Saleem's Sundarbans expedition

Saleem's Sundarbans expedition begins as a military pursuit and becomes a flight from history. While serving as the “buddha,” a scent-tracking member of the Pakistan Army’s CUTIA unit, Saleem leads Ayooba Baloch, Farooq Rashid, and Shaheed Dar far south from the violence in East Pakistan. He eventually confesses that there was no quarry to catch: he deserted, drawing the three boys with him into the Sundarbans. The forest offers neither simple escape nor reliable shelter. It subjects the fugitives to fear and guilt, restores Saleem’s memories through a snakebite, and finally expels them by flood back into the war’s world of armies and dates.

Pursuit and Flight

The unit’s orders send it through a city and countryside marked by military violence. Saleem and the boys track people identified as minor Awami League officials and known Communists, while villages are burned for allegedly sheltering the Mukti Bahini. Their work follows a scent-trail toward the sea, but the pursuer and the quarry become difficult to distinguish. Saleem’s narration initially frames the journey as an apparently endless assignment: the soldiers cannot return empty-handed, and the trail keeps leading south.

The pursuit continues by boat along a river Saleem calls the Padma, while explaining that its name conceals the same sacred, maternal water of the Ganges. Saleem points the way and the others follow, until the forest closes around them. Only after setting the expedition inside the Sundarbans does he correct its apparent purpose. He admits that there was no last quarry. Unable to continue performing his military duty, he fled and took the three child-soldiers with him. His account makes the journey both a physical desertion and a belated confession: what had been presented as a mission was, in fact, an attempt to escape the consequences of obedience.

Lost in the Forest

Once inside the Sundarbans, the four lose their bearings among dense vegetation and branching waterways. Farooq recognizes that Saleem no longer knows the route, but the soldiers are already too deep in the forest to retrace their steps with confidence. They struggle through rain and rising water, take shelter, and try to live on what they can find. Their ordeal is rendered through Saleem’s retrospective account, which gives the forest a power to distort perception and turn fear into apparent reality.

The boys encounter visions that connect their present journey to the people harmed by their military work. A dead peasant appears to Ayooba, and the fear of the apparition leaves Ayooba’s arm rigid. The forest then confronts the group with accusing images and sounds associated with the wives and children of those they had tracked down. These experiences make the soldiers’ past actions impossible to treat as mere orders. In the forest’s imagined tribunal, the men are made to face the human consequences of what they did.

The ordeal also unsettles the boys’ sense of age and identity. Ayooba’s vision of his mother leads him to recall her constrained life and to stop behaving like a child. Farooq’s memories of his father and brother help him abandon his own childish habits, while Shaheed’s vision of an ancestor restores something of the responsibility that obedience to orders had worn away. The forest’s punishment and its return of memory thus work together: the boys are frightened by what they have done, but their visions also reopen connections to family and to their lives beyond the military unit.

Memory and the Buddha’s Name

Saleem initially remains apart from this process. He sits in silence beneath a tree, until a blind serpent bites his heel. Shaheed crushes the snake, and Saleem survives its venom. After a period in which his body is rigid and his vision reversed, his memories return. The bite reunites him with his past, and the stories begin to pour out: his birth, family history, and the experiences he had lost.

The recovered narrative is not complete. Saleem can recount much of his life, including the history of his family and the story of Jamila Singer, but one crucial fact remains missing. The boys hear how much has been held inside the silent tracker, yet Saleem eventually tells Padma what the account itself had not disclosed: the “buddha” had forgotten his first name. Memory’s return therefore restores a history without immediately restoring a whole identity. The gap persists even amid the flood of recovered stories, making the episode’s recovery partial rather than absolute.

The Forest’s Refuge and Its Price

As the water rises, the four move farther inland and reach a temple carved into a single great rock. Inside, they find an image of Kali and respite from the rain. The temple seems to offer a pause from the forest’s distress, and the group remains there for a period whose duration they cannot determine. But the refuge gradually reveals itself as another of the forest’s deceptions: the men become translucent, as if their dreams and inner lives were being used up.

Their altered appearance forces them to look anew at the temple. They notice great cracks in the rock and, in a shadowed part of the shrine, the remains of four small fires and blackened heaps of bones. The apparent sanctuary is thus shadowed by signs of death and collapse. The men flee toward their boat, but a tidal wave overtakes them and carries them through the channels. Their boat is wrecked against a tree, yet the four are left alive in a flooded rice-paddy. The water that had seemed to close off every way out becomes the force that returns them from the forest.

Confession, Consequence, and Narrative Form

The expedition’s meaning changes with Saleem’s telling. At first, the narrative lets the soldiers believe they are following an elusive enemy; later, Saleem explicitly acknowledges that this was a cover for his desertion. He also distinguishes himself from the “buddha” as he narrates the escape, then reconnects the figure to his own recovered past. This shifting account makes the reader experience the uncertainty of the journey before learning its concealed motive, while presenting the confession as part of Saleem’s larger struggle to assemble a life from fragmentary memory.

The forest does not erase the war or deliver an uncomplicated return to innocence. It confronts the soldiers with the people affected by their actions, unsettles their sense of self, and gives Saleem back much of the history he had lost. Yet he remains unable to retrieve his first name during the memory-restoring narration, and the four leave the forest only after it has nearly trapped them in its illusions. The expedition’s ending is therefore a return without a clean resolution: the survivors emerge from the Sundarbans and re-enter a world governed again by armies and dates, carrying the consequences of both their military service and their attempted escape.