Chapter 4: The Departure

Mishti told her father on a Thursday evening. The evening patrol was done — Dhanraj Lal had returned with mud on his boots and a report of fresh tiger pugmarks near the Kanha corridor crossing, the kind of news that made him simultaneously thrilled (the tiger was back) and anxious (the tiger was back, and so were the poachers). He was at the kitchen table, filling out his patrol log in the careful handwriting of a man who had been told, repeatedly, by district supervisors that handwritten logs were obsolete but who continued writing them because his father had written them and because the act of writing, for Dhanraj, was: proof. That he had been there. That he had looked. That the forest had been: watched.

"Papa," Mishti said. "I need to tell you something."

She told him. Not everything — not the visions, not the notebook, not the forty-one deaths. She told him what Mihir had told her to tell: that she had been offered a position with a government research unit in Delhi. Wildlife conservation. Interdepartmental. The kind of posting that a BSc Forestry graduate would consider: a career-making opportunity.

The lie was: necessary. Mihir had been explicit. "Your family cannot know the true nature of the work. Not because they wouldn't believe you — your grandmother's reputation will make belief easy. Because belief makes them: targets. The people we work against — the forces that cause the wrong deaths — they look for leverage. Family is: leverage. The less your family knows, the safer they are."

Dhanraj set down his pen. Looked at his daughter. The look of a father who has spent twenty-two years watching a girl climb trees and track langurs and read forestry textbooks by torchlight during load-shedding — the specific look of a man who knows his daughter is: extraordinary, and who has been waiting for the world to notice.

"Delhi," he said.

"Delhi."

"Who offered?"

"A.K. Tiwari coordinated it. The unit head came to meet me — a man named Mihir. He was here on Tuesday."

"The man at the gate. I heard about him from Ganesh. He said a stranger stood at our wall and waited."

Of course Ganesh had reported it. In Lormi, stranger-watching was a community service performed with the dedication of a CCTV network and the accuracy of: approximately.

"He's legitimate, Papa. I checked with Tiwari sir. The unit exists."

The unit existed — that much was true. Mihir had shown her credentials, a government ID that listed the unit as "Special Research Division, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change." The ID was real. The division was: technically real, in the sense that it appeared on a ministry org chart in a font so small that nobody would look for it and in a line item that was funded through a budget code that nobody audited. The perfect bureaucratic ghost.

"When?" Dhanraj asked.

"Next week."

"Your exams—"

"I've applied for the supplementary session. I'll finish the last two papers from Delhi. Ranchi has approved it — Mihir's people arranged the permissions."

Dhanraj was quiet. The patrol log: open. The pen: still. The kitchen: filled with the smell of Mishti's mother's dal tadka, the mustard seeds popping in ghee, the specific sound-smell combination that was the Lal household's signature — the sound of dinner being made while the world rearranged itself.

"Mishti," her father said. "I'm going to ask you a question. And I want the truth."

"Okay."

"Is this about your grandmother?"

The question: unexpected. Direct. The question of a man who had spent twenty-two years watching his daughter and had noticed things that Mishti thought she'd hidden. The pressure behind the eyes. The moments of absence — the seconds when she went somewhere else, when her eyes unfocused and her body stiffened and she returned looking: haunted. He had noticed. He had catalogued. He had — like her — kept a private record, not in a notebook but in his memory, the specific parental surveillance that is not surveillance but: love. The love that watches and waits and doesn't ask until: the right moment.

"Yes," Mishti said. "It's about Dadi's gift. But different. Mine is: different."

"Different how?"

"I don't see ghosts, Papa. I see—" She stopped. The instruction from Mihir: don't tell. But this was her father. The man who had put her on her first branch. The man who believed in: negotiation, not force. The man whose patrol log was: proof that he had looked.

"I see things that are about to happen," she said. "Bad things. Deaths. I see them before they happen. Or as they happen. And this unit — Mihir's unit — they can train me to use it. To help. To stop: some of them."

Dhanraj closed the patrol log. Slowly. The way you close a book when you need to think about what you've just read. He stood. Walked to the kitchen counter. Poured two cups of chai from the pot — the always-present pot, the black chai without sugar, the ranger's drink. Handed one to Mishti. Sat down.

"Your grandmother," he said, "saw your grandfather three days after he died. He was sitting on the charpoy in the courtyard, she said. Wearing his forest uniform. She said he told her to oil the lathi because the monsoon was coming and the wood would crack. She oiled the lathi. The monsoon came. The wood didn't crack."

"You never told me that."

"I never believed it. I took her to the Bilaspur psychiatrist because I thought she was: unwell. I was wrong. She wasn't unwell. She was: something I didn't have a category for. Something the Bilaspur psychiatrist didn't have a category for. Something that the forest — this forest, the one our family has guarded for three generations — produces. The way it produces sal and mahua and langurs, it produces: us. People who can sense what others can't."

He drank his chai. The sip of a man processing a truth he'd suspected for years and had just heard: confirmed.

"Go to Delhi," he said. "Learn what they can teach you. But remember: the forest is home. The sal trees are home. Whatever they turn you into in Delhi — whatever you become — this is where you come back to. The forest made you. Don't let the city: unmake you."

Mishti cried. Not the vision-nausea cry — the other cry. The cry of a daughter being released by a father who loves her enough to let her go and who has given her, in two minutes, the origin story she didn't know she needed. That the gift wasn't a curse. It wasn't madness. It was: the forest. The forest that had watched her family for three generations had given them something in return.

*

Her mother took it harder. Sunaina Lal — schoolteacher, thirty years at the Bilaspur government school, the woman who had raised two children on a forest ranger's salary and a teacher's salary and the specific Indian middle-class determination that education was the exit door from everything — sat in the bedroom and said, "You're throwing away your degree."

"I'm not. I'm completing it from Delhi."

"Delhi will eat you alive. You're a forest girl, Mishti. You know trees, not traffic."

"I'll learn traffic."

"You'll learn to be someone else. Every girl who goes to Delhi comes back: different. Not better. Different. They lose the — " She gestured. The gesture that encompasses everything a mother means when she says "the thing that makes you: you" and doesn't have the words for it.

"I won't lose it, Mummy. I promise."

"Promises from children who are leaving are: air."

But Sunaina Lal had also been a girl who left. Had left her village in Korba to study in Bilaspur. Had married a forest ranger when her family wanted her to marry a bank clerk. Had made choices that were, at the time, considered: reckless. And the specific hypocrisy of a mother who had been brave now forbidding her daughter from being brave was: visible. To both of them.

"Go," Sunaina said. Finally. After two hours. After dal that went cold. After Dhanraj's quiet intervention from the other room — not words, just his presence in the doorway, the presence of a man who had already given permission and was waiting for his wife to: catch up. "Go. But call every day. Not every week. Every day. And if Delhi becomes: too much — if the gift becomes too much — you come home. The sal trees don't judge."