Chapter 12 — The Night

They reached Haripada at the wall's exterior as the light was going.He looked at them — the specific looking that Lata had described, the butcher's look, the inventory — and then he looked at Rohan and his expression changed in a way that was small and significant."What did it take?" he said to Rohan.Rohan looked at him. "I'm not sure yet," he said. "Something's different. I don't know what it is yet.""You'll know when you need it," Haripada said. He said it with the gentleness of a diagnosis. "And it won't be there."They walked back through the forest that was not paying the same kind of attention anymore — something had shifted, the quality of the watching less focused, as if the forest had processed what it needed and returned to the ambient. Haripada moved fast, faster than the walk in, and they followed without discussion, the four of them changed in ways they were still inside and couldn't measure.They reached the boat at seven-fifteen. Madan Das was there. He looked at them with the face of someone counting heads and coming up right but feeling that the count was wrong in a way the number didn't capture.He looked at Rohan for a long time.He said something to Haripada in Bengali.Haripada replied.Neither of them translated.* * *They moored at the same permitted landing where they had spent the previous nights.Nobody wanted to eat. Samir opened whisky — he had brought a flask, a habit from long field trips — and they sat in the main cabin with it and nobody said anything for a long time.Rohan was the one who broke the silence."It was like—" He stopped. Started again. "When I was a child. Six, seven. I fell off a bicycle and hit a wall and I was — for a minute, I was completely stunned, everything stopped. And then I started crying. Partly because it hurt. Partly because I was frightened. The fear and the pain were the same thing." He looked at his cup. "I've been scared of things my whole life. Heights. Flying. The usual. And also not-usual things. Failing. Losing people. The specific fear of—" He stopped. "I don't feel any of that right now.""That could be shock," Priti said."Maybe," he said. He looked at his hands again. "But it doesn't feel like shock. Shock is temporary. This feels like something that has been removed." He paused. "Surgically."Lata looked at him. "Are you afraid right now? Of anything?"He considered this honestly. "No," he said. "I'm not.""Are you upset about that?"He thought about it for a long time."I don't know," he said. "I can't tell if I should be upset. The thing that would make me upset about it is probably the thing that's gone."