The tiny Indian village of Sonapur has one paved road, a narrow grey ribbon which falls away to crumbling rocks and dirt at either side. It slices through a scattering of huts and tattered vegetable stalls on its winding route from the city of Gawahati, capital of the far northeastern state of Assam, to the distant animal reserves which nestle against neighbouring Bhutan.
Brown rice paddies push back the encroaching jungle and a handful of rickshaw wallahs jostle and joke as they wait for locals to summon a lift to nearby homes and other villages. Residents have built themselves earthen-floor huts made from wall-sized squares of woven rattan, stitched to bamboo braces.
At the district police outpost, officers keep their World War II rifles within snatching distance as they huddle in the evening gloom, warming themselves over a smoky campfire.
About 10 minutes' walk outside the village, on a small wooded hillock guarded by armed sentries, is the spartan clinic where cardiac surgeon Jonathan Ho Kei-shing is alleged to have helped perform an operation which has shocked the world: the transplant of a pig's heart and abdominal organs to a man.
It was a startling and unsuccessful piece of surgery. The repercussions are rocking medical reputations from Asia to Europe.
At a time when top British scientists have deemed animal transplants - even those from genetically engineered pigs - too risky, medical experts have expressed disbelief that such an operation could have been attempted at a tiny, poorly staffed clinic in the furthest reaches of India.
The patient, a 32-year-old unmarried farmer named Purna Saikia, who was born with two holes in his heart, came from a remote village more than 300 kilometres from Gawahati. He died shortly after the operation.