Chapter 5 — The Guide

November 9th. Daybreak. The Raimangal channel.The man was standing on the bank at five in the morning when we came around the bend in the Raimangal.Madan Das cut the engine without being asked. He had clearly been expecting this, which meant either he had arranged it or he had known it would happen, and when I asked him later which it was, he gave the specific non-answer of a person who was answering honestly: "Both."The man's name was Haripada. That was the only name he gave — no surname, no village affiliation, which was unusual but not inexplicable in a region where many people carried their identity lightly with strangers. He was forty or fifty or could have been either. He had the Sundarbans face — the specific weathering that the combination of salt air and tidal work and sun and the particular stress of living adjacent to tigers produced in the people who made their lives here.He spoke briefly to Madan Das and then, surprising all of us, addressed us directly in Hindi."You want to find the Daat Mandir," he said. It was not a question.Samir, who had been trying to conceal this objective for four days with the transparency of a man hiding a large object under a small cloth, said: "We're documenting the folk religion of the—""You want to find the Daat Mandir," Haripada said again.A pause."Yes," I said.He looked at each of us in turn. The specific quality of his looking was something I noticed and wrote about later: not curiosity, not assessment in the usual sense. The look of a person determining something about each individual — a specific quality, a quantity. The look of a butcher, was what I wrote in my journal, and I crossed it out because it felt wrong, and then I wrote it again because it was right."I will take you close," he said. "Not to the temple. To the edge of where the forest changes. After that it will take you where it wants to take you." He paused. "There are things you should know before we go.""Tell us," Samir said.