I leaned forward, to more closely study Ajad's angular face. His voice had struck me as suddenly sounding much older than that of the young farmer who'd talked me away from the Grand Trunk Road two nights before, to this little farm village called Jhattipuri.

"The electricity going off, you mean?" I asked, vaguely recollecting that, as we were weaving down the dirt road to Jhattipuri on his old bicycle, Ajad had seemed especially proud that his village of 1,500 had four street lamps and four televisions.

Ajad nodded.

He lamented that anymore the village received electrical power only two or three hours each day. It was almost as if the area was possessed with a will that despised such intrusions of technology in its backyard.

Still, power failures or not, life in Jhattipuri was hardly going to be affected all that much. Basically the same habits and lifestyles that had sustained the village's ancestors of a thousand years back, or more, were going as strongly as ever. In a place like Jhattipuri, where the meals were still cooked over smoking dung or twigs on the ground outside, electricity was probably much more of a luxury than an actual necessity.

All that day had been spent with Ajad and his excited friends, touring their farm fields, their homes, and, most fascinating of all, the separate boys' and girls' schools. As in most other areas along the worldwalk's path, the detachment of the people from modern technology was almost too great to be believed. Almost all of the farming of the land was still done by oxen-pulled plows. Water for the homes was still pumped up from wells by hand or pulled up in buckets by the sinewy arms of the women. Animals, from pigs to buffalo, still wandered freely about the streets, and the school children still did their work on handheld slate boards. As with the homes, the schools had been virtually unfurnished, unheated, badly overcrowded, unlit and with almost no windows. All the children sat on the floors of the schoolrooms, just like at home, or else they sat outside on the dirt, where the weak winter sun provided some semblance of warmth.

Though a thousand Jhattipuri-like villages have come and gone before me on my walk around the world, the primitiveness of each has never failed to leave me astonished. The gap between the lifestyle and thinking of their inhabitants and those of my own homeland is so vast as to seem absolutely improbable. It just seems too incredible to think that in an age of mass media, instantaneous information dissemination, and rapid transport, people still do things like ride buffalo-pulled carts to market and wash their clothes on the rocks of rivers. And it's not just some of the world that lives like that, but most of the planet's inhabitants.

That a very small part of the world could be instantly cooking entire meals with microwaves, doing much of their problem solving on computers, and even launching themselves and their robots into the solar system, while the rest live in a shadowy world largely unchanged from centuries before, seems to be more the stuff of science fiction than reality. Yet such is how it is, with the gap growing more profound each day. So great is that difference I can't begin to see it being narrowed or its growth arrested.

At dawn, a shivering Ajad roused me from the depths of my sleeping bag. In his hands were a tin cup and a large pot of hot buffalo milk. I drank all of it, hoping it might keep some of the morning chill away when I left the stable to continue my journey eastward. While I drank the turnipy tasting liquid, dozens of village boys crowded among the cots and cud-chewing cows. Last night they had been overflowing with questions about American society, now they simply wanted to see that I had a warm send-off.

As is my custom, I asked Ajad for an address to which I could send his family a postcard whenever I reached home. He wrote it down and handed it to me along with 20 rupees.

"What's the money for?" I asked.

"Please send a gift of your country to us, when you can. We want something from America we can show to our friends," he explained in a hopeful voice.

"And," he added quickly, "I will pay any duty."

I smiled. Twenty rupees was worth just under two dollars. Nothing it could buy would fetch any duty fees.

"Sure, I'll send a gift," I said, shoving the money into my jacket.

He told the others in Hindi, their native language, and they talked excitedly among themselves.

Slipping into my pack, I worked my way through their midst and out onto a gray street of housewives with pots on their heads and children leading dull-eyed buffalo toward the nearby fields. Ajad and the others accompanied me to the Grand Trunk Road.

"What should I send you? Anything you want in particular?" I asked Ajad, upon reaching the still quiet highway.

He gripped my hand and held it firmly. "It does not matter. I only care to know that I have a friend who has made it back home."

"You have a friend," I said, "and I'll make it home. Don't worry."

Then I walked away toward the east and a future I knew could never again be ordinary.

Steven