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.