"Why didn't you warn us?" Priya said. Not with anger. With the genuine curiosity of someone who wants to understand a decision.
Vikram looked at her. "I tried, in the beginning. I told you the ravines were alive in patches and dead everywhere else, and the dead places were the ones to watch. I told you we were back at the vehicle before dark. These were not random things to say." He paused. "But you were filming before we arrived. You had the thumbnails. Your audience had been told the episode was coming." He looked at Aryan specifically. "You were always going to go in."
Aryan received this. It landed the way things land when they are accurate.
"What's his full name?" Kabir asked.
"Bheema Das," Vikram said. "His grandfather was Bhagwan Das, who was with Man Singh for six years. Bheema lived in the ravines seasonally from the time he was a child. He has not hurt anyone. He will not. But he will be in those ravines until he dies, and he will make sure that anyone who comes there to make money from what happened there goes home with something they didn't come for."
"Understanding," Tanya said.
"Discomfort," Vikram said. "Understanding is what comes after. If it comes."
They stayed at the hospital for two hours. Aryan paid Vikram's hospital bill — the full cost, not asking the amount first, which was the only thing he could think of to do that was immediate and concrete. Vikram did not object and did not thank him effusively, which was appropriate.
They found a hotel in Morena. They ate — the first real meal since Bargawa — in a dhaba attached to the hotel, a late dinner of dal and roti and achaar that tasted better than anything Aryan had eaten in recent memory, which he attributed partly to hunger and partly to the specific quality of food eaten after a day in which you have understood something you didn't know you were ignorant of.
After dinner, he opened the camera and watched the footage in full, alone in his room, from the first shot on the road from Gwalior to the marked path out of the ravines. Eight hours and forty-two minutes.
He watched all of it. He made notes. He thought about structure and about truth and about the difference between a video that performed honesty and a video that actually was honest, which was, he was learning, a more difficult thing to make.
At two in the morning he opened a new document on his phone and wrote, in the subject field: Bhagwan Das — history of Chambal dacoits — research needed.
He had a lot of work to do.
