The cracks were all over the media. Every day she read a new story with updated numbers about her sinking town atop a mountain in Chamoli district. Media persons kept pouring into the villages to gaze at the cracks, and at the protests welling across towns. She had refused to move out of her small house last week when they came asking people to leave their houses Let them kick her out. She was not afraid.
The cracks were more of a sign, she thought, of a strange greed that had tunnelled its way through the village. The new projects and roads that kept invading the mountains were not the only invasions. There was something else, far deeper, that was wrong with the world. The divide was in place already. They had cut themselves off from nature, from the gods of the earth, while chasing a new dream dangling from a mountain vine. That vine though was magical. In pursuit of that illusion, who was to be blamed?
