Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

After she had finished changing, she reached out to touch the sari. Running the cloth between her fingers, she could tell that it had gone through many rigorous washings. She remembered the feel of the cloth. This was exactly the texture of the saris her mother had worn at home in Seattle — soft, crumpled, worn thin. They had been a great grievance for her once, those faded graying saris: it was impossible to bring friends to a home where the mother was dressed in something that looked like an old bedsheet.

Whom did the sari belong to? His wife? The boy’s mother? Were the two the same? Although she would have liked to know, it caused her no great regret that she lacked the means of finding out. In a way it was a relief to be spared the responsibilities that came with a knowledge of the details of another life.

Crawling out of the boat’s shelter, Piya saw that Fokir had already drawn in the anchor and was lowering his oars. He too had changed, she noticed, and had even taken the time to comb his hair. It lay flat on his head, parted down the middle. With the salt gone from his face, he looked unexpectedly youthful, almost impish. He was dressed in a faded, buff-colored T-shirt and a fresh lungi. The old one — the one he had been wearing when she first spotted him with her binoculars — had been laid out to dry on the boat’s hood.

Meanwhile, the sun had begun to set, and a comet of color had come shooting over the horizon and plunged, flaming, into the heart of the mohona. With darkness fast approaching, Piya knew they would soon have to find a place to wait out the night. Only in the light of day could a boat of this size hope to find its way through this watery labyrinth. She guessed that Fokir had probably already decided on an anchorage and was trying to get them there as quickly as possible.

When the boat started to move, Piya stood up and began to scan the water ahead. Her binoculars’ gaze seemed to fall on the landscape like a shower of rain, mellowing its edges, diminishing her sense of disorientation and unpreparedness. The boat’s rolling did nothing to interrupt the metronomic precision of her movements; her binoculars held to their course, turning from right to left and back again, as steady as the beam of a lighthouse. Over years of practice, her musculature had become attuned to the water and she had learned to keep her balance almost without effort, flexing her knees instinctively to counteract the rolling.

This was what Piya loved best about her work: being out on the water, alert and on watch, with the wind in her face and her equipment at her fingertips. Buckled to her waist was a rock climber’s belt, which she had adapted so that the hooks served to attach a clipboard as well as a few instruments. The first and most important of these was the hand-held monitor that kept track of her location, through the Global Positioning System. When she was “on effort,” actively searching for dolphins, this instrument recorded her movements down to every foot and every second. With its help, she could, if necessary, find her way across the open ocean, back to the very spot where, at a certain moment on a certain day, she had caught a momentary glimpse of a dolphin’s flukes before they disappeared under the waves.

Along with the GPS monitor was a rangefinder and a depth sounder, which could provide an exact reading of the water’s depth when its sensor was dipped beneath the surface. Although these instruments were all essential to her work, none was as valuable as the binoculars strapped around her neck. Piya had had to reach deep into her pocket to pay for them but the money had not been ill spent. The glasses’ outer casing had been bleached by the sun and dulled by the gnawing of sand and salt, yet the waterproofing had done its job in protecting the instrument’s essential functions. After six years of constant use the lens still delivered an image of undiminished sharpness. The left eyepiece had a built-in compass that displayed its readings through an aperture. This allowed Piya to calibrate her movements so that the sweep of her gaze covered a precise 180 degrees.

Piya had acquired her binoculars long before she had any real need of them, when she was barely a year into her graduate program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. Early though it was then, she had had no doubts about the purchase; by that time she was already sure of her mind and knew exactly what she was going to be doing in the years ahead. She had wanted to be absolutely sure about getting the best and had gone through dozens of mail-order catalogues before sending her check.

When the package arrived she was surprised by its weight. At the time she was living in a room that looked down on one of the busier walkways in the university. She had stood by the window and turned the glasses on the throngs of students below, focusing on their faces and even their books and newspapers, marveling at the clarity of the resolution and the brilliance of the image. She had tried turning the instrument from side to side and was surprised by the effort it took: it came as a discovery that you could not do a 180-degree turn just by swiveling your head — the movement had to torque through the whole of your body, beginning at the ankles and extending through the hips and shoulders, reaching almost as far as your temples. Within a few minutes she had grown tired and her arms had begun to ache. Would she ever be able to heft an instrument of this weight over the course of a twelve-hour day? It didn’t seem possible. How did they do it, the others?

She was used to being dwarfed by her contemporaries. Through her childhood and adolescence she had always been among the smallest in her age group. But she had never in her life felt as tiny as she did that day in La Jolla when she walked into her first cetology lecture — “a minnow among the whale watchers,” one of her professors had said. The others were natural athletes, rawboned and finely muscled. The women especially seemed all to have come of age on the warm, surf-spangled beaches of southern California or Hawaii or New Zealand; they had grown up diving, snorkeling, kayaking, canoeing, playing volleyball in the sand. Against their golden tans the fine hair on their forearms shone like powdered silica. Piya had never cared for sports and this had added to her sense of apartness. She had become a kind of departmental mascot — “the little East Indian girl.”

It was not until her first survey cruise, off the coast of Costa Rica, that her doubts about her strength were put to rest. For the first few days they had seen nothing and she had labored under the weight of the binoculars — to the point where her coworkers had taken pity on her, giving her extra turns on the “Big Eye,” the deck-mounted binoculars. On the fourth day, they had caught up with what they had thought was a small herd of maybe twenty spinners. But the number had kept growing, from twenty to a hundred to probably as many as seven thousand — there were so many that the numbers were beyond accurate estimation; they filled the sea from horizon to horizon, so that even the whitecaps of the waves seemed to be outnumbered by the glint of pointed beaks and shining dorsal fins. That was when she learned how it happened — how at a certain moment the binoculars’ weight ceased to matter. It was not just that your arms developed huge ropy muscles (which they did); it was also that the glasses fetched you the water with such vividness and particularity that you could not think of anything else.

NIRMAL AND NILIMA BOSE first came to Lusibari in search of a safe haven. This was in 1950 and they had been married less than a year.

Nirmal was originally from Dhaka but had come to Calcutta as a student. The events of Partition had cut him off from his family and he had elected to stay on in Calcutta, where he had made a name for himself as a leftist intellectual and a writer of promise. He was teaching English literature at Ashutosh College when his path crossed Nilima’s: she happened to be a student in one of his classes.