
On September 2 last year Jebanti and her two-year-old
daughter started the longest journey of their lives. In Kumbharigan, her
village in Odisha’s Kandhamal district, a place of aching beauty ringed by the
Eastern Ghats, in the stranglehold of poverty since forever, hope was precious.
Not yet 18, Jebanti could afford it; she had the impossible optimism of the
young. Her brother Jeetendra Uthansingh, one of 11 siblings, came with her.
They took an overcrowded autorickshaw from Kumbharigan