A walky-talky lay on the grass even as steel badges, police boots, broken lathis and tear gas squibs were found strewn across the field.
Yesterday's bloodbath on this patch, which resulted in 13 deaths, has visibly numbed the town.
Kalinga Nagar, where the government had planned a huge complex of over 12,000 acres to provide space to several steel plants, has very few houses.
Only the rising structures of proposed steel plants can be seen at different points from the distance as also the spiralling smoke from Nilachal Ispat Nigam.
Life has come to a stand-still at Duburi Chhak where shops and eating places had downed their shutters.
A few distance away at Madhuban Chhak, wailing relatives sat around four bodies of two men and two women cursing the administration and the police.
Sania Tiria was crying bitterly by the side of the body of his young wife Deogi who was killed in yesterday's firing. "She has left behind three small children. How can I look after them?''
Children, unable to apprehend the magnitude of the tragedy, played in the background as 65-year-old Upin Jamuda, a landless tribal of nearby Chandia village, sat speechless.
He had lost his younger son in an accident two years ago. Yesterday, his other son Ati (32) fell to the police bullets.
Shyam Barla was weeping over the body of his younger brother Sudam (25), who, he said, was the only bread earner of his family.
The inhabitants of several nearby villages had brought four bodies to the Daitari-Paradip expressway, built in the early 1960s to facilitate transport of iron ore and chrome ore from the hinterland to the Paradip port. They sat through the chilly night with the bodies, lying on wooden cots, refusing to part with them.
