Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

Now, as she sat in the boat thinking about these connections and interrelations, Piya had to close her eyes, so dazzling was the universe of possibilities that opened in her mind. There was so much to do, so many queries to answer, so many leads to follow: she would have to acquire a working knowledge of a whole range of subjects — hydraulics, sedimentation geology, water chemistry, climatology; she would have to do seasonal censuses of the Orcaella population; she would have to map the dolphins’ movement corridors; she would have to scrounge for grants, apply for permits and permissions; there was no horizon to the work that lay ahead. She had been sent to the Sundarbans for a fortnight to do a small survey on a shoestring budget — but to follow through on the questions now buzzing in her head would take not a week or two but years, even decades. She had perhaps fifteen to twenty years of active field research ahead of her; she sensed that this would consume all those years and more: it was the work of a lifetime.

Piya had often envied those field biologists who had found monumental subjects to work on — Jane Goodall in the mountains of Kenya, Helene Marsh in the swamps of Queensland. Being unambitious by nature, she had never imagined that something similar might come her own way one day. And yet here it was, and she had stumbled on it by chance, exactly when things seemed to be going wrong. She recalled the mythologies of discovery that had attracted her to the sciences as a child, and how the most miraculous seemed always to be those that had the most quotidian origins — Archimedes and his bathtub, Newton and his apple. Not that her work would be in any way comparable or similar — but now at least she could see what it was about, how it happened that an idea floated unexpectedly into your mind and you knew in an instant that this was an errand that would detain you for the rest of your life.

She had never had high aspirations for herself as a scientist. Although she liked cetaceans and felt an affinity for them, she knew it was not just for the animals that she did what she did. As with many of her peers, she had been drawn to field biology as much for the life it offered as for its intellectual content — because it allowed her to be on her own, to have no fixed address, to be far from the familiar while still being a part of a loyal but loose-knit community. This would not change any of that; for the most part it would be the usual grind of writing applications, trying to find funding and so on. Whatever came of it in the end, it was a certainty that it was not going to create an upheaval in science. But at the same time, who would have thought that it would be so intensely satisfying to have your future resolved, to know what you were going to be doing next year and the year after that until who knew when? And yes, it was true that whatever came of it would not revolutionize the sciences, or even a minor branch of them, but it was also true that if she was able to go through with it — even a part of it — it would be as fine a piece of descriptive science as any. It would be enough; as an alibi for a life, it would do; she would not need to apologize for how she had spent her time on this earth.

IT WAS WELL PAST NOON when Kanai went down to knock again on Nilima’s door. He was glad to find her dressed and on her feet.

“Aré, Kanai,” she said, smiling. “There you are. Come in.”

On her face there was no sign of the anguish Kanai had seen that morning, and he guessed that the change in her spirits was due to her being at her desk. It was in this way, he realized, that she had coped with Nirmal’s death and the years of loneliness that had followed — by immersing herself in her work.

“Moyna should be here any minute now,” Nilima said. “I’ve asked her to show you around the hospital.”

“What does Moyna do here?” said Kanai.

“She’s one of our trainees,” replied Nilima. “She joined the Trust years ago, when we started our ‘barefoot nurse’ program. It’s an outreach project for providing medical assistance to people in out-of-the-way villages. We give the nurses some basic training in hygiene, nutrition, first aid, midwifery and other things that might be useful — how to cope with drowning, for instance, since that’s a situation they often have to face. Then they go back to their villages and hold training classes of their own.”

“But I take it Moyna has risen in the ranks?”

“Yes,” said Nilima. “She’s not a barefoot nurse anymore. She’s training to be a fully fledged nurse in the hospital. She applied a couple of years ago, and since her record was very good we were happy to take her in. The strange thing was that even though she had worked for us for a long time, we had no idea who she was — in the sense that we didn’t know she was married to Kusum’s son. And when I found out, it was almost by accident.”

“What happened?”

“I was in the market one day,” Nilima said, “and I saw her with a young man and a child. Now you have to remember I hadn’t seen Fokir since he was a boy of five, so of course I didn’t recognize him. I said to her, ‘Moyna, is this chhélé-chhokra your husband, then?’ and she replied, ‘Yes, Mashima, this is him.’ ‘So what’s his name then?’ I asked, and she said, ‘Fokir Mandol.’ It’s a common enough name, but I knew at once. I said, ‘ Éki ré? Who are you? Are you our Kusum’s Fokir?’ And he said yes.”

“So at least that part of it turned out well,” said Kanai. “He was here, safe in Lusibari.”

“I wish it were that simple,” said Nilima. “But the truth is, it hasn’t gone well at all.”

“Oh? Why not?”

Moyna was both ambitious and bright, Nilima said. Through her own efforts, with no encouragement from her family, she had managed to give herself an education. There was no school in her village, so she had walked every day to another village miles away. She had done well in her school final exams and had wanted to go on to college in Canning or some other nearby town. She had made all her preparations and had even gotten her Scheduled Caste certificate. But her family had balked at the prospect of her departure and to thwart her plans had insisted she get married. The man chosen to be her husband was Fokir — by all accounts a perfectly fine young fellow except that he could neither read nor write and made his living by catching crabs.

“But the remarkable thing is that Moyna hasn’t abandoned her dreams,” said Nilima. “She’s so determined to qualify as a nurse that she made Fokir move to Lusibari while she was in training.”

“And is Fokir happy about that?”

“I don’t think so,” Nilima said. “I hear they’ve been having trouble — that might be why he disappears sometimes. I don’t know the details; the girls don’t tell me everything. But I do know that Moyna’s been having a difficult time. This morning, for instance, she looked completely distraught.”

“So she came by, did she?”

“Yes,” said Nilima. “In fact, she should be here again any minute. I sent her to the hospital to get me some medicine.”

“But Fokir isn’t back yet?”

“No,” said Nilima, “and Moyna’s sick with worry. I’ve asked her to show you around the hospital because I thought it would take her mind off this thing for a bit.”

There was a tapping sound on the front door, and Nilima responded by calling out, “Moyna? Is that you?”

“Yes, Mashima.”

“ Esho. Come.”

Kanai turned around to see a young woman standing at the entrance with her sari drawn over her head. A stream of sunlight flooding in from the open doorway had cast her face into shadow, so that all he could see of her was the three glinting points of her earrings and her nose stud: in the dark oval of her face they seemed to shine like stars in a constellation.