Anima enters the wadi, managing the container of suralichya vadya carefully so they don’t go to pieces. Children of all sizes are playing on the mud path leading into the wadi. Men have rolled up their vests over their stomachs to let in the air. Women in maxis fan themselves with squares of folded scrap paper and make soft shooshing noises to feel cooler. They sit untidily in the doorways of their squat, tin-roofed, single-room homes, half their attention on the noisy children and half on their dinners cooking on improvised three-brick chulahs fired with wood shavings. Rice bubbles and crackles on one chulah, dal on another. A young girl in a salwar kameez angrily beats dough into large, thick bhakris and slaps them on to an iron griddle on a third fire. In the split second that she allows her attention to wander to the gold border of Anima’s sari passing by, the tip of a finger gets seared on the griddle. ‘Oh shit!’ she spits out. Anima looks back startled. A woman sitting in a nearby doorway howls with laughter. ‘Her father’s put her in an English-medium school, see? But her mother’s in hospital so the fancy miss has to make bhakris.’ The girl throws the woman a venomous look and beats out the next bhakri with even greater fury. The eater of that bhakri is going to end up with a stomach ache, Anima thinks, and stubs her toe on a stone.

‘Watch it,’ a voice emerges from the dark shadows on the right. Ramprasad clicks his tongue sympathetically from his seat under the banyan tree. ‘This is the exact place where a coconut this large dropped off that tree on a visitor’s head,’ he says, speaking in his UP Hindi. ‘That was in ’55 when there were three times as many coconut trees here than you see now. Fellow died on the spot. He was right there where you are, standing one minute, down the next.’

Anima makes yes-yes noises and slips away, with Ramprasad’s voice in hot pursuit. ‘There was no electricity in these parts then. The wadi was full of Bhandaris’ huts, toddy tappers . . .’

Anima rings Haridas’s doorbell. That is, she pulls at the rope hanging by the door releasing a rich, melodious tinkle within. Haridas has had the bell cast by a Bastar tribal in bell metal. Marli opens the door. She’s dressed in vivid colours—a salwar kameez of large floral print, shiny, coloured clips in oil-slicked hair tied with a bright-pink nylon ribbon bow topped by three clusters of blazing gulmohr flowers. Marli’s face is a wide grin as she steps aside to let Anima in. Anima gives her a playful pat on the head and hands over the suralichya vadya to her.