Rajat Bhatia
1
The air in the Satpura forest had always felt like a living thing—dense, watchful, sacred. But this morning, Kabir Solanki sensed something else: silence that felt tampered with. The usual melody of drongos and parakeets had been replaced by the low, uneasy whisper of a forest holding its breath. Riding his forest department-issued motorbike along a narrow dirt path cloaked in early mist, Kabir scanned the sal and teak trees with a practiced eye. He had served in these jungles for nearly five years since leaving the army, but he’d never seen this particular route—just beyond Jamni camp near the core zone—this empty. His instincts told him to turn back, but something glinted ahead. He cut the engine and walked the remaining fifty meters. What he found stopped him cold: acres of felled trees, freshly cut, their stumps still bleeding sap like open wounds. Diesel-smelling mud bore the imprint of heavy machinery—illegal logging vehicles. In the center of the carnage, a half-burnt wooden totem from the Baiga tribe lay smashed, its charred edges still warm. Kabir crouched down, running his fingers along a broken pugmark—a tiger’s. But the trail ended abruptly, tire tracks overlaid its path, as if someone had deliberately erased the evidence.
He snapped photos quickly, glancing over his shoulder. The terrain here was restricted under the Forest Conservation Act. No one, not even he, was officially allowed inside this deep. As he documented the tree stumps and disturbed soil, a strange unease crept in—not just because of what he saw, but because of what wasn’t there. No calls from langurs. No rustling of leaves. It was as if the jungle was ashamed. He returned to base by dusk, heart pounding, throat dry. At the station, he filed an incident report with geo-tagged images, and handed it to his superior, Divisional Forest Officer K. P. Sinha. Sinha, tall and urbane, with silver-rimmed glasses and a politician’s smile, took the file without a word. Kabir noticed the man’s fingers twitch as he flipped the pages. “You shouldn’t have gone that deep, Solanki,” Sinha finally said, voice even but eyes darkening. “It’s a core zone. You know the protocol.” Kabir swallowed his frustration. “With due respect, sir, the zone is being torn apart. Someone is running a full-scale operation in the dark. We need to alert the Wildlife Crime Bureau.” Sinha closed the file calmly and stood. “Let me handle it. You’ve done enough.” That night, Kabir couldn’t sleep. The calls of the jungle returned after sunset—but they were shriller, more chaotic. Somewhere around 2 a.m., he smelled smoke. Then came the sound of a matchstick strike.
By the time Kabir stumbled out of his hut barefoot, the thatched roof was already ablaze. Flames curled through the bamboo eaves like a serpent dancing in delight. He grabbed his field diary, radio, and the camera with the SD card still inside. Everything else—his bedding, his field clothes, his patrol boots—turned to ash as he stood helpless, coughing under the starlit sky. Nearby, he could hear soft footfalls—too heavy to be a deer, too deliberate to be an animal. Shadows moved in the trees, just beyond the reach of firelight. He reached for his torch but it was gone. A distant motorcycle engine buzzed like a dying wasp and then faded into silence. By dawn, only smoke remained, rising into the canopy like a warning. Kabir stood alone, blistered hands trembling, staring at the skeletal remains of the home that once protected him from the wild. The fire hadn’t been an accident. It was a message. Not from the jungle—but from men who feared what he’d uncovered. And just like that, Kabir Solanki knew this wasn’t just a case of illegal logging. It was something far worse: the forest was being murdered, and someone was getting rich while burying the truth beneath its roots.
2
The sun hadn’t fully risen when Kabir left the charred remains of his hut behind. The smell of smoke clung to his skin like betrayal. He didn’t report the fire. He knew better now. The fire had been sanctioned in silence—either by those in power or those paid to look away. Instead, he slipped into the forest trail behind Jamni camp, moving like a ghost, navigating by instinct. He avoided check posts, skipping the radio call. At the edge of the Nakkar nala, he whistled a bird call—three short, two long. It was an old signal taught to him by Ramu Gond, a tribal tracker and childhood acquaintance. Moments later, Ramu emerged from behind a curtain of bamboo, barefoot, bow slung over his shoulder, his eyes wary and sharp. “They tried to burn you, didn’t they?” Ramu asked softly, his voice cracked with anger and fear. Kabir nodded. They sat under a flowering palash tree while Kabir explained everything—what he saw, what he filed, and how DFO Sinha dismissed it like a nuisance. Ramu listened quietly, then pulled out a small packet from his satchel. Inside was a rusted GPS chip. “I found it in your bike’s saddle. They planted it. You’re being followed,” he said. Kabir took it in his palm. Cold. Silent. A spy in the shape of technology.
As the morning deepened, they traveled deeper into the forest, past areas tourists never saw—old elephant trails, forbidden salt licks, hollowed termite mounds. Ramu took him to a small tribal camp deep in the buffer zone where outsiders rarely ventured. The Baigas and Gonds living here didn’t greet Kabir with smiles—they eyed him with suspicion, but Ramu’s presence shielded him. Inside a mud-plastered hut, an old radio crackled. A community elder, Baba Devlal, spoke in riddles. “Trees remember the hands that cut them. And the forest remembers those who watch and do nothing.” Kabir, despite his training, felt humbled. He saw children playing with toy tigers made of neem wood, even as the real ones vanished from the jungle’s map. That afternoon, while resting near the stream, Ramu showed him a stretch of forest cleared within the last seven days. “No reports, no permits. All done at night. They used a noise-cancelling chainsaw—silent death,” he said. Kabir clenched his fists. He wasn’t a paper pusher. He had once taken bullets for this country. And now, his own department wanted to erase him like a typo in an annual report. They needed outside help. But who would listen? The national media didn’t care about forests unless blood was involved. That’s when he remembered her—Rhea Dandekar, the Mumbai journalist who’d once exposed a poaching ring in Manas. She didn’t flinch from threats. She didn’t flinch from truth.
That night, under a blanket of stars, Kabir connected his old forest phone to a weak signal hotspot atop a termite mound wired with solar batteries. He typed the message carefully: “Rhea. I have proof. Illegal logging. Core zone. Government involved. They tried to burn me alive. Come if you dare. —K.” He hit send. No reply came that night. But he knew she would come. Rhea had a nose for stories that bled beneath the skin of policy. Meanwhile, the forest whispered louder. That evening, the call of the owlet came too early. The langurs stopped leaping. Somewhere, the dry leaves shifted not with wind—but with something heavier. Kabir and Ramu stayed alert, bows and knives close. As darkness fell, the jungle came alive with a different rhythm—one laced with tension. Kabir knew the war had already begun, not with gunfire, but with silence, deception, and sawdust. The enemy wasn’t just hiding in plain sight—they wore uniforms, shook hands at press meets, and signed tree-planting MOUs while axing the lungs of the forest under moonlight. Somewhere in that dense tangle of life and death, Kabir Solanki prepared for what lay ahead. The forest had spoken. And this time, he would not be silenced.
3
The rickety white SUV wound its way through the narrow forest road leading to Pachmarhi, kicking up long plumes of red dust as it passed. Inside sat Rhea Dandekar, clutching her DSLR bag and a cracked thermos of black coffee. Her jeans were mud-stained, and her long braid tied in a loose knot, but her mind was razor sharp. She had taken the 4 a.m. local from Jabalpur, changed at Pipariya, and bribed an angry taxi driver to drop her at a nonexistent wildlife guesthouse she used as cover. Her message from Kabir Solanki had arrived just as she was closing her laptop after finishing a story on mangrove encroachment in Navi Mumbai. “Illegal logging. Core zone. Government involved. They tried to burn me alive.” No one sends a line like that unless they’re running from death. She remembered Kabir vaguely—from a panel debate years ago about forest militarization. He had said little but had spoken like a man who knew the smell of gunpowder and wet soil. She knew the symptoms of truth too well—the tone, the urgency, the recklessness. That’s why she came. By the time she reached the forest edge, the birds had begun their midday retreat. A boy from the Baiga village waited with a banana-leaf sign: “Follow. No phone.”
He led her through thick forest underbrush, across a dry streambed, and up a slope that offered no clear path. Finally, behind a screen of bamboo, she found Kabir—taller than she remembered, beard thicker, shirt half torn, eyes hollow with purpose. He didn’t waste words. He showed her the SD card: images of freshly logged zones, bulldozed sacred groves, and a clear, wide track used for timber trucks. Rhea examined the photos silently, then nodded. “Verdanta Corp.,” she whispered. “I knew they were dirty.” Kabir raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been following them?” Rhea pulled out a battered notebook. “They claim to run eco-tourism projects in eight states, but all their sites are mapped near logging corridors. They buy politicians, plant trees for PR, and clear forests in the name of ‘development zones’.” Kabir clenched his jaw. “They’re inside the core zone now.” Together, they visited three different illegal patches over the next two days, always under moonlight, always without phone signals. Ramu Gond guided them like a shadow, never leaving footprints. At the third site, they found something new—black drums filled with chemicals used to artificially accelerate wood drying, a banned practice that meant logs could be sold faster and higher. This wasn’t a rogue act. This was a syndicate.
They returned to the Baiga village in silence. That evening, Rhea copied the contents of the SD card and uploaded them to an encrypted drive. But her satellite link was spotty, and attempts to send emails failed. That’s when she received a text from her editor in Mumbai: “Verdanta is a client now. Drop this. Don’t mess with them, Rhea.” She stared at her phone, rage spreading through her like wildfire. She had worked for four years building trust, exposing poachers and land mafia, only to be muzzled by the same media that profited from environmental campaigns. She showed the message to Kabir. He didn’t flinch. “That’s why they win,” he said. “They control the paper, the camera, the law. But not the trees.” Rhea sat by the fire that night, furiously sketching timelines, connections, and names in her notebook. The pattern became clear. DFO K. P. Sinha had approved a fake eco-trail route near the cleared zone. The same zone Verdanta had publicly adopted for “wildlife research”. The trail was never opened to tourists. Instead, it served as the entry point for trucks—operating only between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., never recorded in the forest logbooks. She whispered into the night, “They turned the forest into a ledger. And erased the animals from the balance sheet.” Kabir didn’t respond. He was sharpening a hunting knife, eyes fixed on the darkness. Somewhere in the forest, a tiger roared—not with hunger, but warning.
4
By dawn, Rhea Dandekar and Kabir Solanki were already at the boundary of a newly cordoned “eco-restoration zone” near Bhawarwada, deep in the northern fringe of Satpura. What struck Rhea first was the absence of sounds—no birdcalls, no rustle of langurs. It was a silence unnatural for a forest this alive. Through binoculars, she scanned the distant clearing. There they were—Verdanta Corp workers in olive-green uniforms, indistinguishable from forest guards at first glance, stacking logs into neatly covered piles under makeshift plastic domes. A drone buzzed above—probably theirs. Rhea quickly stowed her camera and scribbled notes. “They’re getting smarter,” she muttered. “Camouflaging operations to look like afforestation drives.” Kabir remained still, eyes fixed on the tree line. “They’ll finish this batch by night and have it out before dawn. No checkpoint logs. No satellite eyes. All done behind the veil of reforestation.” Nearby, a signboard declared: “Project Green Pulse: Rewilding India’s Future – In Collaboration with MP Forest Department.” Rhea let out a bitter laugh. “Greenwashed,” she said. “That’s what this is. They chop forests and plant hashtags.” Kabir picked up a soil sample—dry, loose, mixed with chemical residue. “Nothing will grow here again,” he said softly. “Not even weeds.”
Later that morning, they entered the regional forest sub-office at Tamia. Kabir wore his uniform—freshly washed but still faintly smoke-scented. He carried his report: photographs, locations, proof of violation. Rhea stayed behind, watching from a tea stall across the road. Inside, the air-conditioned room buzzed with printers, bureaucrats, and synthetic calm. Kabir saluted and placed the file on DFO K.P. Sinha’s desk. Sinha read it in silence, expression unreadable. Then, as if it were routine paperwork, he closed the folder and looked up. “This is not your jurisdiction anymore, Ranger Solanki,” he said. “You’ve already crossed departmental boundaries, violated zone restrictions, and failed to file proper chain-of-command documentation.” Kabir’s jaw clenched. “Sir, this is criminal activity. The GPS logs, the photos—these are serious breaches of conservation laws. This could go to the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau—” Sinha raised a hand. “You’re suspended, effective immediately. Leave your badge.” Silence thickened. Kabir stood frozen. “You’re protecting them,” he said, voice flat. “You knew all along.” Sinha smiled faintly. “I’m protecting the future. You can’t stop infrastructure, Solanki. No forest lasts forever. Might as well profit while pretending to protect it.” Kabir walked out without another word, tossed his forest ID on the desk, and shut the door behind him harder than necessary. Across the road, Rhea already had the lens focused on his face, and when she saw it—rage held in check by pride—she knew they were in too deep now.
They regrouped at an abandoned check-post that evening, perched like ghosts on broken chairs beneath a roof of moss and cobwebs. Ramu Gond brought them news: one of the villagers in a nearby patch had been offered money to burn a grove and report it as a lightning accident. Another had vanished after refusing. Rhea opened her laptop, frustration rising. Her editor had revoked her publishing credentials. The Verdanta story was too “sensitive,” and media funding from “green initiatives” had sealed every loophole. She decided to build her own story—independent, raw, and dangerous. With Kabir’s help, she created a full map of the core zone showing deforested patches overlapping Verdanta-linked areas. The pattern was undeniable. That night, a pickup truck passed their shelter, its headlights off, moving quietly along a road that wasn’t supposed to exist. Kabir made note of its direction. “They’re removing a tiger tonight,” he whispered. “They never kill on site. They trap, they transport, they sell. It’s not just logging anymore.” Rhea looked at him, stunned. “Organ trade?” Kabir didn’t answer. But his eyes said everything. She closed her laptop and whispered, “We go dark now. No phones. No signals. Just boots on the ground and truth in our teeth.” Outside, the moonlight slanted across the forest floor like broken glass—and somewhere in the branches above, a lone owl called out, unanswered.
5
The forest no longer felt like a refuge—it felt like a chessboard. Every movement Kabir made was countered by an invisible hand. Every tree that should have offered cover now seemed to hide a pair of eyes. It began with the cigarette stub—American brand, found smoldering behind their shelter near the riverbed, where no outsider should’ve reached. Then came the crushed leaf trails: bootprints over Gond footpaths, subtle but fresh. Kabir had been trained to track men in uniforms, but these intruders were skilled—paramilitary precision, no phones, no lights, no wasted motion. One night, while collecting camera traps near a ridge, Kabir froze mid-step. Across the clearing, beyond the flickering flame of a resin torch, stood a man in all black—face covered, a glint of glass where his eyes should be. By the time Kabir raised his knife, the man was gone, vanishing into the undergrowth without a sound. That night, Rhea couldn’t sleep. She stood outside their camp, scanning the canopy with her flashlight, clutching a stick she didn’t really know how to use. “We’re being hunted,” she said quietly. “Not legally. Not by law. These people are… professionals.” Kabir didn’t reply. He was oiling the blade of his khukuri with neem oil, hands steady, eyes already knowing this would end in violence.
Two days later, the body turned up. It was Chhotu, Ramu Gond’s cousin, a lanky nineteen-year-old who ran errands between villages. They found him near Denwa river, half-submerged in reeds, his throat cut with clinical precision. The police wrote it off as a leopard attack—ignoring the clean incision, the blood loss inconsistent with a mauling, and the presence of boot tracks nearby. When Kabir confronted Inspector Jitendra Rawat, the local cop, the man looked away. “Don’t ask questions, sir. Not now. You have enemies you can’t see.” That night, Rhea and Kabir buried Chhotu near the base of an ancient silk-cotton tree, wrapping his body in a red tribal shawl. Baba Devlal came, chanting low prayers, his voice trembling. “The forest knows its martyrs,” he whispered. “But its rage will not come in words. It will come in flame and claw.” Back at camp, Rhea began moving all her work offline—duplicating footage across multiple SD cards, creating backups buried in ziplock packets beneath termite mounds. She filmed voiceovers at night, whispering into her mic by lantern-light: “Verdanta Corp is not just logging trees—they are systematically removing obstacles. Legal, human, animal. This isn’t corruption. This is warfare.” Kabir, meanwhile, began planning escape routes and fallback shelters. They could no longer rely on outside help. Their phones were turned off, their GPS devices smashed. The jungle was now their firewall—and their only ally.
It was during a night watch, around 3 a.m., when they heard the click. It wasn’t loud, but to Kabir’s ears, it was unmistakable—a suppressed gun hammer, misfired in damp. He threw Rhea to the ground and rolled behind a log as a bullet tore through the air and embedded into the trunk behind them. Ramu returned fire with a homemade bow, arrows dipped in wild datura. The assailants retreated, but not before leaving behind a torn patch of uniform. Kabir inspected it later—military-grade fabric, dyed in forest tones, no insignia. Mercenaries. Rhea’s hand was scraped, her wrist bleeding, but her grip on the camera never faltered. “They won’t stop,” she said, panting. “They’re scared. That means we’re close.” The next morning, they found their supplies slashed—rice bags punctured, solar batteries stolen. It was psychological warfare now. Every shadow stretched a little longer. But with each attack, Kabir’s resolve hardened. “They have guns, yes,” he said, wrapping his knife in cloth. “But we have the truth. And this forest. And both remember everything.” He looked around at the towering trees, the vines hanging like veins, the birds still singing despite the death beneath them. “Let’s make them afraid,” he whispered. “Let’s make the jungle speak.”
6
The Baiga village where they had taken shelter was older than any map, its mud paths winding around mahua trees and stone totems with eyes carved into them. Children played with carved wooden elephants while elders sat on charpoys, chewing sal seeds and watching the jungle like it was a breathing god. Rhea woke before sunrise, drawn by the low thump of drums echoing through the mist. It was the first day of Van Bhari, an ancestral ritual that paid homage to trees that had been felled—not in mourning, but in memory. The villagers gathered around a tall stump, painted white and red, offering rice, turmeric, and strands of hair as tribute. Kabir stood silently behind them, head bowed. Baba Devlal approached him, resting a hand on his shoulder. “The jungle does not forget, Solanki-ji,” the old man whispered. “Its silence is not sleep. It is waiting.” That day, Kabir helped an old tracker replace a totem stolen by loggers. Rhea interviewed the elders, learning how sacred groves had once been protected by songs. Now, bulldozers sang louder. As she listened, one woman handed her a cloth bundle. Inside was a copper amulet, blackened with age. “This was tied to a tree the day the British came,” the woman said. “It is for protection. From men who speak sweet and cut deep.”
While Kabir traced an old smuggling path etched into tribal memory, Rhea sat under a neem tree with her notebook spread open, red threads connecting names, trails, zones, and deaths. The pattern that emerged chilled her. Every illegal felling site matched a logging permit issued not to Verdanta—but to shell NGOs registered under tribal welfare schemes. Verdanta had simply bought them out—on paper, the land had been given back to the community. In reality, it was stripped clean and sold to furniture giants overseas. She cross-checked satellite images over the past six months. The number of missing forest cover zones aligned too perfectly with the names on Kabir’s confiscated GPS logs. They weren’t just harvesting wood—they were using tribal identity as a weapon, turning ancestral ownership into a mask for corporate theft. That evening, Rhea showed Kabir the evidence. He didn’t speak for a long time. Then he took out a notebook of his own—pages stained with rain and ash. “An old ranger gave this to me,” he said. “He died under ‘mysterious circumstances’ in 2003. It has sketches, license plates, and audio cassettes. I think we’re the first ones to connect it all.” They realized then that this wasn’t just about Satpura. It was a blueprint, being used across forests in India. Verdanta was the face. But behind it were dozens of hands, invisible and well-fed.
That night, the forest did not sleep. The drumming stopped. The birds grew restless. Even the wind hesitated between trees. Kabir couldn’t shake the feeling that something had shifted. Ramu returned from a scouting run with a torn sack—one of their own, used to hide drone batteries. It had been found hanging from a tree with a slash across its center. A message. Kabir went outside and sat by the fire. He stared into it for a long time before whispering, “They’re going to try again.” Rhea came out moments later, her recorder in hand. “Let’s do this now,” she said. “Before the next bullet comes.” They recorded the confession—the entire story—names, routes, GPS evidence, the ranger’s notebook, the NGO shell game. Rhea’s voice trembled only once, when she named Chhotu. She ended the recording by saying, “The forest remembers. And now, it speaks.” Kabir uploaded the file onto three separate encrypted drives and handed them to different villagers with instructions: if they didn’t return in five days, take these to three separate media houses. As they sat beneath the banyan tree, watching moths dance around a dying lamp, Baba Devlal emerged from the shadows. He held out a curved necklace made from tiger claws—symbolic, hand-carved, old. “You’re no longer just a ranger,” he said to Kabir. “You are the jungle’s voice now. Speak wisely. And strike only when necessary.” Kabir took it. Rhea nodded. They both knew what had to come next: the strike back.
7
The road to Hoshangabad ran through undulating teak-covered hills, rivers cutting like scars across red laterite earth. Kabir drove the borrowed jeep, his eyes fixed far beyond the bends, while Rhea sat beside him, reviewing notes under the flicker of sunlight through the canopy. In the back sat Ramu Gond, silent, chewing neem twigs and scanning every roadside tree as if the forest might whisper another warning. They had one destination: the aging house of Dinesh Rao, a retired forest deputy once suspended for whistleblowing in 2004. He had refused to approve a road through the Satpura buffer zone—and vanished from departmental memory soon after. According to Kabir’s late mentor’s notes, Rao held documents proving long-term forest diversion collusion between Verdanta and regional politicians. As they reached the edge of Hoshangabad, concrete took over greenery, and the air felt heavier. They parked near an old government colony—its gates rusted, the walls painted with slogans like “Plant More Trees” under posters of vanished tigers. When Rao opened the door, his frame was thinner than memory, but his eyes sharp. “I thought you’d never come,” he said, ushering them inside. “They killed my pension. But not my conscience.”
Rao led them to a dimly lit study stacked with brown files and brittle cassette tapes. He pulled out a faded file marked “SR-Delta Operations 1998–2003”. Inside were hand-drawn maps, signatures of political clearances stamped in red, and ledger pages with payments made to fake forest schools. Verdanta’s name was never mentioned directly, but its funding streams showed up through companies with names like GreenNet Foundation, Tiger Future Trust, and BioHarvest India. Each NGO was registered under a different tribal woman’s name—none of whom had ever seen a rupee. Rhea photographed every page. “This was a dry run,” Rao said. “The pilot project. When no one protested, they scaled it across the state. Then nationally.” Kabir asked, “Did you tell anyone?” Rao smiled grimly. “I told the wrong people. That’s why they buried me.” He handed them one last item: a sealed envelope with an old pen drive and a typed letter addressed to Inspector Jitendra Rawat. “His father was my friend. An honest ranger. They shot him in the forest in 2003. Rawat might still listen to truth.” They left Hoshangabad by sunset, shadows lengthening across the road. But thirty kilometers in, a Bolero jeep rammed them from behind. Kabir swerved, shouting for Rhea to hold tight. Two motorcycles flanked them—riders masked, dressed in jungle fatigues, wielding iron rods. Kabir sped through a narrow ghat road and slammed into a dry ditch to escape. Rhea hit her head. Ramu fired an arrow, grazing a rider’s arm. The attackers retreated, headlights blinking into the fog. They were lucky to survive.
They limped into a roadside village under cover of darkness, resting near a closed dhaba. Rhea had a gash on her forehead but waved it off. “They wanted the pen drive,” she said. Kabir agreed. “Which means it’s gold.” At dawn, they drove to a small police outpost in Sohagpur to find Rawat. The inspector received them coldly, arms folded, posture suspicious. “Why are you bringing ghosts into my station?” he asked after reading the letter. But as Kabir played the audio from the pen drive—voice recordings of strategy meetings, politicians using forest code names to discuss bribes and truck schedules—Rawat’s face changed. One of the voices was unmistakably MLA Mahadev Tomar, the regional powerhouse with ties to every local election. “This can’t go public,” Rawat whispered. “Not yet.” Kabir leaned forward. “Then tell me what you can give us.” Rawat hesitated, then pulled open a desk drawer. Inside was a folder marked “Pending – Not Cleared.” He handed over a photo of a radio-collared tiger—Mowgli—reported missing four months ago. “The collar stopped transmitting two days before a Verdanta truck was seen at Bhondia gate. They said it was a medical transport.” Rhea frowned. “Medical transport for what?” Rawat said nothing. But in his eyes, Kabir saw the answer. That night, back in the forest, Kabir replayed the tiger’s last tracking signal, watching it vanish like a dying heartbeat. “They’re not just logging trees,” he said. “They’re selling life. One species at a time.” Rhea looked at the dark woods surrounding them. “Then let’s show them what happens when the forest fights back.”
8
The carcass was discovered by a local goat herder at dawn—half-buried under brush, near a dry watering hole east of the core zone. Kabir and Rhea arrived before the forest beat guard could file the usual “natural death” report. What they saw stole the breath from their lungs. The tiger’s face had been skinned. Its body was partially decomposed, but clean incisions marked the rib cage and underbelly—organs removed with precision. There were no scavenger marks, no signs of struggle. Around the site, Kabir noticed faint tire tracks and three cigarette butts—foreign, unfiltered. Rhea took photographs wordlessly, blinking hard to hold back the rage. “This is Mowgli,” Kabir said softly, crouching beside the body. “I know those stripes.” The tiger had been the pride of Satpura—radio-collared, tracked, photographed, even featured in Verdanta’s glossy brochures. “They killed the face of their own campaign,” Rhea whispered. Kabir nodded grimly. “Because the face knew too much.” Rhea took out the old satellite data Rawat had given them and cross-checked the coordinates. Sure enough, the collar had gone silent less than a kilometer from this spot. She pulled out the broken device, buried nearby. Its chip had been forcefully removed. Not a poacher’s job. A professional one. “Organ harvesting,” Rhea muttered. “Pancreas, kidneys, even bones. The black market must be paying in lakhs.”
Later that day, they trekked back to their secret hilltop outpost, exhausted but fueled by fury. Kabir laid out the satellite overlays while Rhea unpacked the Verdanta database she had finally cracked with help from an old journalist ally in Bhopal. What they found went beyond anything they had imagined. The files listed not just trees and transport logs—but species inventory: “T1 – Dispatched”, “L1 – Intercepted”, “S3 – Harvested.” Each code corresponded to an animal. Tigers. Leopards. Sloth bears. Even pangolins. The status columns were color-coded: green for “located,” yellow for “secured,” and red for “extracted.” The final column read: “Cleared.” Cleared for what? Sale? Disposal? Rhea clicked through frantic tabs. A different file, titled “Project Girdle,” showed a ledger of dates and “remittance receipts”—each following an “extraction.” Kabir stood frozen. “They turned the forest into a catalogue,” he said. “And the animals into inventory.” They printed the files, photographing each sheet with timestamps. “This,” Rhea said, holding up the evidence, “is the smoking gun.” But they knew it wasn’t enough. They had to broadcast it—uncut, unfiltered, undeniable. Kabir pulled out a folded topographical map. “There’s a telecom repeater on Churna Peak. It runs off-grid satellite. No state firewall. We get there, we upload it all.”
The climb to Churna took hours. The sky threatened rain, and the forest grew denser with every step. They carried only the basics: food, two field knives, the hard drive, and a backup SD card hidden in Rhea’s sock. Ramu guided them through dry riverbeds and unmarked trails. Halfway up, they spotted two men ahead—dressed like forest rangers but with mismatched boots. Kabir signaled to stop. A standoff followed—no words, just silent recognition. But after a tense minute, the men moved on, disappearing into the ravine. “They know where we’re going,” Rhea whispered. “Then we move faster,” Kabir said. By dusk, they reached the stone structure at Churna Peak—abandoned except for a solar repeater dish still blinking green. Rhea plugged in the drive and began uploading: 37 GB of photos, documents, audio, and raw confession tapes. As the files loaded, Kabir stood watch outside, knife in hand. The clouds rolled in, thunder cracked, and the jungle exhaled a heavy breath. Suddenly, there was a rustle—too deliberate. Kabir tensed, ready to strike. But then, from the undergrowth, emerged a shape—silent, regal, eyes burning gold in the fading light. A tiger. Not Mowgli. But perhaps her sister. Or her ghost. She didn’t snarl. She didn’t run. She simply stood between Kabir and the trees, facing the darkness beyond. And in that moment, he understood: the forest wasn’t just watching—it was guarding them now.
9
Rain fell in sheets as the final 12% of the upload crawled through the uplink. Rhea stared at the progress bar, fingers trembling not from the cold but the weight of what they were about to unleash. “Signal’s holding,” she whispered. “Barely.” Outside, Kabir wiped water off his blade, eyes fixed on the trail below the Churna ridge. Ramu had already set traps near the base—tripwire bells made of empty bullet casings and wild honey jars laced with red chili powder. Kabir checked his watch. “Ten more minutes. Maybe less.” Thunder cracked above them like a warning shot. Then—the bells rang. Faint but clear. Three times. Kabir turned to Rhea: “We’re out of time.” She pressed harder on the keyboard. “Seven percent left. I’m not leaving it incomplete.” Kabir grabbed his walkie—an old analog backup—and hissed, “Fallback to ridge path. Now.” Ramu responded with a soft double click. No voices. Silence was safer. Rhea had just hit 99% when the first shot hit the repeater dish—splintering a corner but sparing the transmitter. Kabir fired back blindly into the trees, driving the shadows away. Another shot hit the stone wall near Rhea’s head, grazing her temple. “Done!” she shouted, yanking the drive out. “Backup’s uploaded!” Kabir grabbed her wrist and they bolted out the side door into the fog-drenched jungle.
The descent was madness—thorns, mud, slipping rocks—but they knew the path better than their hunters. Behind them, three figures moved with chilling discipline. No shouts. No flares. Just the soft thump of boots and the mechanical click of suppressed weapons. Rhea stumbled but kept moving. Her blood smeared leaves behind her, like breadcrumbs of resistance. Ramu waited at a halfway bend, bow loaded. He let one arrow fly—datura-dipped—and it caught a pursuer square in the neck. The man crumpled without a sound. The others paused, reassessing. Kabir didn’t wait. He grabbed Rhea and ran. They reached the old forest fire watchtower just before midnight—drenched, blistered, but alive. Rhea collapsed against the metal base, gasping. “They’ll know now. The world will know.” Kabir lit a match and held it to the darkness, one last defiant spark. “And we know their names. That’s the only weapon we ever needed.” The radio crackled with interference—and then, suddenly, a clear voice: “This is All India Syndicate Radio. We’ve received an anonymous forest file dump…” Rhea sat up, heart hammering. It had begun. Every outlet was picking it up. The ghosts of the forest were about to speak on every frequency in the nation.
The next forty-eight hours were chaos. News portals lit up with headlines: “Tiger Corp Involved in Poaching Racket”, “Satpura Logging Exposed”, “State Officials Under Fire”. Verdanta Corp’s stock plummeted 28% by noon. Photos of Mowgli’s skinned body were shared with warnings, but they pierced the nation’s apathy like a claw through silk. Protests erupted in Bhopal, Nagpur, Delhi. Forest guards in Kanha and Pench began leaking their own data. The truth spread like wildfire—this time, not killing trees, but feeding minds. Rhea was contacted by two global environmental watchdogs within hours. Kabir, meanwhile, was declared AWOL by the Forest Department. A non-bailable warrant was issued for his “unauthorized disclosure of state records.” But none of that mattered now. The forest had spoken, and the country had listened. Inside the charred tower, Kabir stitched Rhea’s wound as radio anchors debated the value of life in conservation zones. “They’ll hunt us,” Rhea whispered. “We just cost them billions.” Kabir looked outside, to the trees moving gently in the wind, and replied, “Let them. The jungle knows who its children are. And who the trespassers are.” Somewhere below, a tiger called out—not in pain, not in warning, but in triumph.
10
Three weeks had passed. The monsoon had arrived early, and with it, the jungle began to reclaim itself. Paths washed away, tire tracks erased, and the scent of blood diluted into the red soil. Kabir Solanki stood beneath the banyan tree in the Baiga village, watching the rain drip through thick green canopies. His beard was longer now, skin darker, his uniform replaced with tribal cotton. He was no longer a ranger in the eyes of the state—he was a fugitive. But here, among the people who had guarded the forest for centuries, he was something else. Baba Devlal called him “Ulgulan-ka-putra”—the son of resistance. Rhea had taken refuge in Bhopal under a different name, working remotely with international environmental law firms. Her footage had been picked up by Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and the Rainforest Alliance. A global investigation had begun into Verdanta’s parent company, and multiple Indian ministries were now under pressure. But Kabir knew how these stories ended—blame would be shuffled, faces changed, some scapegoats arrested. The machinery would lie low until the smoke cleared. “This story won’t end unless the roots are torn out,” he told Ramu one night as they walked along the Denwa. “Not just the branches. The whole rot beneath.”
Then came the explosion. A sudden fire at a Verdanta logistics facility near Pipariya took out thousands of logs, hard drives, and a ledger office. Authorities called it an accident. Kabir didn’t. He recognized it for what it was—a purge. Someone at the top was erasing traces. The message was clear: they still had reach, and they still had power. One morning, Rhea sent a secure message: “They offered me a buyout. 80 lakhs. Silence clause. I told them to shove it.” Kabir smirked, but worry crept into his face. She was being watched again. And he couldn’t protect her from afar. He asked Ramu to arrange safe passage for her to Nepal through the forest trail. “She won’t leave,” Ramu said. “She’s writing a book.” Kabir lit a beedi and stared into the flames. “Then she’d better be ready to bleed for every page.” That evening, Kabir returned to the ruins of his old forest camp—burned, overgrown, forgotten. He knelt near the site where his hut once stood and placed a small metal badge into the earth. It was his forest ranger insignia, warped by fire. He covered it with wet soil. “You served me well,” he whispered. “Now serve the soil.” Behind him, the forest crackled—not in fear, but in regrowth.
A month later, an anonymous source leaked audio from a private shareholders’ meeting. In it, executives openly discussed “removal of obstacles in tribal zones” and “biological liabilities”—their euphemism for tigers, humans, forests alike. It ignited global fury. The Satpura Files became more than a scandal; it became a movement. New conservation legislation was introduced. Tribal councils were given more land rights. Forest departments across three states launched internal audits. But Kabir remained in the shadows. Some said he had crossed into Chhattisgarh. Others claimed he’d taken sannyas in the jungle. Rhea’s book—“The Forest That Spoke”—was launched with no public photos of the author. In her foreword, she wrote: “He told me the forest has memory. He was wrong. The forest has voice.” In one final scene, weeks after the storm of trials and protests, a school group visited Satpura. At the edge of the jungle, a boy pointed to a carved totem newly placed beneath a sal tree. “Who’s that?” he asked the guide. The man replied, “A ranger. The one who stayed.” As the children walked past, the camera trap nearby blinked once. Just once. Somewhere deep in the forest, a shadow moved—quiet, steady, unafraid. The forest had taken back its own.
The End
