![]() But his eyes were on the dancers: wasn’t that girl in the red sari the one who had come with baskets of wild hibiscus that she had flung carelessly into a corner of his factory floor? And that man who was dancing with his arm around her waist, wasn’t he one of the honey-collectors? It was hard to tell, with their new saris and dhotis, the flowers in their hair, the beads flying out from necks, the firelight. ![]() His kurta and dhoti were an austere white, his waistcoat a lawyerly black. He had smoked a pipe all evening and held one polite leaf cup of toddy that he had only pretended to sip. His long nose struck out, arrow-like, beneath deep-set eyes. The drums, the monotonous twanging of a stringed instrument, and loud singing obliterated the sounds of the forest.Ī man with a thin, frown-creviced face topped by dark hair combed back from his high forehead sat as still as a stone image in their midst, in a chair that still had its arms but had lost its backrest. Smoke curled from cooking fires and tobacco. Men in loincloths and women in saris had begun to dance barefoot, kicking up dust. ![]() ![]() In the warm glow of fires that lit the clearing at the centre of straw-roofed mud huts, palm-leaf cups of toddy flew from hand to hand. ![]()
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