Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

They had not expected a utopia, but neither had they expected such destitution. Faced with this situation they saw what it really meant to ask a question such as “What is to be done?”

Nirmal, overwhelmed, read and reread Lenin’s pamphlet without being able to find any definite answers. Nilima, ever practical, began to talk to the women who gathered at the wells and the ponds.

Within a few weeks of her arrival in Lusibari, Nilima noticed that a startlingly large proportion of the island’s women were dressed as widows. These women were easily identified because of their borderless white saris and their lack of adornment: no bangles or vermilion. At the wells and by the ghats there often seemed to be no one who was not a widow. Making inquiries, she learned that in the tide country girls were brought up on the assumption that if they married, they would be widowed in their twenties — their thirties if they were lucky. This assumption was woven, like a skein of dark wool, into the fabric of their lives: when the menfolk went fishing it was the custom for their wives to change into the garments of widowhood. They would put away their marital reds and dress in white saris; they would take off their bangles and wash the vermilion from their heads. It was as though they were trying to hold misfortune at bay by living through it over and over again. Or was it merely a way of preparing themselves for that which they knew to be inevitable?

There was an enormity in these acts that appalled Nilima. She knew that for her mother, her sisters, her friends, the deliberate shedding of these symbols of marriage would have been unthinkable, equivalent to wishing death upon their husbands. Even she, who believed herself to be a revolutionary, could no more have broken her marital bangles than she could have driven a stake through her husband’s heart. But for these women the imagining of early widowhood was not a wasted effort: the hazards of life in the tide country were so great; so many people perished in their youth, men especially, that almost without exception the fate they had prepared themselves for did indeed befall them. It was true that here, on the margins of the Hindu world, widows were not condemned to lifelong bereavement: they were free to remarry if they could. But in a place where men of marriageable age were few, this meant little. Here, Nilima learned, even more than on the mainland, widowhood often meant a lifetime of dependence and years of abuse and exploitation.

What to make of these women and their plight? Searching for a collective noun for them, Nilima was tempted to settle on sreni, class. But Nirmal would not hear of it. Workers were a class, he said, but to speak of workers’ widows as a class was to introduce a false and unsustainable division.

But if they were not a class, what were they?

It was thus, when reality ran afoul of her vocabulary, that Nilima had her epiphany. It did not matter what they were; what mattered was that they should not remain what they were. She knew a widow who lived near the school, a young woman of twenty-five. One day she asked her if she would be willing to go to Gosaba to buy soap, matches and provisions. The prices charged by Lusibari’s shopkeepers were exorbitant; even after the fare for the ferry, the woman would save a considerable amount. Half of this she could keep for herself. This tiny seedling of an idea was to lead to the foundation of the island’s Mohila Sangothon — the Women’s Union — and ultimately to the Badabon Trust.

Within a few years of Nirmal and Nilima’s arrival in Lusibari, zamindaris were abolished and large landholdings were broken up by law. What remained of the Hamilton Estate was soon crippled by lawsuits. The Union Nilima had founded, on the other hand, continued to grow, drawing in more and more members and offering an ever-increasing number of services — medical, paralegal, agricultural. At a certain point the movement grew so large that it had to be reorganized, and that was when the Badabon Development Trust was formed.

Nirmal was by no means wholly supportive of Nilima’s efforts — for him they bore the ineradicable stigma of “social service,” shomaj sheba — but it was he who gave the Trust its name, which came from the Bengali word for “mangrove.”

Badabon was a word Nirmal loved. He liked to point out that like the English “Bedouin,” badabon derived from the Arabic badiya, which means “desert.” “But ‘Bedouin’ is merely an anglicizing of Arabic,” he said to Nilima, “while our Bangla word joins Arabic to Sanskrit — bada to bon, or ‘forest.’ It is as though the word itself were an island, born of the meeting of two great rivers of language — just as the tide country is begotten of the Ganga’s union with the Brahmaputra. What better name could there be for your Trust?” And so was the Trust’s name decided upon.

One of the Badabon Trust’s first acts was to acquire a tract of land in the interior of the island. There, in the late 1970s, its hospital, workshops, offices and Guest House were to be built. But in 1970, the year of Kanai’s first visit, these developments were still a decade in the offing. At that time, the meetings of the Women’s Union were still held in the courtyard of Nirmal’s bungalow. It was there that Kanai met Kusum.

IN THE FAILING LIGHT the boat approached a bend that led into a wide channel. The far shore, a few miles away, had already been obscured, but in midstream something lay anchored that seemed to suggest a floating stockade. Fetching her binoculars, Piya saw that this object was actually a cluster of six fishing boats, similar in size and design to the one she was in. The boats were tied tightly together side by side, and they were tethered against the current by a battery of ropes. Although they were more than half a mile away, her binoculars provided a clear view of the crewmen as they went about their business. Some were sitting alone, smoking bidis; others were drinking tea or playing cards; a few were washing clothes and utensils, drawing water from the river in steel buckets. A boat in the center of the cluster was sending up puffs of smoke and she guessed that this was where the communal dinner was being cooked. The sight was both familiar and puzzling. She was reminded of riverside hamlets on the Mekong and the Irrawaddy: there too, at the approach of nightfall, time had seemed to both accelerate and stand still, with lazy spirals of smoke rising into the twilight while bathers came hurrying down the banks to wash off the day’s dust. But the difference here was that this village had taken leave of the shore and tethered itself in midstream. Why?

Catching sight of the boats, Tutul gave a shout and launched into an animated conversation with his father. She could tell that they had recognized the boats in the little flotilla. Perhaps they belonged to friends or relatives? She had spent enough time on rivers to know that the people who lived on their shores were rarely strangers to each other. It was almost a certainty that Fokir and his son knew the people in that floating hamlet and that they would be welcome there. It was easy to imagine how, for them, this might well be the best possible conclusion to the day — an opportunity to mull over the day’s events and to show off the stranger who had landed in their midst. Maybe this had been the plan all along — to anchor here with their friends?

As the boat rounded the bend, she became convinced of this and found herself thinking of the hours that lay ahead. She had long experience of such encounters, having been on many river surveys where the days ended in unforeseen meetings of this kind. She knew what would follow, the surprise that would be occasioned by her presence, the questions, the explanations, the words of welcome she didn’t understand but would have to respond to with forced good humor. The prospect dismayed her, not because of any concern for her own safety — she knew she had nothing to fear from these fishermen — but because for the moment all she wanted was to be in this boat, in this small island of silence, afloat on the muteness of the river. It was all she could do to restrain herself from appealing to Fokir to keep on going, to hug the shore and keep their boat well hidden.