In the yard in front and to the left of the office were the various odds and ends that the policemen brought there in the course of keeping the law around Balangir and the villages of the district. A bundle of tendu leaves, which are used to wrap beedis, was lying in the sun. A small coop with three thin chickens, probably seized after a village dispute. Half-a-dozen logs of rotting timber, sal timber too, very valuable. These must have been seized from real timber smugglers, but it must have been a long time ago, because their outer bark had fallen off and rain and sun had made the sal wood red like the back of ants. And in the middle of the yard, Korok’s father’s bicycle.

When Korok’s father was arrested, he had been on his bicycle, with a bundle of potatoes from his field which he was carrying to Deogan’s weekly market. In a fit of efficiency that Balangir police were never known for, they had put him in their jeep and gone off … and come back to pick up the bicycle and the potatoes.

The potatoes had been tried and sentenced to be eaten by the policemen, but while Korok’s father waited for the court to decide whether he was innocent or not, his bicycle was in jail at the police station.

Every week when Korok came to meet his father he would see the bicycle with its faded brown seat in the police station yard. Once he saw a constable riding it down the street.

Every once in a while, he would come to the police station to ask if it could be released, since the police did not need it, and his father couldn’t use it, but he could.

Inside the room of the officer-in-charge sat two Gonds on a wooden bench. They were from some other village and seemed to be here to settle a dispute, because they were not looking at each other and wouldn’t allow anyone else to share the bench with them so they could be pushed closer. Perhaps the dispute was over the three chickens in the coop outside. Korok stood on either leg for a few minutes and then crouched on his haunches.

An hour or so passed before the officer-in-charge, an inspector, made his appearance with great speed from another room, sitting behind his desk and flipping rapidly the pages of the biggest book Korok had ever seen in his life, not that he had seen many. This was the Daily Diary, the holy scripture of a police station, where every incident, complaint or action by the policemen was to be recorded.

Not all of what they did was recorded, of course, such as what happened to Korok’s father’s potatoes. They might have been important to Korok, or his father, but not for the police station. But the book was the Key, the Life of the station.