Saleem leads the CUTIA squad’s escape into the Sundarbans

During the Bangladesh war, Saleem, known to the soldiers as the buddha, leads Ayooba Baloch, Shaheed Dar, and Farooq Rashid away from their military assignments and into the Sundarbans. What begins as a trail-following mission becomes an escape from the work they have been ordered to do: Saleem knows he is fleeing, while the soldiers cannot tell whether they are pursuing an enemy or being led away from the war. The episode’s decisive turn is both physical and moral, carrying the group toward a forest where their military certainty and their sense of direction fail together.

War and the unit’s assignments

The episode unfolds amid the 1971 refugee crisis and the war in East Pakistan, with ten million people crossing into India and Indian soldiers training the guerrillas known as the Mukti Bahini. Tiger Niazi commands in Dacca. Against this vast conflict, the novel focuses on Number 22 Unit, whose soldiers have lost their innocence but continue obeying orders. Their work makes the war’s violence immediate: they enter a city convulsed by bloodshed and are sent into the countryside, where villages are burned because they are collectively held responsible for sheltering the Mukti Bahini.

Saleem follows scent-trails while Ayooba, Shaheed, and Farooq carry out the unit’s assignments. They track minor Awami League officials and familiar Communist figures through a landscape marked by displaced villagers carrying their belongings, damaged railway tracks, and burned trees. Their route repeatedly takes them south, toward the sea and the mouths of the Ganges. The movement is not an abstract retreat from history: the men pass through the consequences of military operations even as their own purpose grows harder to name.

The pursuit turns into flight

The soldiers are eventually assigned a quarry whose skill at evading Saleem makes the pursuit seem endless. Unable to return to base empty-handed and unable to break from their training, the three continue after the elusive trail. They commandeer a boat because Saleem indicates that it leads downriver. Hungry and exhausted, they row through abandoned rice fields; the war recedes from their thoughts, but Saleem keeps pointing south.

The river is called the Padma, though the narrative identifies it with the larger, sacred Ganges. Its familiar name offers no reliable orientation: the men are moving through a place where names can mislead even as the water carries them farther from their known world. Saleem has stopped speaking for days and communicates by pointing. When the soldiers wake to find him gone, Ayooba blames Saleem’s disappearance on the earlier conflict between them and fears what may happen next. The group is already separated from its base and from any clear account of the mission.

The soldiers then see Saleem running across the rice fields with a local peasant pursuing him, while a woman follows and calls out. Ayooba interprets the scene as a personal quarrel and warns Saleem that the peasant may catch him; he also threatens to shoot Saleem next time. The scene briefly makes the flight look like an isolated encounter, but it does not restore the soldiers’ control or clarify their destination. Their boat and their orders have brought them to the edge of a landscape in which their usual explanations no longer suffice.

Into the Sundarbans

The four continue rowing toward an immense green wall: the Sundarbans, a jungle so dense that, as the narration puts it, history has scarcely found its way in. The forest swallows them. They spend hours rowing through branching salt-water channels beneath high trees, and the possibility of finding an exit seems to retreat as they travel. The soldiers repeatedly turn to Saleem for direction, but his instructions—pointing one way, then another—no longer appear to offer the certainty they expect from their tracker.

Farooq recognizes that Saleem does not know where he is going. Saleem remains silent, and the group reads that silence as confirmation that it may be lost. Ayooba, usually presented as a powerful, controlled soldier, breaks down and weeps. Farooq turns on Saleem, who endures the blows without responding; Shaheed intervenes to keep the boat safe. The men’s behavior begins to conform to the disorientation of the jungle, and the forest continues to close around them as rain begins.

Saleem’s confession and the episode’s turn

Only after describing the pursuit does the narrator correct its apparent premise. There was no final, elusive quarry driving the men south. The buddha—Saleem, though he insists on distinguishing the fleeing figure from himself—knew what he was doing: he had become unable to continue submissively in his assigned duty, deserted, and led the three soldiers toward the rainforest. Their pursuit was the cover for a flight whose destination Saleem understood more clearly than they did.

Saleem presents that desertion as a response to the consequences of acceptance: reality has become intolerable, and flight promises the safety of dreams. But the jungle is not the refuge he imagined; it is wholly other than his expectation. The episode therefore does not end with a completed escape or a confirmed way out. It ends with the men inside the Sundarbans, separated from the military world, lost in its channels, and beginning to succumb to the forest’s altered sense of reality. In the narrator’s account, the route south is at once a military mission, a deliberate desertion, and the beginning of a new ordeal.