They stopped in a wider section of the ravine where a collapsed rock overhang had created a natural shelter — not a cave, but a roof of rock extending three metres out from the wall, giving shade and, importantly, a wall at their backs and a clear view of the ravine in both directions for twenty metres.
It was the middle of the day. They had been walking for three hours. The temperature in the ravine was ten degrees cooler than the plateau above but still hot, the heat radiating from the rock walls, the air still. Nobody had eaten since the chai in Bargawa.
Kabir sat against the wall with his phone and did what Kabir did in crisis: he researched. His archive — the photographs of the police reports and the historical documents — was on the phone's local storage, not the cloud, and therefore still accessible despite the absence of signal. He went through it methodically, cross-referencing what had happened since the previous afternoon with what he knew about the documented practices of the Chambal dacoit gangs.
He found it forty minutes into the rest stop.
"Listen," he said.
They listened.
