woman.
How they had arrived at Deogan, nobody knew. They were certainly not
from Odisha, but they spoke the local dialect. They had first dropped in at
the mahji’s place and given him a long lecture on who they were and what
they expected the villagers to do. The mahji nodded politely, although he
was extremely frightened, partly of them and partly of being arrested again
by Patnaik if the police ever found out that real Maoists had come to
Deogan. But he had listened to them, and they had visited some of the other
houses. Nobody knew why they visited Korok. Perhaps it was by accident.
‘Where is your father?’ their leader, a young man, asked the startled boy.
Korok said his father was not at home, which was what he told strangers
unless they were pin-striped people who wore sunglasses. They were
dressed in pants and shirts and sweaters, almost identical, almost … a
uniform, but not quite. Even the woman, who was older than the men. But
they were not armed.
Afterwards, Korok thought about this. He had heard a lot about Maoists,
but had never seen them. There were no Maoists in this part of Odisha,
everyone knew. But he had expected them to be fierce fighters and carrying
all kinds of weapons. They were fierce, but only in their eyes, which were
hard and blazed. But perhaps it was only the light of the lantern.
‘It’s good you have some dinner for us, then,’ said the leader, and the
men took the pots of rice and dal, and the only two plates Korok had, and
went into his house and sat on the bed. That is, the four men sat, and the
woman stood. Even though she was older.
Whatever they were, they were certainly not Gonds.
There was food for just one thin boy, so it became food for just two of his
visitors. Korok stood near the door, nervously. The leader asked him his
name, and Korok told him.
‘You know who we are?’
Korok gave a slight nod.
‘Of course you do. We are the Red Brothers.’ They didn’t add ‘and
sisters’, but perhaps it was too much effort.
‘We fight the government and the police. We heard what has been
happening here, that the government wants to take away your land, and the
police have been beating and arresting you people. That is what they do
everywhere. So we have come to tell you: don’t worry. We are here.’
Korok, who was very worried by now, gave another nod and shuffled his
feet.
‘See, this is what happens when people are quiet and meek,’ said the
leader. ‘The government comes and takes things from you. Steals things
from you. Leaves you hungry and cold. Will you sit by silently if people
come and take what is not theirs?’
Korok, watching his guests eat the dinner he had cooked for himself,
didn’t say anything.
‘They are all thieves. They see a meek people, they see a chance. They
just want to take what is valuable and leave you nothing,’ the leader went
on. It was possible he had given the same speech at several houses in
Deogan, because he spoke rapidly.
‘All this protest, and going to court in Delhi and everything,’ said the
leader, licking the rice and dal on his fingers, ‘is of no use. No use. The
governments in Bhubaneshwar and Delhi will win. And you will have to
defend what you have. People should fight for their homes. People should
defend their homes and possessions. Don’t you think you should defend …’
The leader took a look around Korok’s one-room house. There wasn’t
much to defend here, but he recovered bravely.
‘Don’t you think you should defend the village? Your hill? Your
goddess?’
Korok immediately thought of Obotar, and those poor blue people
throwing spears at the flying machines. That big tree, which was destroyed
by the bombs from the flying machines, it would never grow again.
‘Sooner or later, Korok, you will have to take up weapons. That is going
to happen,’ the leader said, going out and washing his hands and mouth
from the water pot. The man wiped his hands on his shirt, came back inside
and sat on the bed.
Korok had never touched a weapon in his life. He didn’t know what he
would do if someone gave one to him.
‘Now, us Red Brothers, we think everyone is equal. Gond, Munda,
Kondh, Odia. Everyone is equal. Men, women. No difference.’
Korok looked at the four men sitting on the bed, and the woman standing
against the wall. She might be older, but it is possible the Red Brothers
were like the police, and had ranks, and she was of lower rank. Otherwise,
there was no reason to make her stand all this time. And they hadn’t even
offered her the food. It just wasn’t right.
‘Yes. That’s what we are. Equals. And you will like it in the forest, when
we fight the government. We have to take back the land and what they stole
from us.’
Korok, who would be going to bed hungry, if he didn’t die of fright any
minute now, nodded once again.
‘We will be back, Korok. The government will be back, and so will we.’
Then they walked out into the mist. There was no trace of them the next
morning, and the policemen at the village entrance slept peacefully through
the night, and Patnaik did not get to hear anything about it.
But Korok went to bed very afraid, and felt exactly like mustard seeds
when they are thrown into a mortar and the pestle comes down on them.
Between the government, and Patnaik’s lathis, and the Red Brothers, there
was just no peace, not even when he was sitting at home. He could not sleep
well at all. Mainly because of his worries, but also because the blanket was
just not warm enough. He really wished he had a dog which could snuggle
up with him, but he couldn’t expect the goat to do this, and anyway her
horns would surely make some more holes in his blanket, and his father,
whenever he returned home, might get very angry.
 The English year ended, and sometime after the first week of the new
year came the first day of the month of Pausa. On the Tuesday after the first
new moon night, there was the Sulia Jatra festival at Khairguda village in
the district. It was a Kondh tribal festival, but Gond families too would
visit, traditionally, and Korok had gone there every year with his father.
This time the Gonds weren’t sure about celebrations of any kind. Their
own festivals had been small, and there wasn’t much rejoicing. A few
people, those with small children, went to Khairguda, but the mahji stayed
at home and stared into the distance, and Korok walked around in the hills
and did not talk to anyone. He would stay at the hanal kot till evening fell
and it became cold.
Far away, in Delhi, many things were happening. Jadob, who had set the
events in motion after Korok’s idea, now sat and watched it all unfold, and
every once in a while he would wonder what he would tell the mahji and
Korok.
After he returned to his village all those years ago, Jadob had spent all his
time working for his people. Most of his work involved talking to
government officials, bureaucrats like Behera and his minions, or answering
questions by officers like Patnaik and his minions, who always suspected
people like Jadob of being troublemakers. Far from it. Jadob and people
like him were necessary for villages like Deogan and its neighbours. There
were very few educated young people who could explain to the villagers
what the government had in mind.
Over the years, Jadob had lost his faith in the government. More and
more, he would tell villagers to solve their problems themselves, such as the
flooding by the river Tel, or getting enough water to irrigate their fields in
the dry season. The government, Jadob had realised like the mahji before
him, was too vast to worry about a small people like the Gonds of Deogan.
Like a distant god, or an absentminded giant, asking the government for
help would bring more harm than good, is what Jadob thought.
 But as he talked with his friends and the lawyers in Delhi, and as he went
over their petition, and their plan to fight the case in Supreme Court, Jadob
began feeling a little optimistic. Perhaps, he thought, the judges would see
through the government data, the reports by the police, the expert articles,
and would see the truth hidden in all this. Perhaps, thought Jadob, the
highest court in the land would have some kind of sympathy for the Gonds.
He knew that lower courts certainly would not, and he had no expectations
from officials like Behera or policemen like Patnaik. But perhaps,
somewhere in the Supreme Court, justice still lurked? So Jadob decided to
sit quietly in a corner and listen to the arguments.
But it was not an easy fight for the lawyers who were arguing the case on
the side of Jadob and his friends. The ‘bench’ of three senior judges had
many questions for them, and many other questions for the government.
That the Gonds had been living in the villages around Devi Hills for a
very long time was quite clear to everyone, and even the state government
did not deny it. So the judges did not talk much about it at all.
That the Gonds also owned houses and land in the villages was clear, too,
and Jadob’s lawyers submitted all these documents to the judges anyway.
The problem was, what should the land be considered as? Jadob’s
lawyers said it was forest land, but it was also true that the forest
department did not look after the hill. Under the old system, the hill was
taken care of by the Gonds, because it was sacred land but, said, Jadob’s
lawyers, it was still a protected forest. The lawyers told the court the
government was wrong to declare the forest was not protected. And because
it was sacred to the Gonds, the central and state governments were also
wrong to hand it over to the Company which would dig it up.
Sitting in court, silent, Jadob thought the lawyers were arguing the case
well. The whole idea, as he had told his friends, was to show that the Gonds
had a right to the land, and should thus be given a chance to decide what
was to happen to the land.
 In their reply to this, the government lawyers said the mine would give
jobs to the Gonds, and they were very poor, and needed jobs. And the mine
would produce aluminium, which the country needed. So everyone would
be happy. Jadob knew the government’s argument would be based largely
on this. He also knew his own lawyers would have to convince the judges
that, while the Gonds were certainly poor, the mine was not the only
solution.
But there was also the problem of the Maoists. As Ghosh had predicted,
this was a big point for the government, whose lawyers said the villagers
had been arrested for contacting Maoists, and they were planning to fight
the government with all kinds of weapons, and this was a serious thing.
The judges agreed that it was a serious matter. Maoist fighters in
Chhattisgarh and other states had been fighting the government for years
and years. Many people had been killed, and if the fighting spread to
Balangir and other parts of Odisha, it was not good.
To this, Jadob’s lawyers said there was no proof that the villagers had
been talking to Maoists, and that the topmost police officer in Balangir, a
fellow named Patnaik, had arrested the Gonds and made a false case against
them.
The judges looked at the documents about the arrest of the Gonds very
carefully. They had all read the news reports when the arrests had been
made, and had read the expert articles and watched the news, so they
thought they knew a lot about it. But they looked at the documents the
government showed them, and said, shaking their heads, that there didn’t
seem to be much proof against the Gonds. Where, the judges asked the
government lawyers, was the proof that the Gonds were planning to fight
the government?
The government lawyers scratched their heads, and thought a lot about
Sorkari Patnaik, and cursed him for making things so difficult for them.
Then they told the Supreme Court judges that police was investigating the
case and would find real evidence very soon.
 The judges shook their heads again, and said, very well, but the court
couldn’t wait for the police to find proof. Will we, they said sarcastically, sit
around and nap while the police in Balangir try to find their evidence? The
judges said they had to decide about the matter, and the sooner it was done,
the better for everyone.
And so around and around they went, the lawyers from both sides and the
judges, and Jadob watched like a hawk at every turn, listened to every
argument and counter-argument. Could it be possible, he thought, that the
court would say: fine, the Gonds have earned the right to choose. Jadob
hoped they would, and at night, after each day of the hearing, at his room in
a friend’s house, he thought of the villagers, and the hill, and hoped the
court would decide in their favour.
In the end, the judges told the court, while thinking aloud, in the end, it
was a very simple question. Was the mine more important than the
goddess? That is, was the mine more important than what the hill meant for
the Gonds?
The judges told the people in court their views, and wrote the judgment,
using very long words and some of the ancient language that Korok had
heard in Balangir court. The judges said that a court could not judge about
whether a hill, or group of hills, were sacred or not.
‘We can’t judge a god, or a goddess,’ said a judge, and the other two
nodded their heads, agreeing.
‘We can’t comment on the beliefs of the Gonds, or any other people. The
law can only decide on what is covered by the law,’ said the court.
The judges said the court could only decide if the Gonds were right in
saying they should vote on the matter. The judges said this was a very rare
request. People did not vote on every decision of the government. The
government acted on its own, and it was understood that the government
could be trusted to act for the best interests of the people.
 However, said the judges, the Gonds’ lawyers had said, in this case, the
government could not be trusted, and that the Gonds should be allowed to
decide on their own.
So after talking about this, and looking at every part of the problem, the
judges said, they had decided that they would ask for a report on the
situation, before they allowed, or did not allow, the voting.
The problem was: who to ask to make the report? The judges said the
Gonds had their lawyers in court, and the ministry of mines in Delhi, which
wanted the hills, also had their lawyers in court. So the judges had to ask
someone else, a sort of neutral party.
There was no ministry of gods and goddesses that could file a report at
the Supreme Court in a matter like this, said one of the judges, and the
people in court laughed. Judges make jokes too, sometimes. Jadob, sitting
in a corner, did not laugh. He had been to a lot of trials in lower courts, and
in his experience when judges started laughing, it meant they were not
paying attention to the case, or did not care about the outcome. For Jadob,
everything depended on the Supreme Court judgment. So he did not laugh
or even smile.
In the end, the judges decided that since the area was forest land, the
ministry of environment and forests was to make a report about everything.
How the Gonds lived, how they took care of the sacred hills, what the law
and order situation was, whether the police had been behaving cruelly with
the Gonds, and so on. Based on all this, the court would decide whether the
Gonds should be allowed to vote for the mine or not.
And that was where it stopped for some time. The court would wait for
the report from the ministry of forests. Jadob thanked the lawyers who had
fought so hard on behalf of his people. He also thanked his friends, packed
his small bag and left Delhi. He would have to return to the Supreme Court
when the ministry’s report was filed. He missed home, and was happy to
return as quickly as possible.
 But he was disappointed. He knew how each part of the government
worked, so he knew what a report by a ministry would mean. He had never
seen one branch of the government criticise another, so there was no reason
the environment ministry would step in to save the Gonds. A report would
be filed at the court, of course, but the Gonds could not expect any
sympathy. Then the court would read the report and tell the Gonds: sorry,
but the mine has to come up.
Jadob felt very, very tired at the end of his journey.
OceanofPDF.com
 13
JANUARY

Korok ran to the mahji’s house on being told Jadob had returned. The
villagers had celebrated, in a small way, when news of the court’s order had
come. At least the highest court of the country had listened to the Gonds,
they said. Who would have ever imagined that? They were sure the court
would rule in their favour. No judge, said some of the headmen, and
certainly no judge in Balangir, had ever listened so patiently to a Gond in a
court before. If this was not good news, what was? All that remained was
for the people to wait for the ministry’s report, and the judges would at least
allow them to vote. And, they were sure, no Gond would vote for the
government’s plan.
So Korok ran, happy, to the mahji’s house, and reached much before the
other headmen arrived. Jadob was sitting in the backyard with the mahji,
drinking sweet and very milky tea, wearing a new sweater which Jadob’s
friends in Delhi must have gifted to him.
But Jadob was not smiling, and Korok’s heart sank when he saw the
man’s face.
‘Korok,’ said Jadob, ‘how is your garden?’
 Korok looked at him but did not say anything. The mahji was silent, too.
‘I am sorry, Korok. I am really sorry. We have lost.’
‘But …’
‘I know. The mahji told me everyone here thinks we will win. But we
won’t. I sat there in the Supreme Court listening to the lawyers, and I came
back. I will have to go to Delhi again after the report is filed, but it doesn’t
matter. We will not win.’
The mahji swatted an invisible fly on his arm. The sound was loud in the
silence.
‘You see, the other ministry, of forests, is going to file a report. It will just
be a report. Another report by the government. Nobody cares about us. So
the judges will read the report. It doesn’t matter what the ministry says.
What will it say? It is a ministry of forests, so it will say the trees are green,
and the Gonds have cared about the hills. That is all. The court will say,
sorry, that is not enough, and the police are right, the Gonds might start
fighting the government, so we should allow the government to build a
mine. The Gonds will get jobs and won’t fight the government if there is a
mine. So we have lost. We will have to leave. It is just a matter of time.’
Korok took a while to understand what Jadob was saying, but in the end,
he saw Jadob was right. It would just be a government report and the Gonds
could not hope to get justice.
As the other headmen started arriving, Korok slowly edged out of the
house and walked off to the epho’s garden. He sat among his flower beds
for some time. Finally, he took a small trowel and the water sprinkler and
began poking around the flowers aimlessly.
The weeds had returned. After all the work he had done, as the coldest
days passed and the ground softened in the sun, the weeds had returned
from hiding under the ground. Korok could never win against them. After
pulling out a few of the bigger ones, he felt very tired, and felt like crying,
so he threw the trowel away and sat on the ground.
 Jadob was right. Nobody cared about the Gonds. The central and state
governments certainly did not. Patnaik, of course, hated every Gond in
Balangir. Everyone just saw chances and opportunities to use the Gonds.
The police saw Gonds as people to be arrested for crimes they didn’t
commit. The Company saw metals under their land. The government saw
money. Even the Red Brothers saw, in the Gonds, a chance to fight the
government and get people to take up guns. The politicians saw a chance to
be in the news. And the government and the Company would keep on
returning, again and again, until the Gonds lost.
Anchita had been right. The government and the Company were just like
weeds, and weeds were …
What were weeds, really? Korok thought he must know. He knew all
about them. So he sat on the cold ground and thought about weeds. He
thought and thought for a really long time and even after the sun had gone
down.
That evening, Korok visited Jadob’s house and talked to him. The next
morning, he visited his mother on the hill, and spent a long time at the
hanal kot. And then, knowing Bishto would turn up whenever he was
needed, Korok walked down to the main road and waited for the bus.

Ghosh was packing up to leave. His work was done. The Company had
asked him to solve the problem, and he had. It had taken a little longer than
he had expected, because of the court case, but he had won, as he always
knew he would. Now he couldn’t wait to leave dusty Balangir and go to
Australia.
He was very happy when he met Patnaik.
‘I am relying on you now, Patnaik. Remember that. Collector Behera can
do what he likes. Everything is up to you,’ he said, at Patnaik’s office.
Ghosh had been telling Patnaik that it was over, and the Gonds had lost.
Patnaik had not been quite sure.
 ‘You need not worry. The Supreme Court has just asked for a report from
the ministry of forests. So they will write a report and send it to the judges.
That is what the government is good at. Writing reports that don’t mean
anything. Then the judges are going to tell the Gonds that their request for
voting on the mine can’t be allowed. And that will be that.’
Patnaik nodded and stared at his cup of tea. This man Ghosh was scary,
in some ways. First, because he clearly had so much power. People in Delhi
listened to him all the time. Second, Ghosh had been living in Balangir for
months, and had not even complained once. About the food, or water, or
dust, or the weather. Nothing seemed to bother the man. Almost as if he was
beyond all this. Patnaik wasn’t sure whether that made Ghosh a superman
or something else.
‘So you can relax. But not quite. I have to go, but you have my phone
number and can reach me anytime. But don’t just call me unless it is very,
very important. Now, what you will have to do is also very important. You
have to keep a tight control over this district, particularly the Gond areas.
There must be no crimes, no big incident that will be in the newspapers.
Nothing must make the judges notice Balangir in any way. So when they
get the ministry’s report, they will just treat this district as a normal place.
You understand?’
Patnaik said he did.
‘That also means no lathi charge. No more beating up the Gonds if they
protest. You are a new kind of policeman. You frighten people into
following the law by smiling at them.’
Patnaik thought about it. A New Policeman. He smiled. He liked the
idea.
‘But there is one thing you need to keep an eye on. And that is the
Maoists. You know how they are. When they hear of something like this,
about people fighting the government, they always want to be involved.
Always. I have seen it many times in Chhattisgarh. So if you hear of any
Maoist activity, you have to put a stop to it. And if you do happen to catch
any Maoists, it will be the best news possible. Because if that happens, the
Supreme Court judges will be convinced Deogan and the other villages are
a big problem, and the mine is the only solution to it. So, you have to be in
control of the district.’
Patnaik agreed, although he did not think there would be any Maoist
problem. That one time he had arrested the Gond leaders had been a made-
up story, because the villagers had never been in touch with Maoists. So he
was going to relax, but keep an eye on things.
And Ghosh had left. The Company was happy with the way things had
turned out, and the Big Person from Bhubaneshwar who used to bother
Patnaik so much called up the police officer, and Behera, and told them
things were looking good, and they had done well. There was, Patnaik
thought, not a cloud in his sky.
A few days after Ghosh left, Patnaik, sitting in his office playing with a
glass paperweight, got a call from the Superintendent of Balangir Jail. They
were on good terms, but the superintendent did not call often.
Patnaik could hear the man shuffling paper on his desk and clearing his
throat. He waited.
‘There was something I had to tell you. It might be important. On the
other hand, it might not be. I don’t know. I just thought I should tell you.’
‘What is it?’ asked Patnaik.
‘You know how it is in the jail. People tell me things.’
Patnaik nodded to himself. Of course there were prisoners who gave
information to the guards. Important information, and sometimes, useless
news. Patnaik had informers of his own almost everywhere in Balangir.
‘So people here have been talking. Not just one or two. Many of them.
They are saying a very big Maoist leader is going to visit Deogan.’
 Patnaik stopped fiddling with the paperweight and put it down on his
desk. There was a short silence.
‘A very big leader?’ he said.
‘A very big Maoist leader. That’s what they are saying.’
There was another silence as the jail superintendent shuffled some more
papers at the other end, and cleared his throat again.
‘Look, I know this might be nothing. It might be just a rumour, or
nothing important. But I heard it from my informers, and not just one or
two of them. Several. So I thought I should tell you. And I know you
arrested those Gond villagers for talking to Maoists some months ago …’
The jail superintendent knew the case had been made up, that it was a
fake case. He had seen the Gond villagers when they had been put in his jail
for two weeks. Every government official and most people in Balangir
knew the case was false. But the superintendent couldn’t say this to Patnaik.
‘So that is what I have heard. If I hear anything more, I will tell you.’
Patnaik thanked him and sat back in his chair. This was unexpected news.
It could actually be just a rumour. But, equally, it could be true. A big
Maoist leader visiting Deogan. Who? He didn’t know. When? ‘Soon’. That
is what the jail superintendent had said. ‘Soon’ could mean anything. This
afternoon, the day after tomorrow. Next week.
What should he do?
Patnaik called Ghosh. He didn’t want to. He would have preferred to
handle things on his own. But just in case the matter was as big as he
thought it was, it would be good to ask Ghosh. He would know what to do.
So he called Ghosh’s number, but couldn’t connect with it. Patnaik sat
back in his chair once more, and thought about what to do.
Finally, he called his junior officers and held a meeting. It was a long
meeting, and they asked for tea and samosas. Patnaik told them what he had
heard, and asked them if they knew of anything. They said, no, they hadn’t
heard of anything about Maoists so far.
Then he asked them the big question: were the Gonds in touch with the
Maoists?
His junior officers, speaking very carefully, said: the Gonds had been
arrested for contacting Maoists.
Patnaik lost his patience and told them, ‘Of course I know about that! I
arrested them, didn’t I? But are they really in touch with these terrorists?’
The police officers said they didn’t know. One of them said, what if, after
being arrested, the Gonds had actually decided to ask for help from
Maoists? The villagers had peacefully protested against the government, but
what if they had lost patience and were going to fight with weapons?
Patnaik said, yes, this was possible. In fact, it could actually have
happened. The more he thought about it, the more he realised this must
have happened. The Gonds had gone to court, and were about to lose the
case, so they must have contacted the Maoists because they had nothing to
lose.
His officers agreed. This was nothing new, because they always agreed to
whatever Patnaik said. He was the biggest police officer in Balangir, after
all. The officers said no top Maoist would leave the forest and walk into a
different state unless something big was going to happen.
After the meeting, Patnaik sat for a long time alone in his office,
thinking. He had to find out more. And he had to catch this top leader when
the fellow came to Deogan. That would not only end the court case, it
would also make him famous. Promotions, rewards. Many things. He told
his junior officers to ask their informers to keep their ears open. Patnaik
went to bed a very happy man.
OceanofPDF.com
 14
JANUARY

It began like that: a short phone call from the jail superintendent. But over
the next few days, Patnaik and his men got to hear it again and again, until
it seemed every police informer in Balangir, and in the Gond villages, was
saying the same thing. A very senior Maoist leader, a man wanted in several
states, was going to visit Deogan. The Gonds were going to start fighting
the government. Other informers got tidbits of more information. A huge
number of guns and ammunition would be brought to the Gond villages
very soon, and the villagers would be trained in them. Patnaik laughed
when he heard this. He would like to see Gonds with guns against his
policemen. Yes, he would like to see that. So, those potato farmers and
fishermen were going to fight the government, were they?
But there was very little actual news. Who was this fearsome Maoist
leader? Patnaik’s informers did not know. What did they know about him?
Nothing much, except he was somebody very big. When was he coming to
Deogan? Again, nobody knew.
Patnaik sat in his office, listened to the reports and waited.
 Winter began to leave Balangir, and the sun grew stronger. There was a
small storm in the Bay of Bengal, but nothing came this far up into western
Odisha. In Balangir, life continued as always.
Patnaik waited.
Ghosh had called him back. On being told about the news, Ghosh said,
‘That is exactly what I expected. The Gonds have given up. This is the end.
Now the judges will never listen to them. But Patnaik, you have to catch
this man. You have to catch him alive, and take a lot of pictures, and videos.
Image is everything. You must catch him, and be seen doing this. You,
personally.’
Patnaik, who had decided to do just that, was happy Ghosh agreed with
him.
He waited. More reports came in, again saying the same thing. It was
definitely going to happen.
But when? Patnaik got his men ready to go to Deogan in minutes if
needed. There was no point in camping at the Gond village. It would scare
the Maoists away.
And then, one morning, Patnaik got a call. It was from an informer.
‘Yes?’
‘He is here,’ whispered the informer.
‘In Deogan?’
‘Yes. He arrived just a while ago. He is at the mahji’s house, talking to
him and that Jadob.’
Yes! Thought Patnaik.
‘His name is Mishra.’
‘Just Mishra?’
‘That is all I heard.’
 Mishra, thought Patnaik. That must be his surname. Or maybe it was a
fake name. Maoist leaders had so many names, he knew. Mishra. He hadn’t
heard of this one, but maybe his real name was something else.
‘What does he look like?’
‘Small, thin, short grey hair.’
‘How many of them have come?’
‘Four men.’
‘Just four?’
‘Yes. I checked. There are no other new faces in the village.’
Of course. They would hardly bring an army, would they? Maoists
moved quietly and travelled in small groups outside the forests.
‘Are they armed?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Which also made sense, if the Maoists were travelling in Odisha. And a
senior leader would not carry a gun around all the time, would he?
Patnaik wasn’t sure of this, but it made his task easier. Ghosh had warned
him to catch the man alive.
He called his junior officers and told them to get ready immediately. How
many men were they going to take to Deogan? As many as possible,
Patnaik said. They were going to search the whole village, just to be safe.
Patnaik called for his driver. The constable came in and saluted.
‘Get my car ready. Now.’
The constable turned to go.
‘Wait. Have you seen my phone charger? The battery is very low.’
The constable usually charged Patnaik’s phone for him. Patnaik was too
important to do these things himself.
 ‘Sir, I had charged it,’ the constable said.
‘Okay. Where is the charger?’
Patnaik searched his desk, but he had to go. They went out and got in his
car. The charger wasn’t there either. Patnaik had a very expensive phone,
and neither his junior officers nor his constables had the right charger.
‘Okay, we can’t wait. Let’s go,’ he said.
A convoy of police vehicles sped out of Balangir and raced to Deogan.
They made the trip really quickly, because police cars can move very fast,
but only when policemen want to.
Patnaik’s phone battery died halfway down the road, but his wireless set
was still working, just in case someone wanted to talk to him. In any case,
Deogan was now the most important village in Balangir. Everything else
could wait.
They sped into the village. Patnaik’s junior officers led some of the men
to the rest of the village, where they began checking all the houses, one by
one.
Patnaik himself marched straight into the mahji’s house. He found a
small group sitting in the backyard on some very old chairs. There was the
mahji, and that useless teacher named Jadob, who was always visiting
Balangir to complain about something or the other, and two other headmen
who Patnaik thought looked familiar.
And there were four other men. Clearly not Gonds. Three were dark-
skinned, with curly hair. Maybe they were from Andhra. There were a lot of
Telugu leaders among the Maoists. The fourth, Patnaik saw, was indeed
short, thin, with short grey hair. He was wearing an old sweater and
trousers. He wasn’t much to look at.
Maoist leader, eh? Patnaik thought. Must be an intellectual.
Patnaik smiled. Ghosh had told him to be a New Policeman, so he would
try this. The group looked at him and the armed policemen who had
surrounded the courtyard and was silent.
‘Mishra?’
The Maoist leader looked at him.
‘Yes, that is me.’
‘Oh, it is, is it?’
Patnaik’s smile grew even broader.
‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Very good. Search them. And you Gonds, now you
have really been talking to Maoists, haven’t you? And, that too, their top
leaders.’
One of the Maoists opened his mouth to say something, but the leader
gestured with his hand, and he shut up.
The policemen went over the four visitors, and over the Gonds, just to be
sure, but nobody was carrying a weapon. They did have a lot of papers
lying on the table.
‘Good. You men, gather up all these papers,’ said Patnaik.
Then he took a handcuff from a constable standing nearby. It was an old-
fashioned handcuff, made of thick steel, with big chain links between the
cuffs, and a rope attached to one end. He walked over to Mishra, who was
still seated and looking at him. Patnaik patted the Maoist leader’s shoulder
and smiled again. He was getting better at being a New Policeman.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Patnaik. ‘We will not beat you. Not much, at least.
Mishra, you are under arrest.’
Then he slipped the handcuffs on the Maoist’s hands. Patnaik made
everyone stand up and called one of his constables who was standing
nearby with a camera. A mobile phone would have worked just as well, but
a proper camera was better. Patnaik was old-fashioned in these things. And
Ghosh had told him to take a lot of photos. Image was important.
 Patnaik thought of the headlines in newspapers, with the photos. ‘Top
cop catches Maoist big fish,’ he thought. That sounded really good. Big
fish.
There was even a Gond boy with the group, sitting on the floor.
‘Mishra, you have been recruiting children also, is it? Preparing the
Gonds for war against the government? Very good, very good. Come, we
must go to Balangir now.’
And very gently, smiling all the time, Patnaik led the arrested men
outside and into the vans. The policemen even put the boy in one of them.
Patnaik made Mishra sit in his car. He wanted to watch the Maoist leader all
the way back to Balangir.
The rest of the villagers stood at their doors, watching the police team.
Nothing else had been found in any of the other houses. In absolute silence,
the police team started out from Deogan.
Patnaik’s driver, a Gond, drove back. The Maoist leader was silent.
Patnaik was feeling happy.
‘Where are you from, Mishra? I mean, I know you people live in forests,
but where are you from originally? Uttar Pradesh?’
‘Bihar.’
‘I see. And those three? Your … what, junior commanders?’
‘Two are from Andhra Pradesh. The third is from Telangana. They are
my junior officers.’
‘Officers, is it? Ha! And I knew they were from the south.’
Patnaik kept on smiling.
‘A long road, isn’t it?’ he asked.
Mishra looked at him.
 ‘I mean, for you. How many years have you spent away from home?
Must be many,’ said the police officer.
Mishra was quiet.
‘And you must travel so much.’
‘Not much. I would like to travel, but I don’t get to,’ said Mishra.
‘So you just sit in the forest, giving orders, is it? While your men fight
the government? How many people do you have?’
‘We have many people.’
‘But tell me something, Mishra. I am really curious,’ said Patnaik,
twisting in his seat till he was more comfortable. This car wasn’t very big.
Now that he was sure to get a promotion, he would get to travel in better
cars.
‘Tell me something. I know you heard about these Gonds and thought
this was a good chance to spread your war against the government to
Odisha. But have you seen these people? If you beat them up once, they
don’t stand up again. They tried to block the bridge once, and I ordered a
lathi charge. They went back and sat inside their village and never dared to
block the road again. That’s the kind of people they are. Did you see the
looks on the villagers’ faces? You know why they were so quiet?’
‘I wondered about that,’ said Mishra.
‘You did, did you?’ Patnaik could just not stop smiling. ‘They were quiet
because of me. They know me. They see a police uniform, they know what
it means. Me, the Collector, the other officials. We rule this district. The
government’s hand controls everything. Yes, companies come and go; they
do their work. But we stay. And we know these Gonds better than your
fighters and you do. These Gonds, they are not good for anything. They
have their small farms, and they can barely grow enough to feed
themselves. They are not interested in the big world. You can’t get them to
do anything. And you certainly can’t get them to fight. You see?’
 ‘I see.’
‘So what I don’t understand is why you thought you could come here and
make them fight the government. The government, of all things. You know,
every month, I have a number in my head. That is the number of Gonds I
have to arrest. They don’t have to do anything, most of them haven’t really
done anything, but I have to arrest them and put them in jail, and then they
keep going to court and nothing happens. You know why I do that?’
Mishra was silent.
‘Because I have to keep them quiet. Otherwise they will think the
government is weak and they can do whatever they like. And that won’t do,
will it? Now, these villages, all they care about is their hill. So they have
been protesting, and have even gone to the Supreme Court against the mine.
Who would have thought? But now they will understand: you can’t fight the
government. That is, you can fight, but you won’t win.’
Mishra still did not say anything.
The long line of vehicles returned to Deogan and entered the compound
of Patnaik’s office. Patnaik put his arm around Mishra and, holding the rope
tied to the handcuffs, took him inside. A crowd was already beginning to
form outside the office. Those on the streets with nothing to do—and in
Balangir town there were many of them—began looking over each other’s
heads to see what was going on.
Patnaik marched straight to his office, still smiling, while his men
brought in the four arrested Maoists and the Gonds, including the boy.
Patnaik sat on a sofa at the other end of the room and insisted Mishra sit on
another sofa.
‘You are a top leader, so you must sit here,’ said Patnaik. The other three
men and the Gonds, he said, were to sit on the floor. The Gonds did it
without a murmur, because they were used to it, in big offices. The three
men looked at each other and stayed standing. Patnaik glared at them.
 ‘So, good. Everyone here? Excellent. Now we will talk some more, and
meanwhile we will call a press conference. I’m sure some of those TV
people are also in town. They always seem to be. Have you seen my charger
yet?’
The constables said they hadn’t.
‘Okay. So, Mishra, do you have anything …’
The phone rang. Patnaik waved at one of his constables to pick it up.
‘I was saying …’
‘Sir,’ said the constable, ‘It’s Collector sir. He wants to talk to you.’
Patnaik smiled again and walked quickly to the phone.
‘Hello, Behera? Is that you? Listen, there is some good …’
‘No, you listen. Where have you been? Your cellphone was switched
off.’
‘Yes, that. My charger is missing, so the battery died.’
‘I have been trying to contact you for hours. I couldn’t call your officers,
this is too important. And I couldn’t talk about it over the wireless.’
‘Whatever it is, it can wait. You have to know what I did …’
‘No, this is really important. The principal secretary from the ministry of
environment and forests is coming to Balangir today to inspect the area.
You know, for the report to the Supreme Court.’
‘Today? But they should have told us in advance.’
‘They don’t have to. The Supreme Court has asked the ministry for an
independent report, which means they can come and go as they like. It has
nothing to do with us. Anyway, I’m calling to say, I hope the day goes well
and there are no problems. Not even a road accident anywhere in the
district. Everything must be smooth, you understand? Meeting at my office
in an hour. Everyone will be there. Even the jail superintendent. Please
come. We have to make a quick plan. And we have to be good hosts but not
let this fellow think we are doing it because of the report. Although he will
know. He is a senior official. They don’t miss anything. So we have to make
sure this Mishra doesn’t face any problems here.’
There was a very short moment during which Patnaik went deaf. He
couldn’t hear anything, not even the sound of the traffic outside. It was still
winter, but he had started sweating and his mouth had gone dry.
‘What did you say?’ Patnaik whispered.
‘Which part? Haven’t you been listening? I was saying a principal
secretary of …’
‘The man. What did you say his name was?’
‘Mishra. AK Mishra. I just got to know his name this morning. Then I
was trying to call …’
‘I will call you back.’
Patnaik hung up and turned towards the group of arrested men. For some
odd reason, the Gond boy in the corner, a very thin little fellow, was
smiling. The police officer looked at the senior Maoist leader sitting on the
sofa. He too was smiling.
‘Is your name AK Mishra?’
‘Yes.’
‘Principal secretary, environment and forests?’
Mishra continued smiling.
‘From Delhi?’ Patnaik managed to croak. His throat had really gone dry.
Then Mishra held out his cuffed hands.
‘Could you please ask someone to open these?’ he said. ‘They are a bit
tight. And then, I would like your man to give me his camera.’
OceanofPDF.com
 15
MARCH

The bus was late.

Korok still didn’t have a watch, and would probably never own one.
Time was still not a number for him. Time was in the change of seasons, in
the heat of the summer, and the coolness of the rains, the mists of winter.
Time was in the growing of plants and in the colours of flowers, and the
changing leaves of trees. Korok didn’t have a watch, and he didn’t have a
calendar. He had a garden, and that was enough.
But the bus came eventually, as it always did when it was needed. Bishto
hung from the handrail by his one hand, and waved.
Korok was going to Balangir.
Spring had come to Deogan and the rest of the district. A bed of senna
plants, whose seeds Korok had planted last year, had flowered. As the bus
rattled on to town, he thought of weeds. The interesting thing was: what
could be a weed for one gardener could be a plant for another. Weeds did
have their uses, and some gardeners grew them. But there were all kinds of
weeds and the good gardener had to know everything about them.
 Some weeds could be uprooted. Others were so cunning that their roots
wrapped themselves around the roots of other plants, and they couldn’t be
simply uprooted. And some weeds competed with others. So a clever
gardener would sometimes have to wait for a strong weed to eat up all the
weaker weeds, and then uproot the remaining one. A clever gardener knew
how to let the weeds defeat one another.
On that January evening, Korok had thought a lot about weeds, and he
had thought a lot about the government, the Company, the politicians and
police officers and the courts. They were all powerful, rich, educated and
connected. Even the Maoists were powerful. Who was he, after all? Just a
gardener.
So Korok had gone to Jadob with his second, and greatest, idea. He told
Jadob: is the big ministry of forests in Delhi going to send someone to write
a report? Jadob had said, yes, of course. Then Korok said: what if they
could do something so that this big person from Delhi would be made to
realise, personally, what the Gonds had to go through every day?
Jadob had asked what Korok had in mind. The boy had told him: Patnaik
had arrested the headmen for ‘talking’ to Maoists. This meant Patnaik’s
biggest problem, maybe his biggest fear, was if Maoists came to Deogan.
What if the Gonds could use this fear against Patnaik, and make him arrest
the big man from Delhi? This would not only cause a huge embarrassment
to Patnaik, but it was just possible that the big officer from Delhi would go
back and tell the judges what had happened to him. The Gonds had been
facing this for years, but if this time it happened to somebody really
important, perhaps other important people would understand?
The Gonds didn’t have anything to lose, and there was nothing else they
could possibly do anyway. It was all in the hands of the Supreme Court.
At first, Jadob had been afraid of this idea. It was not something he
would have come up with, and he did not think even Patnaik would fall for
it. But Jadob was grateful for Korok’s earlier idea about voting over the
mine, so he decided to listen to the boy. Perhaps, against such powerful
enemies, the Gonds could only win by cunning. And they had talked and
talked about it. About how it could be done, what could go wrong, and how
to make sure nothing went wrong. Jadob finally came up with a detailed
plan, and said it had to start from the jail.
So Korok had gone to Balangir and met his father, and explained
everything to him. Korok’s father, although very worried about the boy, had
listened. He had spent months in jail for something he had not done, while
his village and people were in danger of being uprooted. Here was a chance
to strike back at Patnaik.
Korok’s father had talked with just a few of the many Gonds in jail, those
who could be trusted. Then they had started the rumour that a top Maoist
leader would be coming to Deogan. The rumour had got its own life, and
quickly spread everywhere, even outside the jail. Some of the police
informers did not know the truth. Some of the informers, all Gonds, did
know that it was just a rumour. But the news spread very fast and, in a few
days, so many people were talking about it that Patnaik and his officers
were convinced it was going to happen.
On that eventful January morning, Patnaik’s driver had made sure the
phone battery was low, and the charger would never be found. Patnaik’s
wireless operator was quite ready to not take any message from Collector
Behera. The informer from Deogan was ready to call Patnaik at the last
moment, and make the police rush to the village without getting time to
think. All of them were Gonds. They worked for government money, but
they also believed in the goddess of the hill.
All that was needed was a name. Jadob could not get it from his friends
in Delhi. When Mishra finally arrived in Deogan from Koraput, without the
officials in Balangir getting to know, Jadob got a name. The informer had
called Patnaik, and Patnaik had made the arrest. It was simple, and against
all odds, it worked. Because everybody knew how Patnaik thought, and
what he would do. He had been in Balangir a long time, after all.
 After Mishra got rid of his handcuffs, he quickly seized the camera and
video recording of the arrest. The TV reporters who were standing just
outside were told that there had been ‘an unfortunate misunderstanding’.
Mishra was very polite about it, but he made sure everyone got to know the
details.
The next day had been a disaster for the entire administration of Balangir
district. Every newspaper and TV channel carried a report about how the
Superintendent of Police had arrested a very senior ministry official from
Delhi and accused him of being, of all things, a top Maoist. It was a huge
embarrassment for the police. Collector Behera, who tried to tell anyone
who would listen that he was not involved in the matter at all, was also
criticised. What was he doing, everyone asked, when all this happened?
Mishra, meanwhile, went back to Deogan. He had planned to stay for two
or three days. He stayed a week. He visited every Gond village in the area,
and talked to the headmen. He listened to the stories of the villagers. Not
just the stories of their lives, but also the tales of their people, and their
legends. His junior officers looked at all the documents. Mishra walked up
into Devi Hills. He visited the hanal kot and saw the many pens along the
forest trails. He walked up to the sources of the two streams that flowed
down to the Tel. He walked around to the river. And he even visited
Korok’s garden and had tea with Anchita’s father.
As it turned out, Mishra was interested in gardening himself, and had
many things to discuss with Korok. The ministry official was very
impressed with the garden, and promised he would visit again and stay for a
longer time. He couldn’t take back a medicinal plant as gift, because he was
here on official work, but when he came on holiday, he promised Korok, he
would.
Then Mishra went back to Delhi and, by the end of January, wrote a very
long report for the Supreme Court. And he wrote everything in it. How the
Gonds lived, what their hopes and aspirations were, what they wanted for
themselves. But mainly he wrote about the government in Balangir. He
wrote about how Gonds were repeatedly arrested, and very rarely convicted
of any crime. He submitted numbers and data showing how many Gonds
had police cases against them. He wrote about how the police treated the
villagers. He even wrote about how, according to him, it was very possible
that the Collector of Balangir had falsely written that the Gond villages did
not have a drought problem, just to cause them hardship. And he wrote, at
the end, how the police had falsely accused him of being a Maoist himself,
and arrested him and dragged him in handcuffs back to town.
The Supreme Court judges read the report aloud in court. The
government lawyers did not know where to hide from the embarrassment.
The case was decided long before the judges finished reading the report.
The judges said the Gonds had earned the right to be heard, because clearly
the government had taken away all their rights a long time ago. So the least
the Gonds could get now was the right to vote about the mine.
And so, finally, the Gonds were allowed to decide their own fate. The
Supreme Court appointed a special team to make sure the voting was done
in a fair manner. All kinds of experts and observers were sent to Deogan.
And, in the third week of February, the Gonds came out to vote. They were
to put a tick mark against either of two boxes, ‘yes’ or ‘no’, against two
questions, and then drop the piece of paper in a box. Every single grownup
from twenty villages was there, even the old and the sick.
Jadob met Korok after the court’s order. With tears in his eyes, Jadob
thanked the boy, and apologised because Korok himself, being less than
eighteen, would not be able to vote.
‘You have earned it, you know. You should have been allowed to vote.
You are as grown-up as anybody else, maybe even more, even if the law
does not agree. I am sorry,’ said Jadob.
Korok, who was not used to people crying around him, did not know
what to say. He was happy the villagers would get to vote, and did not much
mind if he didn’t. He would vote when he grew up.
 And the Gonds voted. Every single one of them voted ‘no’ to the first
question: were they willing to leave their villages and settle somewhere
else? And every single Gond voted ‘no’ to the second question: should the
government be allowed to give the land to the Company for a bauxite mine?
And that was where the matter ended. The Supreme Court agreed to the
result of the vote, and wrote stern letters to the governments in Delhi and
Bhubaneshwar to leave the Gonds alone.
But there was more. The Supreme Court also ordered the government of
Odisha to investigate how the police and other officials worked in Balangir,
and to ‘make changes where necessary’. It also asked the government to
check if the Gonds had been unfairly treated during the drought, and to pay
them money for such poor treatment.
Long before this, the fury of the state government had fallen on Patnaik.
He had been immediately suspended the day after he arrested Mishra, and
was now being investigated for corruption, for mistreatment of people in
Balangir, and for a lot of other things. Patnaik and his family had to leave
Balangir quietly, and very quickly.
Collector Behera was gone too. Although he would probably not lose his
job (which Patnaik was almost sure to), Behera was now posted to a
southern district, on the border with Telangana. Korok had been told by
other villagers that there were real Maoists just across the border, so Behera
would not have an easy time there. At least, he would not be able to spend
all summer inside an air-conditioned room.
Korok was going to Balangir now, but not to meet his father. Some things
never change, and although after the Supreme Court’s order most of the
undertrials were sure to be released soon, it had not yet happened. Korok
had waited for so long. He was willing to wait some more.
He got off the bus at Balangir chowk and walked to the office of the
Superintendent of Police. He walked up to the officer sitting outside the
SP’s room, and said he had come to ask about his bicycle.
 Korok was given a document and told to go inside the office. The room
had not changed at all since Korok had last been here, on that day when
Mishra had been arrested. But Patnaik was long gone. The new SP of
Balangir was a much younger man, and he looked up as Korok entered. He
looked at the document, and then he signed it.
‘Here it is. You can take the bicycle.’
Korok turned to go. Patnaik may have gone, but he still did not like to be
near policemen.
‘You are from Deogan, is it?’
Korok nodded.
The new SP stared into the distance for a few moments.
‘I should be visiting it sometime soon. Yes, I should.’
Korok thought it would be better if no policeman ever came to Deogan
again. He walked out of the office and gave the document to the junior
officer, who signed it as well. Then Korok walked out to the lawn, where
his bicycle was standing. He wheeled it out to the street, got on it, and
began pedalling.
It was a long way back to Deogan by bicycle, but he had got it back.
Someday, he would get his father back too.
Korok thought about the events of the past year. He knew a lot about
weeds, and knew that just like weeds, the government, and the Company,
and perhaps even the Maoists, would someday return. They never gave up.
So the Gonds would have to be careful. The only people they could truly
trust, and could rely on always, were themselves. Just as a gardener has to
trust herself among the flower beds.
As he turned in from the main road towards the village, he saw a figure
running towards him in the distance. It was Anchita, and she was shouting
something, and waving. He couldn’t quite hear her words, but she seemed
to be happy. Perhaps the director of Obotar had read their letter, and had
replied. Perhaps he was going to visit Deogan. Wouldn’t that be something?
Maybe he would bring the big blue people with him, who knew?
But a thought occurred to Korok, and made him stop pedalling. What if
Anchita’s mother had made kek again, and wanted him to eat it?
He thought he should turn around and pedal away. Now that he had the
bicycle, Anchita would never be able to catch up with him and drag him
back.
But where could he go? This was his village. And this was his garden. He
would always stay here, and never leave. Not even to avoid kek.
OceanofPDF.com
Siddhartha Sarma is an author and journalist based in Delhi. His first teen
novel The Grasshopper's Run won the Crossword Book Award and the
Sahitya Akademi Award for Children's Literature. His other books include
the travelogue East Of The Sun and two works of non-fiction: 103 Journeys,
Voyages, Trips and Stuff and 103 Historical Mysteries, Puzzles,
Conundrums and Stuff. He hopes to have a garden of his own someday.

OceanofPDF.com
 THE BEGINNING
Let the conversation begin…
Follow the Penguin Twitter.com@penguinIndia

Keep uptodate with all our stories YouTube.com/penguinindia

Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your Pinterest

Like ‘Penguin Books’ on Facebook.com/PenguinIndia

Find out more about the author and
discover more stories like this at Penguin.co.in

OceanofPDF.com
 DUCKBILL BOOKS
USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia
New Zealand | India | South Africa | China | Southeast Asia
Duckbill Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be
found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
Published by Penguin Random House India Pvt. Ltd
7th Floor, Infinity Tower C, DLF Cyber City,
Gurgaon 122 002, Harayana, India

First published by Duckbill Books 2018

Copyright © Siddhartha Sarma 2018

All rights reserved

This digital edition published in 2020.
eISBN: 978-0-143-49775-2
www.penguin.co.in

OceanofPDF.com