Adikanda versus Neil Armstrong An Oriya short story

The aluminium bowl rose, then stopped short of Adikanda's mouth. He gulped down the tea that he had already slurped from the bowl. A few drops clung to his beard. "Will this earth bear all this? Was there just God left for you to fool around with?" Hands, quivering with emotion and age, he set the tea down on the sun-baked ground. The faces of people sitting in semi-circle before him stared at him expectantly, reflecting the glow of the night. Adikanda is bound, by one kinship tie or another, to each one of the villagers. Aja, dada, mausa, mama—no one in the village calls him by name. A face as dark as janhi seeds. Eyes that are sunk in their sockets but still glow hot when he speaks and his whole body, all six feet of it, seems to be caught in a surge of a sudden unleashed vibrancy. His tangled jute-coloured hair tumbles to his shoulders, still almost erect. His mouth and chin are hidden in a bushy beard and moustache. To look at Adikanda one would think time and age have accepted defeat. If you were to ask him his age, he would reply with deliberate vagueness, "Four scores or five... who knows." He points to the massive banyan tree that spreads a canopy over the assortment of vermillion marked stones and baked mud horses—the abode of the gram devi. "My grandfather planted that the year I was born." Nothing in the village is complete without Adikanda; everybody knows and admits this. In all rituals, from births to marriages and right through to the cremation ghat, Adikanda's participation is a necessity. Because only he, amongst all the villagers knows the answer to every thing: why the coconut burnt in the sacred marriage fire had to be thrown surreptitiously into the river afterwards; why the castor reed had to be part of a thatched roof. Adikanda knows everything that is of any