As their numbers grew, however, so did the tourists’ boredom, and that’s when the nuisance started. The cellphone network was almost non-existent and so was the Internet. Electricity, they discovered, was optional, so they were left to fill their time in other ways. They would pop up in people’s fields with questions and cameras or disturb some harmless old fellow taking a bath at the river. They even walked over the mahji’s potato fields in the dark. A few went up the hill, smoked marijuana and disturbed some pens on the other side of the peak. This incident caused a bit of an uproar, although the Gonds behaved with a great deal of dignity and those particular young people left.

The only person immune to the dangers of these tourists was, not surprisingly, Bishto. The more sensitive among them, after a single journey or two on his bus, wisely decided it was not good for their bones or stomachs, and either got bicycles or hitched rides on trucks to Balangir. Over time, realising Balangir was little better than Deogan from their point of view, they stopped visiting the town much and limited themselves to walking around the neighbouring villages. To add to the mahji’s woes was his fear that someone would go swimming without knowing how to and drown, but that, at least, did not happen. This was of little comfort to the mahji who by then had become a committed pessimist.

Some decided to help the villagers whether they wanted to or not. Korok had an endless stream of tourists watching him catch his chickens or search for their eggs. A few tried their hand at cooking with firewood in his kitchen, laughing between coughs at what, for them, was a funny experiment. They tried to live on local produce and drove the trader insane asking for food brands he had never heard of. Some went native and drank well water. Not blessed with the iron stomach Gonds have, they usually got dysentery and left.

A few got together and decided to teach the children of the neighbouring villages at the schoolhouse. The way they did this was no less odd. They got everyone of different ages and made them sit together in the yard. Korok himself was half-abducted while walking out of the epho’s garden and taken to school.

There, it turned out none of the young men and women knew how to write in Odia. So they settled for English letters. One among them was elected for this task. Two days later, he got a phone call from his mother in a city in western India and packed his bags. He said his mother had told him to get a job. Yet another, the loudest among them, also received a phone call and left for another country on behalf of an international organisation that worked with poor children. Korok went back to his garden.