Chapter 4 — What Priti Knew

"Which could mean it doesn't exist," I said."Which could mean it exists outside the boundary of what people will discuss with researchers." She looked at her screen. "There are categories of sacred space in this region that are not discussed with outsiders. Not hidden maliciously — simply understood to be private. Specific to communities that don't want them documented." She paused. "But there's a second possibility.""Tell me.""In the folklore of the Sundarbans, there's a category of place that is not a temple in the conventional sense. Not dedicated to a deity in the Hindu or Muslim or syncretic Bonbibi tradition. Something older. The moule — the honey collectors — talk about parts of the forest that have their own will. Not inhabited by a god. The forest itself, wanting something." She looked at me. "The specific phrase used in two community oral traditions I've documented is: the forest that eats. Not metaphorically. They mean it literally — there are places in the Sundarbans where the forest, or whatever the forest is in those places, takes things from people who enter. Not tigers. Not crocodiles. Something that takes from the inside."I thought about Captain Elliot's boatman. An offering that comes from inside."What does it take?" I said."In the oral tradition, the descriptions vary," Priti said. "Memory, in one account. Voice, in another. In a third — and this is the account that made me take this more seriously than I might have — a researcher spoke to an elderly woman in Pakhiralay who said her grandfather had gone into a forbidden part of the forest as a young man on a dare. He came out. He was physically fine. But he couldn't feel pain anymore." She paused. "Any pain. Ever again. He burned himself on a cooking fire three years later and didn't notice until the smell. He lived to seventy but he never felt anything hurt him again."The cabin was small and the river moved against the hull with the small constant sound of water finding its way."Priti," I said. "Are you telling me you think this is real?"She closed her laptop. "I'm telling you I've spent seven years studying the oral traditions of this region, and the specific consistency of the accounts about places where the forest takes something from the inside is — it doesn't read like folklore. Folklore has variability. Every teller changes the story. These accounts are stable. Different communities, different generations, the same core detail: you go in, you come out, but not all of you comes out."I sat with this."I think," she said, "that Samir should know this before we get anywhere near those coordinates.""He does know," I said. "He decided anyway."She looked at me."And you?" she said.I looked at the river through the small porthole. The Sundarbans dark outside, the kind of dark that was not the absence of light but the presence of something that preferred the dark."I'm still working it out," I said.