Chapter 2 — The Brief

"Where did you get this?" I said."An archivist in Kolkata," he said. "I've been looking at Sundarbans records for a different project and she flagged this as anomalous. The Appendix C coordinates were removed from the published version of the survey in 1891. They were in the original manuscript, which has been in the West Bengal State Archives since 1952.""Removed why?""The archivist doesn't know. Possibly irrelevant bureaucratic cut. Possibly something else." He paused. "The coordinates put it in a part of the Sundarbans that is currently inside the Tiger Reserve. No documented structures in that sector.""That doesn't mean—""The Sundarbans has two thousand square kilometers of Reserve area and significant portions of it have never been properly surveyed at ground level," Samir said. "A structure that local people actively avoid discussing could have existed for a long time without documentation."I sat with this."Who else?" I said. Meaning: who is the crew."You as producer. Me as director. Rohan as camera — Rohan Nair, you've worked with him before. And I want to bring Priti Mukherjee for the research-on-camera role. She's a folklore academic at Jadavpur, she's done field work in the Sundarbans, she knows the landscape and the language.""Four people," I said."Four people, a fifteen-day permit from the Forest Department for the non-Reserve zone, and very good boat contacts in Gosaba."I looked at the scanned pages on my screen. Captain Elliot's cramped colonial handwriting. An offering that is not flowers."We'll need a local guide who's genuinely local," I said. "Not a tourist operator. Someone from the honey collectors or the fishermen communities.""I'm working on it.""And Samir." I paused. "If at any point the locals tell us not to go somewhere, we don't go."A brief silence."Of course," he said.I believed him when he said it.I have thought about this often since.