Year of the Weeds by Siddhartha Sarma

Author:Siddhartha Sarma [Sarma Siddhartha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143497752
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2020-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

It was a short while after the two big leaders came and went that the tourists appeared. If the leaders were a brief respite of circus and comedy for the Gonds, the tourists were, in one word, a nuisance.

These were not the usual kind of tourists who visit places and such, take pictures and occasionally leave litter behind. These were political tourists. Unlike the big leaders from Delhi, they did not arrive in a rush and with fanfare. They arrived singly or in small groups, over days. Some had even arrived before the big politicians.

They were young and tended to look similar. The men had wispy beards and wore clean new t-shirts with drawings or English words which Korok could not read, but Anchita could and she said some of them were funny. Some had long hair, other had shaved heads.

They were from big cities across the country and had similar intense looks on their faces. They had heard of the Gonds and the mine and were there to protest, among other things. They came by road, by train and some, Korok was told wonderingly by other villagers, even by air. Imagine, people travelling by aeroplane to visit Deogan.

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.

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