Rohan had been in the jeep for three days, and by the third morning even the tigers had begun to feel like something on a screen rather than something that could kill you. His father kept the binoculars trained on the tall grass. His mother kept asking the guide questions in the too loud voice she used with people she was trying to be kind to. Rohan sat in the back and watched the trees go by until, somewhere past a bend in the dirt track, the jeep stopped for a puncture and nobody minded if he stepped out to stretch his legs.
He walked further than he meant to. The forest at Kanha did that. It looked open from the jeep, all long grass and scattered sal trees, but on foot it closed around you fast, one thicket at a time, until the track behind you had already disappeared.
That was when he saw the other boy.
He was standing very still near a termite mound, watching Rohan the way you watch something that might bolt. He wore a strip of cloth around his waist and nothing else, and his feet, bare and cracked at the heels, looked like they belonged to the ground in a way Rohan’s new trekking boots did not.
For a moment neither of them moved. Then the boy said something, too fast for Rohan to follow, and pointed, not at Rohan, but past him, at something in the grass. It was a set of pug marks, fresh enough that the edges hadn’t crumbled. Rohan’s stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with tigers on screens.
The boy laughed, not unkindly, and said something Rohan understood mostly from the shape of it: old, not today, gone now. His name, Rohan worked out over the next few minutes, was Sukha.
They fell into walking together the way children do, without deciding to. It was Sukha who first noticed that something was wrong with Rohan, though it took him a while to believe it.
They had been walking perhaps twenty minutes when Sukha stopped mid-step, went very still, and tilted his head toward a thicket to their left. He looked at Rohan with an expression of pure expectation, the way you look at someone after a joke, waiting for them to laugh. Rohan looked back blankly. Sukha said something, pointed at his own ear, then made Rohan close his eyes and say out loud what he could hear. Rohan managed only wind, and some birds. Sukha, without opening his own eyes, named four different calls, said which direction each came from, and added, almost as an afterthought, that the third one meant there was a langur somewhere close overhead, probably watching them.
The first miss had simply looked like astonishment on Sukha’s face, the way you are astonished by an obvious fact someone appears not to know. By the second, watching Rohan fail at something a five year old in his village could do without trying, it had curdled into something sharper. He asked if Rohan was making a fool of him. Rohan said no, and meant it, and something in his face must have convinced Sukha, because the suspicion passed into something else. A kind of diagnosis.
Sukha studied him the way you study someone who has fallen ill. He reached up and pressed two fingers, gently, just behind each of Rohan’s ears, and shook his head slowly, the way you might over a child who had overslept and missed something important. He said something short. Rohan understood only the shape of it, not the words, but the shape was enough.
He took a smooth grey stone from a pouch at his waist, held it briefly to his own ear, and pressed it into Rohan’s palm. He said something short again, and mimed the rest, cupping a hand around his ear. The stone was meant to be held close and listened to. If you were patient enough, he seemed to be saying, you could hear something inside it, and this, apparently, was where you started if your ears had gone to sleep and forgotten their work.
Rohan put the stone in his pocket and felt, for the first time all trip, faintly ashamed.
They walked on, and for a while Sukha stopped testing him and simply narrated, half to himself. A woodpecker, working somewhere unseen. The particular stillness of a clearing that meant something had passed through it recently and gone quiet on purpose. A dry, distant rattle he said was only wind in the bamboo, though he said it the way people say things to reassure themselves as much as anyone listening. At one point he stopped walking altogether and simply stood, listening, for so long that Rohan grew uneasy just watching him do it. It was not a sound that seemed to trouble Sukha in that moment. It was the absence of one, in a place that should not have been quiet at that hour, and had gone quiet anyway.
They kept walking. It was Sukha, twenty minutes later, who went suddenly rigid and grabbed Rohan’s arm, not because of anything Rohan could see or hear, but because of something he had heard: three separate calls in quick succession, from three separate directions, that meant, he said afterward, that something large was moving nearby and unhappy about it. He did not explain further. He turned and walked fast, pulling Rohan along, and the forest, which twenty minutes earlier had been a place of bleeding trees and sleeping burrows, became a wall of shapes making sounds Rohan had no names for and, worse, could not tell apart.
They came out onto the dirt track just as the light was failing, straight into the glare of jeep headlights and the raised voices of Rohan’s father and a forest guard and a man in a green uniform, all turning at once. What happened after that happened very fast and mostly around Rohan. His mother had his face in her hands before he had finished stepping out of the treeline. Someone put a bottle of water in his hand. He was asked, three times in two minutes, if he was hurt, and each time he said no.
It took him a full minute, turning in the commotion, to look for Sukha. He was still there, a little apart, exactly where the trees started again. Nobody was speaking to him. The forest guard glanced at him once, the way you glance at something familiar and unremarkable, and went back to Rohan’s father.
Rohan dug into his bag and pulled out the small transistor radio he had brought along for the long drives, the earphone still coiled around it, and held it out. It was the only thing he owned that felt like it was worth anything. Sukha took it, turned it over once, found the switch without needing to be shown, and let it hiss and murmur for a moment before switching it off again. Then he pushed it back into Rohan’s palm. He asked something short, and Rohan understood it without understanding all the words. What use would this be to him. Would it help him listen.
Sukha lifted one hand toward Rohan, not quite a wave, and stepped back into the treeline. The dark took only one of them back.
That night, at the lodge, Rohan’s family was as loud as families are when they have been frightened and are trying to recover from it. His mother would not stop touching his hair. His father kept repeating the story of the jeep and the search party to anyone who would listen, louder each time. The television in the corner was on. Somebody’s phone was playing a video with the volume too high. His sister asked the same three questions, over and over.
Rohan sat through all of it with his hand closed around the stone in his pocket. He found, to his own surprise, that the noise of his own family had begun to feel less like company and more like something physical, a pressure behind his eyes, loud and relentless in a way he had never noticed before. He excused himself early. Lying in the dark, away from all of it, he held the stone to his ear the way Sukha had shown him. For a long time he heard nothing at all. Then, just before he fell asleep, something that might have been his own blood moving, or might have been nothing, or might have been the beginning of something he did not yet have a word for.
The next morning he was quieter than usual, and it was his mother who noticed first, asking twice if he was unwell before giving up. At breakfast he found himself watching the way his family talked, all three of them at once, none of them quite listening, each one waiting for a gap to speak into rather than a thing to hear. He said nothing about it.
It went on like that for the remaining three days of the trip, in small, mostly wordless ways. Rohan took to sitting very still at the edge of the veranda in the mornings. After the first day, uncertain what he was doing but curious, his sister began sitting beside him. By the second morning his mother had joined them, if only to see what the fuss was about, and stayed longer than she meant to. His father, who had spent the whole trip looking at the forest through binoculars, put them down on the third morning without explanation and simply sat. After a while he said, quietly, that he could hear something, he didn’t know what, coming from somewhere in the sal trees, and did anyone else hear it.
Nobody answered him. Nobody needed to. They sat there, the four of them, in a silence that had not existed in their family a week earlier, and listened for whatever it was, together, for as long as it lasted.
On the drive to the airport, three days later, Rohan’s father reached for the car radio out of habit, the way he always did, and then, for no reason he could have explained, took his hand back and left it off. Nobody remarked on it. The car went on, quieter than it had ever been, and Rohan sat with the stone in his fist, warm now from his own hand rather than Sukha’s, listening to the sound of tyres on the highway the way he had once listened to nothing at all.