There is a market that exists for roughly six hours, once a week, and is otherwise simply a junction in the road.

The Bonda have been coming to this exact spot on Thursdays for longer than living memory can confirm. They are one of the oldest surviving tribal communities in India, their customs largely untouched by the centuries of change happening everywhere around them — including marriage practices that invert almost everything mainstream India assumes about gender and age.

Most travel content about Onkadelli treats the Bonda as a photograph opportunity — exotic, brief, consumed and moved past. That is not what this place deserves. The women who walk up to you offering jewellery are not performing tribal life for your benefit. They are simply living it, on the one day a week their community gathers to trade, exactly as they have for generations, in a region most of India will never visit and most of the world will never hear of.

Come on a Thursday. Ask before you photograph. Buy something, if you want to participate rather than only observe. And understand, as you leave, that the market did not exist for you, and it will not remember that you came.