And then, around late morning, the big leader from Delhi arrived in a whirl of dust and greetings in a big convoy. Just behind him, Anchita saw from her perch inside her house and later told Korok, were TV crews in their special vans. Thus Deogan was noticed by the outside world in a big way for the first time.

The leader gave a speech from the stage near the mahji’s house, although the villagers’ opinion remained divided on what it was about. Half of what he spoke, being in Hindi, was a little difficult for the assembled Gonds to understand. The other half of his speech, said some who knew of these matters, the great leader did not himself understand. But it was entertainment for the young people. Most of the old Gonds, having seen this before, mysteriously vanished and did not reappear in Deogan till the evening.

Korok, being under the eagle eye of his pinstriped friends inside his house, missed all this. A while later, a huge crowd washed up his lane, trailed by cameras, and the leader came to his house. It was the fourth or the fifth he had visited by then at Deogan. This time, the guides and speakers were the local leaders of Balangir, because with the coming of the television cameras, the pinstriped gentlemen and ladies had vanished like the Gond elders.

The leader was shown around the house and told Korok’s mother was no more. He smiled in a distant, fixed way at Korok and nodded at the local leaders’ words. He was one of nature’s odd ones: he had the sort of face that on camera appeared much younger than he was. Standing close to him, Korok could see the wrinkles around his eyes and the greying stubble.

The new plates in the kitchen were brought out under the eye of the television cameras, and the leaders, big and little, ate some of the rotis with the vegetables. Korok even got to ladle water into a new aluminium tumbler for the big leader, who asked him questions, which the locals translated. Not very difficult questions, mainly on the lines of whether he went to school and so on. When Korok said the school was closed, something must have been lost in translation because the leader’s smile and nods stayed unchanged.

And then, the tide of humans swept away up the lane. Some of the television crews stayed on and asked Korok some questions in Odia. They asked him what he thought of the bauxite mine project. Then they, too, left.