“Midnight. Kartik new moon. The Achanakmar forest: absolute dark. Not the dark of a city, where light leaks from every window and street lamp and phone screen. Forest dark. The dark that existed before electricity, before fire, before eyes. The dark that is: the original condition. The dark in which the sal trees had grown for millennia, their roots reaching through soil that had never seen light, their network operating in permanent: darkness.”