Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

“Oh?” Nilima’s eyes dimmed and she breathed a sigh of dejection. “And when was it written? Does it say?”

“Yes,” said Kanai. “It was written in 1979.”

“In 1979?” Nilima was quiet for a moment as she thought this over. “But that was the year of his death. He died in July. Are you sure it was written in that year?”

“Yes,” said Kanai. “Why should that surprise you?”

“I’ll tell you why,” she said. “Because that was the one year of his life when he did no writing at all. He had retired as headmaster of the Lusibari school the year before and it was a difficult time for him. The school had been his whole life for almost three decades — ever since we came to Lusibari. His behavior became erratic at this time. As you know, he had a history of mental instability, so it was very worrying for me. He used to disappear for days, and afterward he wouldn’t be able to recall where he had been. He was all in an uproar that year. He was in no state to do any writing.”

“Maybe he had a brief period of lucidity,” Kanai said. “I have the impression the entire notebook was written over one or two days.”

“And do you know the dates?” said Nilima, watching him closely.

“Yes,” said Kanai. “He started writing it on the morning of May 15, 1979. In a place called Morichjhãpi.”

“Morichjhãpi!” There was a sudden intake of breath as Nilima said the word.

“Yes,” said Kanai. “Tell me what happened there.”

Morichjhãpi, said Nilima, was a tide country island a couple of hours from Lusibari by boat. It fell within a part of the Sundarbans reserved for tiger conservation, but unlike many such islands it was relatively easily accessible from the mainland. In 1978 a great number of people suddenly appeared on Morichjhãpi. In this place where there had been no inhabitants before there were now thousands, almost overnight. Within a matter of weeks they had cleared the mangroves, built bãdhs and put up huts. It happened so quickly that in the beginning no one even knew who these people were. But in time it came to be learned that they were refugees, originally from Bangladesh. Some had come to India after Partition, while others had trickled over later. In Bangladesh they had been among the poorest of rural people, oppressed and exploited both by Muslim communalists and by Hindus of the upper castes.

“Most of them were Dalits, as we say now,” said Nilima. “Harijans, as we used to say then.”

But it was not from Bangladesh that these refugees were fleeing when they came to Morichjhãpi; it was from a government resettlement camp in central India. In the years after Partition the authorities had removed the refugees to a place called Dandakaranya, deep in the forests of Madhya Pradesh, hundreds of miles from Bengal.

“They called it resettlement,” said Nilima, “but people say it was more like a concentration camp or a prison. The refugees were surrounded by security forces and forbidden to leave. Those who tried to get away were hunted down.”

The soil was rocky and the environment was nothing like they had ever known. They could not speak the languages of that area and the local people treated them as intruders, attacking them with bows, arrows and other weapons. For many years they put up with these conditions. Then in 1978 some of them organized themselves and broke out of the camp. By train and on foot they moved eastward in the hope of settling in the Sundarbans. Morichjhãpi was the place they decided on.

Earlier that year a Left Front ministry had taken power in West Bengal and the refugees may have assumed that they would not face much opposition from the state government. But this was a miscalculation: the authorities had declared that Morichjhãpi was a protected forest reserve and they had proved unbending in their determination to evict the settlers. Over a period of about a year there had been a series of confrontations between the settlers and government forces.

“And the final clash,” Nilima said, “if I recall correctly, was in mid-May of that year, 1979.”

“So do you think Nirmal was there at the time?” Kanai stopped to consider another possibility. “Or was it perhaps just a fantasy?”

“I don’t know, Kanai,” Nilima said, looking down at her hands. “I really don’t know. He became a stranger to me that year. He wouldn’t talk to me. He would hide things. It was as if I had become his enemy.”

Kanai could see that Nilima was close to tears and his heart went out to her. “It must have been very hard for you.”

“It was,” she said. “I could see that he had developed some kind of obsession with Morichjhãpi and I was very uneasy about it. I knew there was going to be trouble and I just wanted to keep him from harm.”

Kanai scratched his head. “I still don’t understand. Why did this cause have so much appeal for him?”

Nilima’s answer was slow in coming. “You have to remember, Kanai,” she said at length, “that as a young man Nirmal was in love with the idea of revolution. Men like that, even when they turn their backs on their party and their comrades, can never let go of the idea: it’s the secret god that rules their hearts. It is what makes them come alive; they revel in the danger, the exquisite pain. It is to them what childbirth is to a woman, or war to a mercenary.”

“But these settlers weren’t revolutionaries, were they?”

“No,” said Nilima. “Not at all. Their aims were quite straightforward. They just wanted a little land to settle on. But for that they were willing to pit themselves against the government. They were prepared to resist until the end. That was enough. This was the closest Nirmal would ever come to a revolutionary moment. He desperately wanted to be a part of it. Perhaps it was his way of delaying the recognition of his age.”

Kanai was hard put to reconcile the gentle, dhoti-clad man of his memories with this image of a revolutionary. “Did you try to reason with him?”

“Yes, of course,” Nilima said. “But he would say, ‘You’ve joined the rulers; you’ve begun to think like them. That’s what comes of doing the sort of social work you’ve been doing all these years. You’ve lost sight of the important things.’ She shut her eyes as she recalled the contempt with which her own husband had dismissed her life’s work. She turned her head to brush away tears. “We were like two ghosts living in the same house. At the end he seemed to want only to hurt me. Just think about it, Kanai — why else would he have insisted on leaving this notebook to you and not to me?”

“I don’t know what to say.” Kanai had assumed that Nirmal had wanted him to have the notebook because he, Kanai, represented a slender connection to the ears of an unheeding world. He had not for a moment considered the possibility that Nirmal had intended to wound Nilima. The idea shocked him. He had always known Nirmal to be eccentric, but he had never thought him to be capable of malice or cruelty, especially to his own wife. Like everyone who knew them, he had always assumed that Nilima and Nirmal were content in their marriage, that theirs was a happy, if unlikely, pairing. He realized now that it was only because Nirmal never left Lusibari that they had been able to sustain this illusion.

Thinking of what Nilima had been through all these years, an unfamiliar lump arose in Kanai’s throat. “Look,” he said, rising to his feet. “I’ll give you that notebook right now. You can keep it or throw it away — do whatever you like. I don’t want to have anything more to do with it.”

“No, Kanai!” cried Nilima. “Sit down.” Reaching for his hand, she pulled him back into his chair. “Kanai, listen to me: I always did my best to do my duty by Nirmal. It’s very important to me that his last wishes are not dishonored. I don’t know why he wanted you to have the book; I don’t know what’s in it — but that’s how it must be.”