“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.

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.