Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

“Yes,” he said with a nod. “I’m very rarely wrong about accents. I’m a translator you see, and an interpreter as well, by profession. I like to think that my ears are tuned to the nuances of spoken language.”

“Oh really?” She smiled so that her teeth shone brightly in the dark oval of her face. “And how many languages do you know?”

“Six. Not including dialects.”

“Wow!” Her admiration was unfeigned now. “I’m afraid English is my only language. And I wouldn’t claim to be much good at it either.”

A frown of puzzlement appeared on his forehead. “And you’re on your way to Canning you said?”

“Yes.”

“But tell me this,” he said. “If you don’t know any Bengali or Hindi, how are you planning to find your way around over there?”

“I’ll do what I usually do,” she said with a laugh. “I’ll try to wing it. Anyway, in my line of work there’s not much talk needed.”

“And what is your line of work, if I may ask?”

“I’m a cetologist,” she said. “That means —” She was beginning, almost apologetically, to expand on this when he interrupted her.

“I know what it means,” he said sharply. “You don’t need to explain. It means you study marine mammals. Right?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “You’re very well informed. Marine mammals are what I study — dolphins, whales, dugongs and so on. My work takes me out on the water for days sometimes, with no one to talk to — no one who speaks English, anyway.”

“So is it your work that takes you to Canning?”

“That’s right. I’m hoping to wangle a permit to do a survey of the marine mammals of the Sundarbans.”

For once he was silenced, although only briefly. “I’m amazed,” he said presently. “I didn’t even know there were any such.”

“Oh yes, there are,” she said. “Or there used to be, anyway. Very large numbers of them.”

“Really? All we ever hear about is the tigers and the crocodiles.”

“I know,” she said. “The cetacean population has kind of disappeared from view. No one knows whether it’s because they’re gone or because they haven’t been studied. There hasn’t ever been a comprehensive survey.”

“And why’s that?”

“Maybe because it’s impossible to get permission?” she said. “There was a team here last year. They prepared for months, sent in their papers and everything. But they didn’t even make it out on the water. Their permits were withdrawn at the last minute.”

“And why do you think you’ll fare any better?”

“It’s easier to slip through the net if you’re on your own,” she said. There was a brief pause and then, with a tight-lipped smile, she added, “Besides, I have an uncle in Kolkata who’s a big wheel in the government. He’s spoken to someone in the Forest Department’s office in Canning. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”

“I see.” He seemed to be impressed as much by her candor as her canniness. “So you have relatives in Calcutta then?”

“Yes. In fact I was born there myself, although my parents left when I was just a year old.” She turned a sharp glance on him, raising an eyebrow. “I see you still say ‘Calcutta.’ My father does that too.”

Kanai acknowledged the correction with a nod. “You’re right — I should be more careful, but the renaming was so recent that I do get confused sometimes. I try to reserve ‘Calcutta’ for the past and ‘Kolkata’ for the present, but occasionally I slip. Especially when I’m speaking English.” He smiled and put out a hand. “I should introduce myself; I’m Kanai Dutt.”

“And I’m Piyali Roy — but everyone calls me Piya.”

She could tell he was surprised by the unmistakably Bengali sound of her name: evidently her ignorance of the language had given him the impression that her family’s origins lay in some other part of India.

“You have a Bengali name,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “And yet you know no Bangla?”

“It’s not my fault really,” she said quickly, her voice growing defensive. “I grew up in Seattle. I was so little when I left India that I never had a chance to learn.”

“By that token, having grown up in Calcutta, I should speak no English.”

“Except that I just happen to be terrible at languages … ”She let the sentence trail away unfinished, and then changed the subject. “And what brings you to Canning, Mr. Dutt?”

“Kanai — call me Kanai.”

“Kan-ay.”

He was quick to correct her when she stumbled over the pronunciation: “Say it to rhyme with Hawaii.”

“Kanaii?”

“Yes, that’s right. And to answer your question — I’m on my way to visit an aunt of mine.”

“She lives in Canning?”

“No,” he said. “She lives in a place called Lusibari. It’s quite a long way from Canning.”

“Where exactly?” Piya unzipped a pocket in one of her backpacks and pulled out a map. “Show me. On this.”

Kanai spread the map out and used a fingertip to trace a winding line through the tidal channels and waterways. “Canning is the railhead for the Sundarbans,” he said, “and Lusibari is the farthest of the inhabited islands. It’s a long way upriver — you have to go past Annpur, Jamespur and Emilybari. And there it is: Lusibari.”

Piya knitted her eyebrows as she looked at the map. “Strange names.”

“You’d be surprised how many places in the Sundarbans have names that come from English,” Kanai said. “Lusibari just means ‘Lucy’s House.’”

“Lucy’s House?” Piya looked up in surprise. “As in the name Lucy?”

“Yes.” A gleam came into his eyes and he said, “You should come and visit the place. I’ll tell you the story of how it got its name.”

“Is that an invitation?” Piya said, smiling.

“Absolutely,” Kanai responded. “Come. I’m inviting you. Your company will lighten the burden of my exile.”

Piya laughed. She had thought at first that Kanai was much too full of himself, but now she was inclined to be slightly more generous in her assessment: she had caught sight of a glimmer of irony somewhere that made his self-centeredness appear a little more interesting than she had first imagined.

“But how would I find you?” she said. “Where would I look?”

“Just make your way to the hospital in Lusibari,” said Kanai, “and ask for Mashima. They’ll take you to my aunt and she’ll know where I am.”

“Mashima?” said Piya. “But I have a Mashima too — doesn’t it just mean ‘aunt’? There must be more than one aunt there: yours can’t be the only one?”

“If you go to the hospital and ask for Mashima,” said Kanai, “everyone will know who you mean. My aunt founded it, you see, and she heads the organization that runs it, the Badabon Trust. She’s a real personage on the island — everyone calls her Mashima, even though her real name is Nilima Bose. They were quite a pair, she and her husband. People always called him Saar, just as they call her Mashima.”

“Saar? And what does that mean?”

Kanai laughed. “It’s just a Bangla way of saying Sir. He was the headmaster of the local school, you see, so all his pupils called him Sir. In time people forgot he had a real name — Nirmal Bose.”

“I notice you’re speaking of him in the past tense.”

“Yes. He’s been dead a long time.” No sooner had he spoken than Kanai pulled a face, as if to disclaim what he had just said. “But to tell you the truth, right now it doesn’t feel like he’s been gone a long time.”

“How come?”

“Because he’s risen from his ashes to summon me,” Kanai said with a smile. “You see, he’d left some papers for me at the time of his death. They’d been lost all these years, but now they’ve turned up again. That’s why I’m on my way there: my aunt wanted me to come and look at them.”