The Thief

They intrude even into his kitchen, hunting. Now they loot fruits, nuts, spices, herbs, honey-combs… Yet he tells them about a *Black Vasa’s medicinal miracle. They come again, strip the forest of the flora and fauna and construct resorts and duplexes. He’s driven away like a mongoose. On the top of a bare hill, he hunches with an empty stomach-pot. As he takes some rice from their sack, they collar him and beat him brutally, calling THIEF! Media cook his corpse. Remember he was an Adivasi, the original inhabitant, yet he’d to live muted in a desert within the forest. *Black Vasa – a medicinal plant used in the treatment of arthritis, asthma etc. First printed in The Literary Hatchet