Chapter 3 — Gosaba

November 5th, 2023. Gosaba, South 24 Parganas.The Sundarbans arrived before we reached them.This is what I mean: you do not come upon the Sundarbans the way you come upon most landscapes. Most landscapes are a background that you travel through. The Sundarbans is a presence that comes toward you — first as a quality of the air, something damp and layered and biological, not unpleasant but insistent; then as a change in the light, the way the sky above the delta is a particular heavy grey-green even on clear days, as if the forest below is exhaling upward; then as a smell, which I will not attempt to describe except to say that it is the smell of an ecosystem that does not waste anything, that processes everything, that has been processing everything for longer than any human record can reach.By the time we reached Gosaba by road from Canning, all four of us had gone quiet. This happened independently, without discussion — Samir in the front of the car, Priti and Rohan and I in the back, each of us looking out a different window, the conversation that had been continuous for five hours simply stopping.The Sundarbans does that.Gosaba was a town that faced the water with the practical expression of a place that had always lived with the possibility of the water coming in. The buildings were on elevated concrete platforms. The ferry landing was a concrete ramp down to the brown-green river, and at the ramp, when we arrived at four in the afternoon, sat our boat contact.His name was Madan Das. He was sixty, possibly older, with the quality of a person whose age had been shaped by the landscape rather than by years — tanned to the texture of the mangrove bark he worked near, unhurried in the way of someone who had learned that hurry was irrelevant against the tides. He looked at our camera equipment with the specific expression of a man who had transported journalists before and had specific feelings about the experience.He spoke to Priti in rapid Bengali that I could only partly follow.She translated, with the flat affect she used when she was translating something she didn't want to editorialize: "He says he will take us into the Sundarbans. He says he will take us to the areas covered by our permit. He says if we want to go to the area in the colonial document we showed him, he will not take us and he knows nobody who will take us and we should not look for someone who will.""Did he read the coordinates we sent?" Samir said.Priti asked. Madan Das replied."He says he doesn't need to read the coordinates. He says he knows where we're talking about. He says everyone here knows where we're talking about and that's why nobody goes there.""Ask him what's there," Samir said.Priti looked at Samir with the expression she had developed in five days of working with him: the expression of a scholar who had agreed to be in a documentary and was revising her assumptions about what that meant.She asked.Madan Das was quiet for a long time. Then he said something short."He says: a place where the forest is hungry," Priti translated. She paused. "And he says that's all he'll say about it and if we want dinner, his wife cooks fish curry on Tuesday evenings and we are welcome."We ate fish curry that night.It was extraordinary.I wrote in my journal: first day. Everything is fine. The landscape is everything I expected and more.I wrote: a place where the forest is hungry.I underlined it. I am not sure why.