Lin’s arrival in Sunder village is the moment a journey toward Prabaker’s home becomes a public encounter with a whole community. Expected as an unfamiliar foreigner and watched by hundreds, Lin first meets the crowd’s astonishment with a comic performance: a souvenir jester’s cap, bells, and a wag of the head turn wary silence into laughter and welcome.

The journey to the village

Before reaching Sunder, Lin and Prabaker travel by ox-cart with Prabaker’s father, Kishan Mango Kharre. The slow cart moves along a track bordered by crops, while villagers peer through the maize, corn, and millet and hurry ahead to spread word of the visitors. Kishan drives from the ox’s yoke, using a bamboo stick with a nail at its end; his frequent blows make the journey’s progress steady but punishingly slow. Lin tries to intercede on the animal’s behalf, but Kishan’s treatment grows more forceful afterward.

The road also gives the visitors an early glimpse of the practical hardship surrounding village life. Prabaker explains that well water usually comes for an hour at two in the afternoon, but sometimes flows for only half an hour or not at all. On those days, people scrape the green material from the surface of the water remaining in the well. The account places the welcome that follows against conditions in which even access to water is unreliable.

Kishan is introduced on the cart’s ox-bow yoke, smoking a beedie. He is a small, grey-haired farmer with a short moustache and a prominent paunch, dressed in a white cap, cotton kurtah, and dhoti. As the group nears the village, concern over the presents for Prabaker’s family briefly shapes the trip: the gifts are laid out beside the track and repacked into a bag intended for the family, then secured behind Kishan on the cart’s harness for the final leg.

A village gathers

The last turn brings the cart into Sunder along a broad street of swept, pressed golden river sand. Round mud houses with curved doors, round windows, and small domes of thatched grass line the street, arranged so that no house faces another directly across it. Women’s and children’s excited voices announce the visitors before they come into view.

Sunder has about two hundred residents, but word of the foreigner’s arrival draws hundreds more from neighboring villages. The gathering numbers about six hundred. The crowd presses close around Lin and the luggage at his feet, fixing him with stares and whispers; for a moment, nobody speaks. Prabaker is pleased by the attention his guest brings him, yet even he is awed by the tightly packed crowd and the force of its curiosity.

Prabaker explains why Lin’s presence has drawn such notice: the last foreign visitor came from Belgium twenty-one years earlier. Everyone in the village younger than twenty-one has therefore never seen a foreigner in person. Prabaker remembers that earlier visitor as a good man and assures Lin that the people will love him too. His prediction is affectionate, but the crowd’s first stillness makes clear that welcome is not yet assured.

The jester’s cap breaks the silence

At the center of the crowd, Lin reaches into his backpack for a souvenir: a black-and-white jester’s cap with three cloth horns and bells. An actor friend in New Zealand had made it as part of a costume and given it to Lin as a good-luck keepsake just before Lin’s flight to India. Lin puts it on, tightens it beneath his chin, and straightens the horns. The people at the front draw back with a gasp, so the gesture initially heightens the suspense rather than dispelling it.

Lin then smiles and waggles his head, making the bells ring. The sight releases the crowd’s tension. Women, children, and men laugh together; someone touches his shoulder, children reach for his hands, and those within reach pat and stroke him. The change is immediate and physical: the silent wall of staring faces becomes a crowd eager to make contact. Prabaker meets Lin’s eye with visible joy and pride, as though this unexpected welcome had taken on the force of a prayer.

The moment also echoes Lin’s earlier effort on the road to imitate the Indian head-waggle. There, the gesture had prompted people watching from the fields to smile, laugh, and run ahead to tell their neighbors. At the village entrance, the same playful willingness to meet an unfamiliar audience on its own terms finds its fullest response. Lin’s cap turns the foreign visitor from a spectacle to be inspected into a participant in a shared joke.

Welcome and arrival

After allowing the crowd’s affectionate attention to continue for several minutes, Prabaker clears a path and leads Lin into Kishan’s dark, round house. As they enter, the crowd disperses, and the public welcome gives way to the intimate hospitality of the family. Prabaker tells Lin that his sisters have heated bathwater over the fire and are ready to prepare a bath after the long journey.

The scene’s decisive turn is not that Lin ceases to be a stranger, but that the crowd finds a way to receive him. The village’s exceptional curiosity has a specific history—two decades without a foreign visitor—and the celebration does not erase the material limits glimpsed on the road. Instead, a borrowed costume, a ringing set of bells, and a shared laugh make connection possible within those conditions. Arrival becomes more than reaching Prabaker’s home: it is Lin’s first welcome into the village community.