For a millisecond that will forever remain frozen in memory, the earth tilted and came rushing as if it will swallow all from horizon to horizon. Then the jeep stopped, and everything was still. The vehicle had skid at a sharp bend on the muddy road. The road only gets worse and it is still some 20 km from Patna-Tamoli. It might as well have been another planet. On Tuesday, August 6, it probably was. That morning Kuttu Bai sat on her husband's pyre for nearly two hours before it was set ablaze and she died of burns. There are at least two roads from the district headquarters at Panna to Patna-Tamoli, each worse than the other, each passing through Saleha - the police station nearest to the village - each barely jeepable but now ferrying bureaucrats and senior police officers in cars nonetheless, and neither allowing for time travel. Patna-Tamoli is about the irrelevance of politics, irrelevance of government and state till an old, expendable widow commits sati and the people around want to venerate the deed. For at least 10 hours since Mallu Sen died and Patna-Tamoli prepared for a spectacle, there was no political leader, no administrative officer, no policeman around. When a policeman did come and try to do his duty as he saw it, it was to the chagrin of the villagers who beat him up. In the oral history that does the round of police officers and bureaucrats here, there are at least five instances of sati in Panna district in the last 150 years or so. Three of these - including Kuttu Bai's - were in Patna-Tamoli. 'People here in Bundelkhand are deeply in awe of the idea of sati. But that was long ago in the past. There have been no recent instances,' says district magistrate Ravindra Pastor. 'But there is a belief that Sati is an incarnate of Shakti and the women around here are endowed with shakti (strength).' The belief used to run deep in the Chaurasia community. Barsati Lal Chaurasia, a villager, says: 'I have heard that when a widow has been possessed by Sati, she goes with the funeral procession dressed in bridal wear and accompanied by the ululation of the village women and the strains of the Ramdhun (a chant in the name of the Ram). Of course, I am not saying that is how it was with Kuttu Bai.' Government registers its immediate, official presence to the visitor in Patna-Tamoli in two ways. First, the fact that there is a telephone (dependent on the whimsies of nature) in the sarpanch's house is known at the Saleha police station - that is how thanedar sub-inspector Harcharan Singh Ghose learnt of what was about to happen that morning. Second, graffiti on one of the first houses in the village reads: 'Saksharta ki aai lahar, hoti parhai dono pahar (The literacy wave has come, we study morning and evening).' The wave does not wash. But Patna-Tamoli still surprises. For one, the sarpanch is a woman, Bimla Chaurasia. Most villagers did not know which party she belonged to, Congress or BJP - it simply did not matter, but everyone pointed out she is a Chaurasia, the dominant caste. It was her husband, Ramadhar, to whom Kuttu Bai's younger son, Rajkumar, first came and said his mother was threatening to commit sati; it was he who despatched the village chowkidar, Ramgarib Vishwakarma, to the burning ghat to check out what was happening; it was Ramadhar, again, who called the police station and spoke to Harcharan Ghose. Second, Patna-Tamoli has a government higher secondary school. It grazes the walls of Kuttu Bai's kuchcha house. Inside Patna-Tamoli, every villager is afraid to talk because of so many policemen around. They signal you in, away from the main road, and in unison complain how harassed they are since the sati; how pitilessly police have arrested fellow villagers - including Kuttu Bai's two sons, who were picked up on the pretext that they will be let off soon, but have been charged with murder. In that sense, the village today is deeply resentful of the state as they are experiencing it now - an external force intervening in its own affairs. If a team from the National Commission for Women has returned from Patna-Tamoli without being able to talk to a single eyewitness, it is no surprise. Patna-Tamoli is guarding its own zealously. Even in the 1987 Roop Kanwar sati incident in Deorala, all the accused were acquitted six years later because there wasn't enough evidence. At the Patna-Tamoli burning ghat, too, Ghose recalls, it was as if the crowd that morning was 'frozen stiff barring the stray shout of 'Sati ki jai''. 'But as soon as I dragged down Kuttu Bai from the pyre, it was as if all hell had broken loose because she let out a scream 'Ayee, yeh ko ho raha hai?' (What are you doing?)' In retrospect, Ghose agrees that he was trying to save an old woman but the assembled crowd refused to see that and thought he was guilty of committing an atrocity - by forcing down an old woman - and preventing her from acting against her will. 'If the people had stopped her, you tell me, would it have been possible for her to commit sati?' Ghose wonders aloud. But did they force her into it? 'That I cannot say,' replies Ghose. No one in Patna-Tamoli today says Kuttu Bai was forcibly set on fire. Just as surely, no one wants to argue if the village willed her to commit sati. The administration gained control of the situation, after the event. The first time a politician was around was when district magistrate Pastor egged on zilla parishad vice-president Ramakant Sharma (of the Congress) to address the crowd that was gathering between Saleha and Patna-Tamoli, wanting to go to the burning ghat with offerings of coconut and incense sticks. Pastor and Sharma repeatedly said it was not a sati because, first, the couple was not on good terms (thus trying to rob the deed of its 'marital valour'), second, it was not pre-announced and, third, that the rituals that accompany a sati and are supervised by a priest did not take place. But even Pastor and the administration know, this is merely stop-gap. Belief and superstition run much deeper and wider here. In the villages around Patna-Tamoli, local people want to know if it is safe to visit the site for a darshan. They say here in these parts of Bundelkhand that the curse of the sati is unforgiving. In these parts of Bundelkhand, politics, state and government are irrelevant. When there is a sati and when it rains on the parched soil, Panna's rivulets and streams will gush and wash up diamonds for the fortunate. The land is still accursed.