Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

She was about to drop off again when she heard something that made her sit upright. Cupping her hands around her ears, she listened hard, and there it was again, a rippling in the water followed by a muffled snort, as if a man were blowing his nose into a thick wad of Kleenex.

“Shit!” She sprang into a kneeling position and listened carefully, tuning her ears to the fog. A few minutes of close attention was all it took to know that there were several dolphins in the vicinity of the boat. The sounds were scattered in direction and seemed to change location frequently: some were faint and far away while others were close at hand. She had spent great lengths of time listening to these muffled grunts and knew exactly what they were: only the Irrawaddy dolphin, Orcaella brevirostris, produced this particular kind of sound. Evidently a group of traveling Orcaella had decided to make a brief halt near the boat. It was typical of her luck that this had happened at a time when she could not see beyond her arm: from her experience of such encounters, she knew that the dolphins would become restless in a matter of minutes. They would probably be gone before she could unpack her equipment.

“Fokir!” She said his name in an urgent whisper, to make sure he had heard the sounds. The boat rocked and she knew from its motion that he was working his way forward. But he still startled her when he emerged from the fog: his head seemed to be floating on a cloud, with tendrils of mist swirling around his neck.

“Listen!” she cried, holding a hand to her ear, pointing in the direction of the exhalations. He nodded, but without showing any surprise; it was as though there were nothing unexpected about this encounter and he had known all along that they would be there. Could it be that this was the spot he had been aiming for the night before with the idea of showing her the dolphins?

This baffled her still more: how could he have known that they would run into a group of Orcaella right then and right in that place? It was possible, of course, that dolphins frequented this stretch of water, but even so, how could he have known that they would be there on that day, at that time? Groups of migrating Orcaella were anything but predictable in their movements. She decided to shrug off these questions for the time being. The job at hand was to record all the data that could be conjured out of this fog.

Despite the urgency of the moment, Piya’s movements were unhurried and methodical as she went about the business of unpacking her equipment. Just as she was fixing a sheaf of data sheets into her clipboard, a dolphin surfaced a few feet away: it was so close she could feel the spray from its breath. She caught sight of a dorsal fin and a bluntly rounded snout. There was no further room for doubt now: these were definitely Orcaella. Although she had been almost sure from the start, it was still good to have visual confirmation. The animal had surfaced so close to the boat that she had only to extend her arm to get a reading on the GPS monitor. She recorded the figures with a sense of triumph: even if the dolphins took flight this very minute, this little scrap of data would have made the encounter credible and worthwhile.

By this time the fog had thinned and with the tide at its lowest ebb, the shore was revealed to be no more than a few hundred feet away. Piya saw that Fokir had stopped the boat at a point where the shore curved, like the inside of an arm, creating a long patch of unperturbed water in the crook of the river’s elbow. It was evident also that the boat was anchored in the only remaining stretch of deep water. This consisted of a boomerang-shaped area about half a mile in length. It was in this stretch that the dolphins were circling, as if within the limits of an invisible pool.

Soon the dawn fog was as distant a memory as the chill of the night. With the mudbanks and the forests holding back the wind, no breeze could find its way down to the water. In the stillness, the river seemed to give birth to a second sun, so that there was almost as much heat radiating from the water’s surface as from the cloudless sky above. As the temperature peaked, subterranean currents of life rose seething to the surface of the nearby mudbanks, with legions of crabs scuttling to salvage the rich haul of leaves and other debris left behind by the retreating tide.

By midday Piya had enough data to make an informed guess about the size of the group. There were seven individuals, she estimated, but this included a pair that appeared to be swimming in tandem, usually surfacing together. One of these was smaller in size than the other animals, and she knew this to be a calf, probably a newborn, yet too young to swim independently of its mother. Time and again she observed it coming to the surface in a corkscrew pattern, with its little head protruding from the water — an indication that it had still to learn to breathe smoothly. Her heart leaped every time she caught sight of that little head: it was exhilarating to know that the population was still reproducing. Rarely, if ever, did the animals venture away from the bend in the river: they seemed instead to be content to circle within that small stretch of deep water. Nor was it the boat’s presence that kept them there: whatever interest they had had in it had long since been exhausted.

Why were they lingering? What had brought them here and what were they waiting for? It was all very confusing and yet Piya knew intuitively that something interesting was going on — something that might be important to the understanding of the Irrawaddy dolphin and its patterns of behavior. She just had to puzzle out what it was.

SUNLIGHT streaming in through an uncurtained window woke Kanai shortly after dawn. A little later, having washed and changed, he went downstairs and tapped on Nilima’s door. The voice that answered was uncharacteristically tremulous: “ Ké? ”

“It’s me — Kanai.”

“Come in. The door’s open.”

Kanai entered to find a bleary-eyed Nilima sitting propped up in bed with a bank of pillows behind her and a large quilt piled over her legs. There was a cup of tea on the bedside table, and next to it a saucer filled with Marie biscuits. No clothes or personal effects were anywhere to be seen while books and files lay stacked everywhere — under the bed, on the floor and even in the swell of the mosquito net. The room was sparsely utilitarian in appearance, with very few furnishings other than file cabinets and bookcases. But for the presence of a large four-poster bed, it would have been easy to mistake it for an extension of the Trust’s offices.

“You’re not looking well,” said Kanai. “Has a doctor been sent for?” Nilima blew her nose into a handkerchief. “It’s just a cold,” she said. “Why do I need a doctor to tell me that?” “You shouldn’t have come to Canning yesterday,” said Kanai. “It was too much for you. You should take better care of your health.”

Nilima brushed this off with a flick of her hand. “Enough about me,” she said. “Sit down over here and tell me how you’ve been faring. Did you sleep well last night?”

“Well enough.”

“And the packet?” she cried eagerly. “Did you find it?”

“Yes. It was exactly where you said it would be.”

“So then, bal to ré, tell me,” said Nilima, “were they poems or stories?”

Kanai could tell from the expectant tone of her voice that she had already begun to believe that her husband’s literary reputation would be posthumously restored by the contents of the packet she had found. It pained him to disappoint her and he tried to let her down as gently as he could. “Actually, it’s not what I’d expected,” he said. “I thought I’d find poems, essays, stories. But what I found instead was some kind of journal or diary. It was written in an exercise book — just a common khata, like schoolchildren use.”