Blackwell Reference Online

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… and when the colonial government took away the entire forest of the Korku tribe to build the colonial railways, the Korkus were driven to cultivating rocky fields that could never grow enough to feed them. They grew feeble, and slowly the Sickle Cell anaemia hidden in their genes surfaced. Children started dying even before they became adults. Not knowing how to save their children, the Korkus erected a hut outside the village; and the children who were close to death were sent there to wait for the ancestors to take them away. Mahadu was the last Korku child. As he waited, with hunger as vast as an ocean in his belly, he heard a whistle, a train whistle. He ran to the railway track, and smelt in it the forests of the ancestors. As the train was passing by, he jumped on to it. Soon he was in a place called Bombay. There he saw, after so many months, food! And he ate, he ate everything that he saw, food, houses, shops, towers, the courts and the university. With so much food, Mahadu grew tall, his head almost reached the sky. He was thirsty too. He bent down, and in a single gulp drank the entire Arabian sea. Then he stood again, lifted and stretched his arms, plucked the stars in the sky, and, in strange alphabets made of stars, started writing the story of the Korkus again.     (From an oral tale told by Mahasweta Devi to the adivasi children at the Adivasi Academy in 1999, before ... log in or subscribe to read full text