These young people were there because they were concerned. This concern of theirs was a little vague. They seemed to Korok to be concerned about everything and at the moment the Gonds seemed to be on top of their list. Like the proverbial butterfly, they flitted from issue to issue. Like the butterfly, they travelled light and were curious.

All of this would not have been a bother if it hadn’t been for how these tourists thought of the world. First, a lot of them had arrived with some kind of idea that a little village was being besieged by a big company and there was a physical fight going on. Anchita and her mother one evening showed Korok an illustrated book written in English, which they said was very funny. It showed colourful and strange-looking people fighting what they said were other strange-looking soldiers dressed in metal armour and skirts. On the first page of this book, Korok was shown a map of a village surrounded by four tents. He was told this was some kind of army besieging the village and the whole thing was supposed to be so funny that Anchita and her mother laughed just talking about it.

The young people who descended on the village seemed to have a similar idea about Deogan, so they were a little disappointed when, by the time they were in large enough numbers towards the middle of July, neither the police nor the Company’s men had made an appearance. The flower was wilting and the butterflies got restless.

But there were others among these tourists who were so odd that Korok thought they were making fun of him. One morning, when he was waiting for Bishto’s bus to take him to Balangir to his father, a group of men and women came marching up the road. A little breathless and dusty—they didn’t seem to be in good health—they asked him where the dam was. Poor Korok had no idea what dam they were talking about, so they left him and went farther up the road. He later saw them camped at a field near Deogan. They must have gotten over their disappointment at not finding a dam but a proposed mine instead.