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.