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Entry 5

Posted Friday, March 29, 2002, at 11:45 AM ET

Lincoln Kaye has been writing and teaching in Asia for 24 years, including six years in India. His China memoir, Cousin Felix Meets the Buddha, will be published later this year.

A couple of hours' biking and hiking bring us to Markabela village just about at nightfall. Pandey's dinner premonitions at this afternoon's cockfight ring turn out to be spot-on; as soon as we reach his cousin-in-law's house, our host snatches up a passing chicken by the legs and casually dashes its brains out. He squats by the courtyard cookfire, chatting affably as he plucks the feathers and singes the carcass.

Shyam blanches. A Tamil brahmin by birth, he's overcome his vegetarian conditioning enough to face Silicon Valley sushi in the course of his software career, but this is a bit much. To buck him up, Pandey pours a round of distilled mahua-flower wine. Before he can dish out seconds, a neighbor kid announces that someone's turned up in the village looking for us.

It turns out to be Yusuf, the Narayanpur computer teacher. After our earlier call, the state infotech department had tracked him down to his home and sent him out to find us. Asking around, he'd retraced our whole day's peregrinations all the way to here just to offer us an interview.

After less than a year of operation, it's still too early to see much tangible result from his training program, he admits. "But maybe it'll get good in awhile, once the government irons out the initial kinks."

Like what? Well, he and his four partners have yet to see any of the 600,000 rupees they're owed to date in salaries and equipment outlays for the five refurbished PCs they've supplied to the school. Such is the life of a sub-subcontractor in these days of "public-private partnership."

Pandey keeps appearing at the fence to wordlessly remind us that dinner is ready. Nobody's invited Yusuf—they seem unnerved by his sudden arrival and his starchy white shirt—so we have no choice but to send him off on his long road home.

We return to the fireside to find our leaf-plates heaped with broiled drumsticks and giblet stew. As a special treat, we're offered a side dish of buffalo jerky marinated in fermented shrimp paste. I gnaw my way through a nugget. Shyam politely declines, but avails himself of the mahua. Thus fortified we're ready to visit the local gotul, a kind of club house where village youth cohabit from the onset of puberty until they're ready to marry.

Outside apostles of "uplift"—Christian and Hindu missionaries, meddlesome officials, even some PWG guerrillas—dismiss gotuls as hotbeds of promiscuity. Anthropologists credit them for the democratic tribal ethos and the relatively high status of Abhujmari women. "It's where our girls and boys practice living together as grown-ups," Pandey sums up.

Tonight's gotul dancing is already in full swing by the time we approach the circle of torchlight. Turbaned boys whirl about an outer ring, wailing on transverse log drums or laptop kettle tambourines. In the inner ring, flower-bedecked girls shuffle slowly to the accompaniment of bronze castanets. The beat accelerates and then fragments into complex interlocking rhythms.

A "buffalo" bursts into the ring, portrayed by a pair of dancers under a calico sheet, with a quartet of clownish hunters bumbling after him. Soon the japes turn serious, though; the animal dies, but not before goring one of his pursuers. The survivors mourn, then swig heavily from their shoulder-gourds, then go into a trance. The drums crescendo, the women wail, and the dancers twitch in a frenzy, as though truly possessed. Finally the stricken hunter revives. So does the buffalo. Exeunt omnes.

Drained by this drama, we conk out around Lakshman's cookfire and don't open our mahua-heavy eyes until first light. That leaves us just four hours to hike out and motorcycle the 120 bone-jarring kilometers to the district headquarters in Jagdalpur in time for the daily video-conference at noon.

We go into the studio just a few minutes late, only to find the room all but empty. Flanked by her two children, a village woman complains that her bigamist husband has reneged on a promise of divorce. Onscreen from Raipur, five mid-level "general administration" bureaucrats huddle around a conference table nodding gravely. They promise to "look into it."

Not much of a drama, compared with last night's buffalo hunt. Yet today is relatively lively, assistant district collector Nirmal Xaxa assures us, watching from the sidelines. Often, nobody shows up at all.

How come? "Well, they're shy, these tribals. And they don't really understand fixed timings like a daily video-conference hour. Plus, even when they do come, they mostly bring up petty problems that are best handled locally. Nothing that really requires Raipur's attention."

But didn't we only yesterday hear this vexed story about mass evictions for a steel plant?

"Oh, that's different. Politically motivated. I'm talking about real people."

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Entry 5

Posted Friday, March 29, 2002, at 11:45 AM ET
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Lincoln Kaye has been writing and teaching in Asia for 24 years, including six years in India. His China memoir, Cousin Felix Meets the Buddha, will be published later this year.
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