Around this time, one of them gave Korok a t-shirt with the face of a young bearded man on it. He wore it for some time till it had become as ragged as the rest of his clothes. This man seemed to be very popular among the tourists. Korok even saw his face on a mug one of them carried everywhere.

Not all of these tourists were totally clueless. Some, to give them credit, were really concerned about mines and tribes. But even these few did not know much about the people they were living among. And they had other work, other places to go. They brought their flags and banners and posters of famous men and women. They brought their organisational skills. They did their street theatre in languages neither Korok nor the other villagers understood, on issues which did not always concern Gonds. Some stayed on and behaved. Some got sick as the land got drier.

Over time, the tourists mostly left. Only a handful of the most committed remained when Sorkari Patnaik returned to Deogan.

For weeks, he had been lying low and waiting for the right moment. He had not been allowed to enter the villages in his own district, and he never forgave the Gonds for what he saw as an insult. He watched the politicians come and go from Deogan. He waited for revenge.

8

AUGUST

If he had known how bad the roads in western Odisha were, he would have asked for a helicopter. Not that he would have got it. Ghosh had taken a chopper from Raipur, the Chhattisgarh state capital, to a small helipad owned by the Company near one of their mines on the Odisha border, from where he had gone ahead in a small convoy of SUVs to Balangir. Not comfortable, but his work took him mostly to such places.

Ghosh was what everybody called him. Very few knew his first name, and nobody dared to be so familiar with him that they would ask.

The convoy was for show, because nobody travelled without one in eastern Chhattisgarh’s Maoist areas. Ghosh didn’t even think twice about Maoists on his journey. He knew how to deal with them. He had dealt with a lot of people with guns.

If, in real life, people looked like who they were inside, Sorkari Patnaik would have an evil moustache. But Ghosh would look like a super-villain. But since this rarely happens in real life, Ghosh looked like an absent-minded professor. He had spent the previous year in a hot African country and grown a beard for it, so he looked even more like a teacher, and ‘medium’ was a good way to describe him: medium height, normal weight, hair now going salt-and-pepper. A bit sunburnt from all his travels.