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?