It was an old black-and-white print, its edges eaten soft by silverfish, showing a well-dressed young woman standing on the steps of a colonial-style bungalow that Ganapathi did not recognise, certainly not any house near Dandeli's timber quarters. She wore a silk sari far finer than anything in a boatman's family, and in her arms was an infant wrapped in a shawl. On the back, someone had written a short, aching line of farewell in a careful, educated hand, addressed to the child she was leaving behind.
There was no name and no date, only that single sentence of sorrow. Folded beneath the photograph was a small hospital paper from a maternity home in Karwar, dated eleven days after the birthday Ganapathi had always been given, a birthday Basavaraj had described with a strange, deliberate vagueness, as though it were a number chosen rather than remembered.
Radha found him sitting on the wet floor of the ruined house long after the rain had stopped, the photograph still in his hands, his face unreadable in the way still water is unreadable; you cannot tell how deep it runs until you fall in.
"Ganapathi."
"Basavarajappa told me my mother died giving birth to me," he said slowly, "here in Dandeli, in the year of the big flood. But this hospital is in Karwar. And a woman who dies in childbirth does not write a letter of farewell eleven days later."
He was not a man given to wild theories. That, perhaps, was his greatest gift: he distrusted a story that arrived too neatly, the way he distrusted a river that ran too still before a bend. Something was being hidden downstream.
Over the following weeks, while he continued to ferry visitors past the mossy black rocks near the Sykes Point viewpoint, where the Kali dropped away into a gorge and the whole valley opened up green and immense, mist rising off the water like the forest exhaling, Ganapathi began, quietly, to ask questions. He asked the old midwife who still lived near the bus stand. He asked the retired forest ranger who had known Basavaraj since their youth. He asked the priest at the small Someshwara temple, who kept, in his own careful hand, a register of village births going back forty years.
Each answer was a small, careful non-answer. And in Dandeli, Ganapathi had long since learned, when people are careful not to lie but equally careful not to tell the truth, it means the truth is a debt someone is afraid to collect.