Chapter 6 — Into the Reserve

November 11th. Inside the Tiger Reserve boundary.The permit did not cover what we were doing.I want to be clear about this in the record. What we had was a documentary production permit for the non-Reserve zone and a buffer sector. The Raimangal coordinates from Captain Elliot's Appendix C were inside the core Reserve. Haripada knew this. Samir knew this. I knew this.We went anyway.I have thought, since, about the decision points — the places where someone could have said no and the outcome would have been different. There were at least four clear ones in the twelve hours before we entered the Reserve zone. I said something at two of them. Not enough. Not the full stop.I am a producer. I have learned, in fifteen years of this work, to assess risk against story in a particular way. The equation usually comes out in favor of the story, which is why good documentaries get made and also why good documentarians occasionally end up in situations that a purely rational assessment would have avoided.The Sundarbans in the core Reserve was — the word that kept coming was unmediated. The buffer zone, even the parts we'd been in, had the quality of a landscape that knew about human beings and had adapted to their presence — there were signs, platforms, the occasional sound of a distant engine. The core Reserve had none of this. The rivers narrowed. The mangroves grew denser and older, the sundari trees here massive, their root systems creating architecture above the waterline that was more complex than anything built by human hands. The sound changed: louder and more specific, the water birds calling in the upper canopy, something large moving through the roots off to the left at one point that Haripada registered with a slight stillness of the body and then a relaxation that told us it had moved away."Tiger?" Samir said quietly."Deer," Haripada said. "You don't hear tigers."This information settled on the boat with significant weight.Rohan was filming everything. He had the camera's eye that I had seen in the best documentary cinematographers — not scanning, not documenting, but looking for the thing inside the thing, the second image within the first. He had been filming Haripada for two days with particular attention and Haripada had not once performed for the camera, which in my experience was either the mark of someone who had been filmed many times or someone who genuinely did not care about being seen.At two in the afternoon, the boat's engine noise changed, and Madan Das, who was piloting, said something short.Haripada translated: "He says this is where he stops."The channel ahead was navigable — we could all see that. Not wide, not easy, but passable."Why here?" Samir said."He says the water changes here." Haripada stood and looked at the channel ahead. "He is right. You can feel it."I could, in fact, feel something. It was subtle and it is hard to describe with precision: a change in the quality of the air at the boundary. Not temperature — the temperature was the same. Something more like pressure. The sense that the air beyond the point where the channel narrowed had more in it. More weight. More attention.Priti was looking forward with her recorder running. She said, quietly, not to anyone in particular: "We have to go in by foot from here.""How far?" Samir said.Haripada looked at the forest."Distance doesn't work the same way in there," he said. "You walk until you arrive."