But he had asked. And the camera had been put down, once, in the dust of the bowl, by the one who was responsible for it. And sometimes that was enough.
In the beehad, the autumn rains had passed. The river was at its post-monsoon level, the banks marked with the red tide-line of where the water had been. The ravine walls steamed slightly in the morning, the moisture drawn out by the sun, and the sound of the place was what it always was — the wind and the water and the birds that lived in the cuts in the rock, and the silence underneath all of it, which was not empty.
Bheema Das sat at the entrance to the cave that had been his grandfather's winter shelter. The cave that he had kept from being filmed. The cave in front of which the dust had been disturbed just enough for a careful person to notice.
He drank tea from a metal cup. He looked at the ravine as it began its morning — the shadow retreating from the east wall, the light arriving from the rim in long angles, the day warming itself in the way of this specific place at this specific season. He had been watching this particular sequence of light for forty years and it had not been the same twice and it was not boring.
The marks on the secondary ravine were fresh. He would refresh the others when the season turned. The knowledge would stay in the land as long as someone was there to maintain it, and he would maintain it as long as he was there, and what happened after that was not a question he found useful to worry about in the morning, with good tea, in good light, in the beehad that had been his grandfather's and was his and was not, would never be, anyone's content.The Chambal beehad covers approximately 8,000 square kilometres across Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. It remains one of the least-mapped territories
