Jadob mastor, from a Gond village across the Tel, was also present. Jadob was a celebrity in these parts. According to Korok’s father, he was the brightest Gond in a long, long time. Jadob had been lucky to go to school, and luckier that back then, about fifteen years ago, the schoolteacher had not run away. So Jadob studied till high school, and according to village tales, was so bright he got a scholarship to the government school at Balangir.

So far it was a happy story. It took a turn for pure fantasy when Jadob also got a government scholarship to study at a college in Cuttack. This fact alone made it certain that every single Gond child born after him would be compared, in intelligence or whatever made someone good at studies, with Jadob.

At Cuttack, Jadob studied and studied. Then, to the dismay of Odias who had heard of him, he returned to his village instead of getting a job in Bhubaneshwar or Cuttack. His schoolteacher had retired and there had been no one to replace him, so Jadob became a teacher at a school on the other side of the river. But he also spent a lot of time working with the Gonds to solve their problems. Over the last four years, he had helped villages on the other side of the Tel to build an earth-and-stone embankment along the river. They had quietly done all the work and just informed the government at the end that the Tel would not be flooding them again during the rains. When there was a big problem, you went to Jadob mastor.

This evening, the mahji’s big problem was he was expected to make a speech, so he happily passed that responsibility to Jadob and sat on his threshold. Jadob kept it short. He told the crowd that the sorkar wanted to dig up the hill for a mine and send them away. He said not only was the hill more important than any mine, the hill was also protected as a forest area by the sorkar itself, by an old Act made more than ninety years ago. The Gond headmen had not been told of this mine. It was wrong, and even worse, it was being done too fast. Jadob was clearly suspicious and said the village leaders should ask the sorkar to explain properly.

At this Korok, seated towards the back as always, saw the headmen, grey-haired old Gonds all of them, nodding their heads and saying they should meet Collector Behera himself at Balangir. Someone said the Collector’s man, fat Rath, had already visited them in the afternoon. Jadob made a rude remark about Rath and how he was just a clueless man who did whatever the Collector told him to. The villagers laughed, remembering the many times fat Rath had visited them with some brilliant sorkari scheme or the other that always failed.