Poda
Poda was born in the hot season of 33 AD in the uplands west of the Mahanadi, in the interior of Kalinga. Regional rulers shifted, and for villagers, power arrived as collectors, armed escorts, and occasional raids. His people spoke an eastern Indo-Aryan vernacular and kept household and village cults: a clay lamp at dusk, rice and flowers placed at a village shrine, and offerings to ancestors at the compound’s edge.
His mother, Malli, died in childbirth. The household did not break apart. It was a joint compound with his father Bhola, Bhola’s mother Masu, a co‑resident uncle Kalu, and children who came and went between chores. Poda’s first sister, Chelli, had died as an infant years earlier. Another sister, Ponna, stayed alive long enough to be remembered. When Poda was small, Ponna carried him on her hip while Masu cooked and Bhola drove goats out to the scrubby grazing. Ponna died in 35, after days of loose stool and then a fever that left her too tired to sit up. Masu washed the girl and set out a small mound of cooked grain and sesame near the ancestor place. After that, Masu watched Poda closely. She corrected how he held a bowl, how he stepped over the threshold, how he washed before offerings. She did not like noise.
Two older brothers were names in the household’s telling more than faces: Bakku, born in 30, had died at birth; the family kept his memory with a small yearly offering. Nonu, born in 28, lived long enough to teach Poda work. Nonu showed him how to read a herd without numbers: the kinked horn, the white patch above an eye, the goat that limped when it was tired. Nonu died in 42 at fourteen, after a wet season when men came back from the low ground shaking with chills. Poda stopped asking to sleep outside after that.
Dandula, born in 31, was the brother who fed Poda and watched over him. He was quick to seize a stick and quicker to take the first share of curds. He also made sure Poda ate when he forgot, and he pulled him back from a swollen stream once after a sudden spate. Their youngest brother, Vasu, arrived in 36. Vasu talked easily, laughed with the other boys, and copied bird calls while they watched goats. Poda stayed quieter. He liked the early part of morning when the air still held coolness and the animals moved without balking.
Bhola’s work kept the household fed. He herded cattle and goats, made ghee when milk was plenty, and traded hides and curds through village connections that also tied them to artisans and service groups. He expected his sons to follow his paths and his rules. Poda did. He rose before the others, checked the tether knots, and counted animals with pebbles in his palm. He could not learn letters when a wandering scribe’s helper offered to show them, and he could not hold long sums in his head without losing track. So he leaned on routines. The same route. The same resting stones. The same waterholes.
When Poda was in his late teens, levy demands arrived more often. Armed men with spears and short swords accompanied collectors. They took grain, milk products, and sometimes animals, and they required carts and men to move supplies. Poda learned to keep his head down when strangers asked questions. He also learned to drink. Fermented palm liquor appeared at festivals and after long days when men came back from obligations. He started taking more than his share, then sought it out even when there was no festival. It made him loud. It made him easy to anger when someone laughed at him.
Masu died in 52. The strictest voice in the compound vanished, and Poda began spending more evenings with a small group of men near the edge of the grazing, passing a pot and trading complaints about collectors and boundaries. A trader named Malu, who worked the periodic market a day’s walk away, sometimes sat with them and listened more than he spoke. Malu teased Poda about his careful knotting—“you tie as if the rope is your child”—and Poda bristled, then laughed because the line was true.
Bhola arranged Poda’s marriage in 53. His wife, Kanni, came from a nearby village and brought a small dowry of pots, cloth, and a brass bangle. She had a sharp eye for stores and a steady hand with a sick child. Poda did not charm her. He worked. He kept animals alive through bad forage. He returned on time when he said he would. Kanni accepted those things and built a household around them.
Their first surviving son, Dandu, was born in 55. A daughter, Podi, followed in 60. Between and after them, infants died—Tattu in 57 and Bira in 62—each time after a brief sickness that turned the skin cold. Kanni’s grief came out as silence. Poda drank more after the first death, then tried to hide it after the second by staying out with the herd until night.
Bhola became frail in 60. His legs swelled, his breathing turned noisy, and he could not walk to the grazing. Poda took the role no one thanked him for. He washed his father, fed him thin gruel, and kept flies off his face with a whisk of leaves. Dandula and Kalu handled disputes and outside talk; Poda handled the body in the corner of the compound. When Bhola soiled himself, Poda cleaned it without comment, then washed and made a small offering at the ancestor place: water poured from a pot, a pinch of rice, a lamp lit low.
In 62, on a droving route used by armed retainers, Poda and another herdsman came upon the aftermath of a raid. Bodies lay where a hut had been. A captive, hands tied, knelt while a guard struck him and demanded names. Poda watched from behind scrub with others, then turned away. On the walk back he refused to camp near the road and insisted on traveling close to villages, even if it meant worse grazing.
Bhola died in 64. The compound reorganized under Kalu’s authority, and Poda began thinking about leaving. In 66 a neighbor named Jaya accused Poda’s group of taking a goat and pushing animals onto forbidden grazing. Words turned to shoving. Poda swung his staff and hit Jaya hard enough to knock him down. Jaya lay bruised and could not work for days. Elders gathered, with Nila speaking for the council and Kalu standing at Poda’s side. The settlement required compensation: a small animal and dairy goods delivered publicly. Poda complied. He did not apologize in words, but he walked the compensation to Jaya’s yard himself.
The assault narrowed his options at home. Vasu died in 71, from a fever that started as a cough and ended with blood. He had been Poda’s companion on grazing trips, the one who talked easily with strangers while Poda counted animals.
That same year Poda moved with Kanni and Dandu to another village deeper within Kalinga, closer to a periodic market and better pasture. Malu had connections there—a cousin who managed grazing land—and offered work droving cattle and goats between villages and market days. The move meant leaving the compound where Poda had grown up, but staying meant being the man who had beaten Jaya. Dandula died the next year, worn out at forty-one from years of hard walking and bad water. Poda had grown up under Dandula’s commands, and now both brothers who had shaped his working life were gone.
Poda could not write, so he kept his own tally by touch and sight. At every stop he lined animals up and recited markings aloud. People began handing him animals to move because they came back. He took satisfaction in returning a stray goat that had mixed into his drove; he made the owner identify it by a scar and then led it home.
From 77 onward, wet-season fevers returned each year. They left him exhausted, with aches in his joints that made long walking painful. Word came that Kalu had died back at the old compound in 78; Poda did not return for the rites, but he poured water at his own threshold and spoke the name aloud. After a hard monsoon he stayed closer to the village, sending Dandu on longer routes. He tried to keep control by laying out instructions: which waterhole first, which trees to avoid because spirits were said to sit there, which elder to greet with a gift of curds. Dandu followed most of it and ignored the parts he thought were fear.
Kanni fell ill in 85 with a cough that did not end. Her chest rattled. She could not keep food down. Poda stopped traveling. He arranged herbal decoctions from Budhi the healer, kept a pot of warm gruel ready, and paid neighbors with milk to fetch water and firewood. During those months he drank less, not from virtue but because his days were full and he feared being shamed if she died while he was drunk. Kanni recovered slowly, though her breath stayed short and her cough never fully cleared.
Podi had married in 78 and moved to a village two days’ walk away. She visited when she could and sent small gifts of cloth with traders heading home.
Dandu died in 88, taken by the same wet-season fevers that had plagued Poda for years. He was thirty-three. Poda sat by the body through the night and did not drink, then drank for three days after the cremation. With Dandu gone, the herd shrank to what an old man and his wife could manage with hired help.
Podi died in 89, leaving behind news carried by a messenger and then by Kanni’s relatives. Two deaths in two years. Poda went quiet for days and then returned to the drinking pot.
In late 93, during the cooler months, Poda caught a respiratory sickness that tightened his chest and filled his throat. Kanni kept him inside the compound and fed him thin broth. Neighbors helped when she could not lift him. He died on December 7. The household carried him to a cremation place outside the village, and afterward placed rice and flowers at the ancestor spot in the yard.