Chapter 1: The Forest Girl

Mishti Lal had one bare foot pressed against the rough bark of the sal tree and the other dangling three metres above the forest floor. The bark bit into her sole — the specific bite of sal, which is not smooth like teak or forgiving like neem but textured like the palm of a working hand, ridged and honest. She'd been climbing these trees since she could walk, which in the Lal family meant: since four. Her father, Dhanraj Lal, a forest ranger with the Chhattisgarh Forest Department, had put her on her first branch the way other fathers put children on swings — with confidence and a refusal to acknowledge danger.

Below her, the Achanakmar forest spread in every direction — an unbroken canopy of sal and mahua and tendu, the specific green that exists only in central Indian forests, not the manicured green of Delhi parks or the desperate green of Bangalore's remaining trees but the original green, the green that had been here before roads and before language, the green that smelled of leaf rot and rain memory and the musk of sambar deer that moved through the undergrowth at dawn.

She was twenty-two. Home from Ranchi University for the summer break — her final year of BSc Forestry, a degree her father had chosen for her and she had accepted because the forest was not a career choice for the Lals, it was: inheritance. Three generations of forest rangers. Her grandfather had patrolled these same sal corridors on foot, with a lathi and a hurricane lantern, back when the forest was thicker and the threats were tigers, not mining companies.

The morning was February-cool — Chhattisgarh's brief winter, when the nights dropped to twelve degrees and the mornings carried the smell of woodsmoke from the tribal hamlets that dotted the forest's edge. Mishti could see the village of Lormi from her perch — a cluster of red-tiled roofs, the white spire of the small temple, the chai stall where Ganesh Bhaiya opened at 5 AM for the truck drivers on NH-130. Beyond Lormi: the road to Bilaspur, the district headquarters, where her mother worked as a schoolteacher and her brother Deepak was finishing his BVSc at the veterinary college because Deepak had always preferred healing animals to tracking them.

The reason Mishti was in the tree was: the langurs.

Specifically, the troop of grey langurs that had been raiding the mahua stores in Lormi for three weeks, a seasonal annoyance that the villagers handled with firecrackers and curses and that Mishti's father handled by sending his daughter into the canopy to observe their routes and identify the alpha. Because Dhanraj Lal believed — correctly — that if you understood the troop's hierarchy, you could redirect them without violence. "You don't fight the forest," he told Mishti every morning over chai, black chai without sugar, the forest ranger's drink since her grandfather's time. "You negotiate with it."

Mishti watched the langurs. The alpha — a large male with a silver-grey coat and the specific arrogance of an animal that knows it is being watched and does not care — was leading the troop along the canopy highway, moving from sal to mahua with the confidence of a commuter on a familiar Metro line. She counted: fourteen adults, six juveniles, two infants clinging to their mothers' bellies. The troop was healthy. Well-fed. The mahua raids were not desperation — they were: luxury. The langurs had plenty of forest food. They raided Lormi because the stored mahua was easier and because, as Mishti had written in her field journal, "langurs, like humans, prefer the path of least effort when given the option."

She noted the route. The alpha's pattern. The specific tree — a massive mahua on the village edge, the tree that Ganesh Bhaiya's chai stall backed onto — that served as the troop's entry point into the village. If they trimmed the branches on the village side, creating a gap the langurs couldn't leap, the troop would have to find another route. Simple. Non-violent. Effective. Her father's philosophy applied.

She descended the tree. The descent was — as always — faster than the climb, her bare feet finding the bark grooves with the muscle memory of eighteen years of climbing. She dropped the last two metres, landed on the forest floor in a crouch, and felt the leaf litter compress beneath her — damp, the mulch of a thousand seasons, the specific softness of a forest floor that has never been swept because nobody sweeps a forest. The soil smelled of fungi and iron, the red laterite soil of central India that stained clothes and feet and memory.

Walking back to Lormi through the sal corridor, she felt: the thing.

The thing that had been happening since she turned twenty. The thing she hadn't told her father or her mother or Deepak or anyone at Ranchi University. The thing that had no name in any language she knew — not Hindi, not Chhattisgarhi, not the scattered English of her forestry textbooks.

It started as pressure. Behind her eyes. Not a headache — headaches were dull, general, the background noise of dehydration or strain. This was: specific. Located. A pressure that felt like: attention. As if something in the forest — not an animal, not a person, something without a body — was paying attention to her. And the attention had: weight. The weight of being watched by a thing you cannot see.

She stopped walking. The sal trees: silent. No langur calls. No bird alarm. The specific silence that falls on a forest when something is: present. Not threatening — present. The distinction matters. A tiger's presence produces: terror. The birds scream. The deer bolt. The entire forest becomes a siren. This presence produced: stillness. The stillness of reverence. As if the forest had paused to acknowledge something passing through that was older and larger than any creature in it.

Mishti stood in the corridor. The pressure behind her eyes intensified. And then — the thing that frightened her every time, the thing she could not explain, the thing that made her consider for one wild moment that she was losing her mind:

She saw.

Not with her eyes. With something behind her eyes. The pressure became: vision. A vision of a man — not here, not in this forest, but somewhere else, a city, a road — a man on a motorcycle, moving fast, too fast, approaching a turn that he could not see was: obstructed. A truck. Parked. No lights. The man would hit it. The man would die.

The vision lasted four seconds. The forest returned. The sal trees. The bird sounds resuming. The langurs, distant, moving away from the village. Mishti's heart: racing. Her hands: trembling. The sweat on her neck: cold.

She had been seeing these things — these flashes, these intrusions of other people's moments — for two years. Always deaths. Always imminent. Always people she did not know, in places she had not been. The visions came without warning, without pattern, and left her with: nausea. The specific nausea of a body that has been used as a receiver for signals it was not built to carry.

She couldn't help the man on the motorcycle. She didn't know where he was. She didn't know when. The vision gave her: information without agency. The cruelty of knowing someone was about to die and being able to do: nothing.

Mishti walked to Lormi. To Ganesh Bhaiya's chai stall. Sat on the wooden bench. Ordered black chai without sugar — her father's drink, which she had adopted not because she liked it but because the bitterness was: grounding. The taste of something real after the unreality of the visions.

"Everything okay, didi?" Ganesh Bhaiya asked. He was sixty, thin, with the specific thinness of a man who had worked hard his entire life and whose body had responded by becoming: efficient. No excess. He'd known Mishti since birth, had given her jaggery pieces when she was four, had watched her climb the sal tree this morning with the casual concern of a village uncle who trusted her competence but not the branch.

"Fine, Bhaiya. The langurs are using the mahua tree behind your stall. We'll trim the branches tomorrow."

"Good. They stole two kilos of stored mahua last week. My wife is ready to declare war."

"Tell her the war is over. Diplomacy won."

Ganesh Bhaiya laughed. Poured the chai — the colour of dark earth, the steam carrying the scent of overboiled leaves and the specific mineral taste of Lormi's borewell water, which was high in iron and turned everything slightly: metallic. The chai was terrible by any urban standard. But it was: home. And home tasted like iron and bitterness and the knowledge that the world was stranger than anyone in Lormi could imagine.