Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

AFTER PIYA HAD DRESSED and changed, she crawled back to the front of the boat with the checkered towel in her hands. She tried to ask Fokir the name of the fabric, but her gestures of inquiry elicited only a raised eyebrow and a puzzled frown. This was to be expected, for he had so far shown little interest in pointing to things and telling her their Bengali names. She had been somewhat in rigued by this, for in her experience people almost automatically went through a ritual of naming when they were with a stranger of another language. Fokir was an exception in that he had made no such attempts — so it was scarcely surprising that he should be puzzled by her interest in the word for this towel.

But she persisted, making signs and gestures until finally he understood. “ Gamchha, ” he said laconically, and of course that was it, she had known it all along: Gamchha, gamchha.

How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a chest, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?

There was a time once when the Bengali language was an angry flood trying to break down her door. She would crawl into a closet and lock herself in, stuffing her ears to shut out those sounds. But a door was no defense against her parents’ voices: it was in that language that they fought, and the sounds of their quarrels would always find ways of trickling in under the door and through the cracks, the level rising until she thought she would drown in the flood. Their voices had a way of finding her, no matter how well she hid. The accumulated resentments of their life were always phrased in that language, so that for her its sound had come to represent the music of unhappiness. As she lay curled in the closet, she would dream of washing her head of those sounds; she wanted words with the heft of stainless steel, sounds that had been boiled clean, like a surgeon’s instruments, tools with nothing attached except meanings that could be looked up in a dictionary — empty of pain and memory and inwardness.

In the bedroom of Piya’s early childhood there was one window that afforded a glimpse of Puget Sound. The apartment was small — two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen — and the sliver of a view through the one westward-facing window in the master bedroom was its only noteworthy attraction.

There was never any question that she, two-year-old Piya, would be allotted that room. Piya was the altarpiece around which their lives were arranged; the apartment was a temple to her, and her room was its shrine. Her parents took the other bedroom, so small that they had to get into bed by climbing over the foot of the bedstead. This enclosed space became the echo chamber for the airing of their mutual grievances. They would while away hours bickering over trivia, only occasionally generating enough energy to launch into full-throated quarrels.

Piya had the larger room to herself for some five years before her mother abruptly ousted her from it. She could no longer bear the circumstances of her confinement with Piya’s father and wanted nothing more than to shut out the entire family.

Shortly afterward she would be diagnosed with cervical cancer. But in between was a period when she would allow Piya to sit beside her on her bed. Piya was the only person allowed into her presence, permitted to touch and see her. Everyone else was excluded — her father most of all. Her mother’s voice would greet her as soon as she let herself into the flat, on coming home from school: “Come, Piya, come and sit.” It was strange that she could not remember the sound of those words (were they in English or Bengali?) but she could perfectly recall the meaning, the intent, the voice. She would go in and find her mother curled up in bed, dressed in an old sari: she would have spent the whole morning in the bath, trying to cleanse herself of some imaginary defilement, and her skin would be dimpled from its long immersion.

It was only then, sitting beside her, looking toward Puget Sound, that she learned that her mother had spent a part of her girlhood staring at a view of a river — the Brahmaputra, which had bordered the Assam tea estate where her father had been manager. Resting her eyes on the sound, she would tell stories of another, happier life, of playing in sunlit gardens, of cruises on the river.

Later, when Piya was in graduate school, people had sometimes asked if her interest in river dolphins had anything to do with her family history. The suggestion never failed to annoy her, not just because she resented the implication that her interests had been determined by her parentage, but also because it bore no relation to the truth. And this was that neither her father nor her mother had ever thought to tell her about any aspect of her Indian “heritage” that would have held her interest — all they ever spoke of was history, family, duty, language.

They had said much about Calcutta, for instance, yet had never thought to mention that the first known specimen of Orcaella brevirostris was found there, that strange cousin of the majestic killer whales of Puget Sound.

SOON IT BECAME clear that Fokir was making preparations for a meal. From the bilges below deck, he pulled out a couple of large and lively crabs. These he imprisoned in a soot-blackened pot before reaching into the hold again for a knife and a few utensils — including a large cylindrical object that appeared to be an earthenware vessel. But there was a hole in the side of this vessel, and when he began to stuff bits of firewood into it, she realized it was a portable stove made of clay. He took the stove to the stern, and when it was well out of the way of the shelter’s inflammable roof, he lit a match and blew the firewood into flame. Then he washed some rice, drained it into a battered tin utensil, poured in some water and put it on the stove. While the rice was coming to the boil, he dismembered the crabs, cracking their claws with his knife. When the rice was done, he took the pot off the fire and replaced it with yet another blackened aluminium pot. Next he opened a battered tin container and took out some half-dozen twists of paper, which he unrolled and laid out in a semicircle around the stove. There were spices inside and their colors — red, yellow, bronze — were bright in the light of the hissing flame. After he had splashed some oil into the pot, his hands began to fly over the slips of paper, peppering the spitting oil with pinches of turmeric and chili, coriander and cumin.

The smells were harsh on Piya’s nose. It was a long time now since she had eaten food of this kind: while in the field she rarely ate anything not from a can, a jar or a package. Three years before, when working on Malampaya Sound in the Philippines, she had been incautious in her eating and had suffered to the point where she had had to be medevaced by helicopter to Manila. On every survey since, she had equipped herself with a cache of mineral water and portable food — principally high-protein nutrition bars. On occasion, she also carried a jar or two of Ovaltine, or some other kind of powder for making malted milk. When there was milk to be had, fresh or condensed, she treated herself to a glass of Ovaltine; otherwise, she managed to get by on very little — a couple of protein bars a day was all she needed. This diet had the added advantage of limiting the use of unfamiliar, and sometimes unspeakable, toilets.

Now, as she sat watching Fokir at the stove, she knew he would offer her some of his food and she knew also she would refuse it. And yet, even as she recoiled from the smell, she could not tear her eyes from his flying fingers: it was as though she were a child again, standing on tiptoe to look at a clutch of stainless-steel containers lying arrayed on the counter beside the stove; it was her mother’s hands she was watching as they flew between those colors and the flames. They were almost lost to her, those images of the past, and nowhere had she less expected to see them than on this boat.