Chapter 15 — What the River Gave Back

November 17th to 18th.They were two hours from the permitted landing when Rohan went back.This was the gap in the timeline that the recovery search could not account for and that the surviving crew members did not fully explain in the official debrief. The official account reads: "Subject Nair became separated from the group during the return journey under poor visibility conditions."The actual account, from Lata's medical facility journal, written before she understood that the official report had simplified things:We were walking. The forest had the post-temple quality — reduced but not normal, still too quiet, still the residual weight of something that had been paying attention. I was holding Rohan's arm. I had been holding it for an hour. I was aware of being tired and of the deepening of the low afternoon light and of Haripada moving fast ahead.I let go of Rohan's arm for thirty seconds. I don't know why. The absence of danger-sense, probably — the thing that would have kept me holding on was gone. I was calm. I was not worried.When I looked to my right, he was not there.Not immediately gone — I heard him for a moment, footsteps in a different direction, and I turned and called and the footsteps were already far away, farther than thirty seconds could explain, and Haripada had stopped and was looking back at me with the expression of someone who had been waiting for this."He's gone," Haripada said."I can hear him—""He's gone back," Haripada said. "Come. Keep moving.""We have to—""Lata-didi." He used the honorific the Sundarbans people used for an older woman they respected. It was the only time he called her anything. "If we go back, we go back to the temple. And the temple will take more. It will take what it missed the first time. And Rohan is already — he is already inside it. He has been inside it since the first day." He looked at her steadily. "Come."I came.I wrote that I came and then I sat in the medical facility and looked at what I had written and I felt — nothing sharp. The absence where the sharp things should have been. I knew it was wrong that I had come. I knew it intellectually. But the thing that would have made the wrongness unbearable was the thing the temple had taken.I came.God help me, I came.* * *The camera was found in the waterproof case on the Raimangal River at 6:14 AM on November 18th, by a fisherman who contacted the Forest Department.The case had been secured and sealed from the outside. Not something Rohan could have done himself.Haripada, when asked about this, said: "The temple does not want the camera. What the camera holds — the recording — it finds that more difficult than flesh. The camera sees differently than a person sees. What the camera keeps is not what the temple takes.""Rohan secured the case?" Samir said.Haripada considered this. "Rohan," he said. "Or what is in Rohan now. It is hard to say where one ends and the other begins at this point."The fisherman who found the case said it was floating against the current. Not with it.Against it.Moving toward the sea.