‘She is clearly not a Gond, and goes to school. She is dressed better, so she is from a well-off family. And she is from a big city. People like her move differently. Anyone can see that. How is her father?’

‘The DFO? He is useless.’

Which meant Anchita’s father was an honest man who would be of no use to Patnaik or Behera.

‘He must keep getting transferred,’ said Ghosh.

‘He does.’

On seeing Patnaik’s car, Korok immediately wanted to go back across the bridge, but Anchita refused. She was poking the dried mud on the side of the road.

‘We are not running away. And I will climb down to the river and look for crabs,’ she said.

‘You won’t find any crabs in the riverbank at this time. It is too dry. They are all hiding underwater.’

Korok was still getting used to the fact that Anchita knew next to nothing about the natural world.

‘What will you do with a crab if you catch it?’ he asked.

‘I don’t want to catch it. I will take a picture of it with my phone, and then I will make a drawing.’

Korok didn’t know why she wanted to draw a crab.

‘If you could, what would you draw?’ she asked. ‘No, wait. I know. You would only draw flowers.’

But Korok kept glancing at Patnaik’s car, and Anchita knew he was afraid. And she was starting to get angry. Her right hand was digging inside the pocket of her jeans, trying to find a chewing gum she was sure she had with her. She popped it inside her mouth and started chewing it.

‘I want to go back to the village.’

‘We are not going back, Korok. I will show you how I deal with these things.’

And before Korok could say anything, she had crossed the road and approached Patnaik’s side of the vehicle.

‘You are not supposed to be here,’ she told him.

Patnaik didn’t know how exactly to respond to this. First, he hadn’t expected the girl to walk right up and talk to him like this. Second, now it seemed everyone in the district, even the children, knew he had been told to stay away from the bridge. The mighty Superintendent of Police of Balangir had fallen on hard times.

‘Is that how your parents taught you to talk to your elders?’ was the best he could manage, and even he knew it was very weak. So he tried again.

‘Does your father allow you to walk around with these Gonds?’

Both questions were absolutely the last things Anchita wanted to hear. And because she hated ‘your father’ and ‘allow you’ together in any sentence, she simply ignored Patnaik and stared at Ghosh.

‘And who is your new friend? A surveyor? A miner? I have never seen him before,’ she said.

‘And I haven’t seen you before either,’ said Ghosh, very quietly.