Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

“Why?”

“Why else?” she said. “Because there’s a lot of money in prawns and the traders had paid off the politicians. What do they care — or the politicians, for that matter? It’s people like us who’re going to suffer and it’s up to us to think ahead. That’s why I have to make sure Tutul gets an education. Otherwise, what’s his future going to be?”

“I’m sure Fokir would understand if you explained,” Kanai said.

“Do you think I haven’t tried?” she said, her voice rising. “I’ve tried so many times. But what does he understand? He’s illiterate — it’s impossible to explain these things to him.”

It occurred to Kanai, as she was speaking, that for someone in her circumstances, Moyna possessed a sure grasp of the world and how to get by in it. It was astonishing to think of how much had changed in the tide country since his last visit, not just in material matters but in people’s hopes and desires. Nothing was better proof of this than the very existence of this hospital and the opportunities it provided and the aspirations it nurtured. This made it seem all the more unfortunate that someone with Moyna’s talents should be held back by a husband who could not keep up.

“Look.”

They had come to an operating room now, and Moyna broke off abruptly to look through the circular window that pierced the door. She lingered there so long that Kanai began to wonder whether there was an operation under way inside. But when at last she moved aside to let him look, he saw that the room was empty except for its equipment.

“What were you looking at?” he said.

“I just like to look at all the new equipment,” she said with a laugh. “Who knows? Maybe if I finish this course, one day I’ll be working in there myself.”

“Of course you will.”

She pursed her lips. “God knows.”

Kanai could tell from the sound of Moyna’s voice that her dream of becoming a nurse was no ordinary yearning: it was the product of a desire as richly and completely imagined as a novel or a poem. It recalled for him what it meant to be driven to better yourself, to lay claim to a wider world. It was as though, in listening to Moyna, he were looking back on an earlier incarnation of himself.

In the circular pane he saw Moyna’s face appear beside his own. She tapped on the glass and pointed into the dark interior of the operating room. “That was where my Tutul was born,” she said. “Mashima arranged for my admission. I was the first girl from my family to give birth in a hospital. There were three nurses to tend to me and they passed the baby to each other before they handed him to me. All I could think of was how fortunate they were and how much I wanted to be one of them.”

Her ambition was so plainly written on her face that Kanai was assailed by the kind of tenderness we sometimes feel when we come across childhood pictures of ourselves — photographs that reveal all too unguardedly the desires people spend a lifetime learning to dissimulate.

“Don’t worry, Moyna,” said Kanai. “You’ll be there soon.” It was only after he had spoken that he realized he had addressed her as tumi — using a familiar form, without asking the customary permission. There was an intimacy in this that he had not intended but he made no apology, for it seemed best to let it pass unremarked.

AROUND MIDDAY, with the level of the water edging ever higher, it was clear that the dolphins had begun to disperse. Piya’s last set of sightings was of the newborn and its mother and they put on a display the like of which she had rarely seen. First there was a series of surfacings in which they exposed almost the entire length of their bodies: the calf was seen to be about three feet in length while the older animal was almost half as large again. Next she was afforded a couple of beautiful sightings in which they shot water from their mouths, creating fountains in the air. “Spitting behavior” of this kind was a characteristic of the species — she believed the dolphins used it as a strategy to confuse their prey. The sightings were so good that she put away her data sheets and picked up her camera. Minutes later she was rewarded with a rare view of a young Orcaella tossing a fish into the air and catching it in its mouth. The propensity to play with prey was a family trait — Orcaella shared it with its relative the killer whale — but Piya had witnessed it just half a dozen times in all her years of tracking Orcaella, and this was the only occasion on which she had gotten a clear shot of it.

Shortly afterward the pair vanished. Now it remained to be seen whether they would come back when the water ebbed again, in the evening.

While Piya was in the bow watching the water, Fokir and Tutul were sitting in the stern, patiently tending a set of fishing lines. The lines had worried Piya at first, for dolphins had been known to get themselves tangled in certain kinds of fishing gear. But a close look had shown that Fokir’s tackle was too flimsy to pose a threat to animals of that size and she had let the matter pass, deciding that it was all right to ignore such lightweight lines. The fish evidently had come to the same conclusion for neither father nor son had a single strike all morning. But this didn’t seem to worry them — they looked content where they were, at least for the time being.

But when would Fokir and Tutul demand to leave? The night before, she had hoped they would set off at first light. But the dolphins had changed everything: she saw now that it was imperative that she stay till the next day. This was the only way she could discover whether there was any truth to her intuition that these dolphins had adapted their behavior to suit the ebb and flow of the water — by staying here through a whole cycle of tides. It was possible, of course, that this was just a fantasy and in any event it would take years to gather supportive data. For now all she needed was a few more shreds of evidence, a few indications to suggest that she was thinking along the right lines. If only she could remain here till the next sunrise — that would be enough.

As the hours passed, Piya’s anxiety shifted focus, moving away from the dolphins and settling on Fokir and the boy. How much longer before they grew impatient and demanded to leave? What would she have to do to persuade them to remain here? She had noticed that their clay stove had not been lit all morning — they had eaten nothing but some dry chapatis. This was not a good sign; it could mean they were running low on supplies. In other circumstances she might have offered Fokir a bonus, as compensation for whatever inconvenience he might have to suffer. But this was not an option here: the child could not be expected to defer his hunger in order to earn money for his father.

Her own supply of water was running low, but she knew she could make it last. It was the two of them she was worried about, and her anxiety prompted her to do something unprecedented: digging into her carefully hoarded stock of nutrition bars, she offered them some. Fokir declined, but Tutul accepted one and ate it with evident relish. This reassured her a little. If need be, she would sacrifice a few more bars — it would be well worth it if she could only persuade them to stay on. But her nerves would not be quieted: even as she was filling in her data sheets, she kept casting glances in their direction. Their every movement made her start: Was this it? Had they decided to leave now?

Unaccountably, nothing happened. Neither of them seemed to have any interest in getting the boat under way. After a meager midday meal of chapatis and honey, they both lay down in the shade of the shelter.

Piya was now in a state of such anxiety and expectation that she knew she would not be able to sit still and wait for the hours to pass. Instead, she decided to spend the rest of the afternoon mapping the riverbed to see whether or not there was an underwater pool where the Orcaella had gathered. She had some experience of this kind of mapping and knew it to be a simple, if painstaking, task: it would require her to take depth soundings that could be linked together to create contour lines. Thanks to the Global Positioning System it was easy to ensure the exact placement of each sounding, so that the readings were taken along regular, geometric quadrants.