Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

Shutting the door behind him, he stepped out onto the roof and discovered that the landscape, in its epic mutability, had undergone yet another transformation: the moonlight had turned it into a silvery negative of its daytime image. Now it was the darkened islands that looked like lakes of liquid, while the water lay spread across the earth like a vast slick of solid metal.

“Kanai-babu?”

He turned to see a woman standing silhouetted in the doorway with her sari drawn over her head.

“Moyna?”

“Yes.”

“Did you hear?” No sooner had he said the words than he heard the sound again: it was the same indistinct echo, not unlike the bellowing of a faraway train, and again it was followed by an outburst of barks as though all the island’s dogs had been waiting to hear it repeated.

“Is it a —?” Kanai began, and then, seeing her flinch, cut himself short. “I shouldn’t say the word, should I?”

“No,” she said. “It’s not to be spoken aloud.”

“Where do you think it’s coming from?”

“It could be from anywhere,” she said. “I was just sitting in my room waiting, but then I heard it and I couldn’t sit still anymore.”

“So Fokir isn’t back yet?”

“No.”

Kanai understood now that the animal’s roar had a direct connection with her anxiety. “You shouldn’t worry,” he said, trying to reassure her. “I’m sure Fokir will take all the right precautions. He knows what to do.”

“Him?” Anger seethed in her voice as she said this. “If you knew him you wouldn’t say that. Whatever other people do, he does just the opposite. The other fishermen — my father, my brothers, everyone — when they’re out there at night, they tie their boats together in midstream so they won’t be defenseless if they’re attacked. But Fokir won’t do that; he’ll be off on his own somewhere without another human being in sight.”

“Why?”

“That’s just how he is, Kanai-babu,” she said. “He can’t help himself. He’s like a child.”

The moonlight caught the three points of gold on her face, and once again Kanai was reminded of stars lined up in a constellation. Even though her ãchol was drawn carefully over her head, there was a restlessness in the tilt of her face that was at odds with the demure draping of her sari.

“Moyna, tell me,” said Kanai in a half-jocular, teasing tone, “was Fokir a stranger to you before you married him? Didn’t you know what he was like?”

“Yes,” said Moyna, “I did know him, Kanai-babu. After his mother died, he was brought up by Horen Naskor. Our village was not far from theirs.”

“You’re a bright girl, Moyna,” Kanai said. “If you knew what he was like, why did you marry him?”

She smiled, as if to herself. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said.

He was nettled by the certainty in her voice. “ I wouldn’t understand?” he said sharply. “I know five languages. I’ve traveled all over the world. Why wouldn’t I understand?”

She let her ãchol drop from her head and gave him a sweet smile. “It doesn’t matter how many languages you know,” she said. “You’re not a woman and you don’t know him. You won’t understand.”

Leaving him standing, she whirled around and left.

THE DOLPHINS’ QUIET, regular breathing had lulled Piya into a doze from which she was woken by a sound that seemed to come booming out of a dream. By the time she opened her eyes and sat up, the forest was quiet again and the echoes had already faded. The river was lapping gently at the boat’s hull and the stars above had become faint pinpricks of light, their glow dimmed by the brightness of the moon.

Then the boat began to rock and she knew that Fokir was awake too. Raising her head, she saw that he had seated himself in the center of the boat with his blanket draped shawl-like around his shoulders. Now she roused herself and made her way like a crab along the boat, seating herself beside him. “What was it?” She mimed the question with raised eyebrows and a turn of her hand. He gave her a smile but made no direct answer, only pointing vaguely across the water. Then, resting his chin on his knees, he fixed his eyes on the island they had visited earlier, visible now as a faint silver filigree across the water.

For a while they sat listening companionably to the Orcaella as they circled around the boat. Then she heard him humming a tune, deep in his throat, so she laughed and said, “Sing. Louder. Sing.” She had to exhort him a few more times and then he did sing out loud, but keeping his voice low. The melody was very different from that of the day before, alternately lively and pensive, but it mirrored her mood and she felt a sense of perfect contentment as she sat there listening to his voice against the percussive counterpoint of the dolphins’ breathing. What greater happiness could there be than this: to be on the water with someone you trusted at this magical hour, listening to the serene sound of these animals?

They sat a while in silence and presently she sensed that despite the direction of his gaze, he was not really watching the far shore. Was he perhaps half asleep, she wondered, as people sometimes are even when they seem to be awake? Or was he just lost in thought, with his mind racing to retrieve some almost forgotten shard of recollection from his past?

What did he see when he looked back? She pictured a hut like those she had seen on the fringes of Canning, with mud walls and straw thatch and shutters of plaited bamboo. His father was a fisherman like him, with long stringy limbs and a face imprinted by the sun and wind, and his mother was a sturdy but tired woman, worn to the bone by the daily labor of carrying baskets full of fish and crabs to the market. There were many children, many playmates for little Fokir, and although they were poor their lives did not lack for warmth or companionship: it was a family like those she had heard her father talk about, in which want and deprivation made people pull together all the more tightly.

Had he seen his wife’s face before the wedding? Her own parents, she remembered, had actually been allowed to meet and talk to each other, although there had been many relatives present — but of course they were city people, middle class and educated. A meeting between the unwed would surely not be allowed in the village Fokir lived in. The couple would have first set eyes on each other when they were seated at the sacred fire and even then the girl would not have looked up: she would have kept her eyes downcast until it was night and they were lying beside each other in the mud-walled room of their hut. Only then would she allow herself to look at this boy who was her man and thank her fate for giving her a husband who was young, with fine, clean limbs and wide, deep eyes, someone who could almost have been the dark god of her prayers and dreams.

She decided to get up and go back to the bed she had made for herself in the bow of the boat. She flipped over and lay on her stomach, turning her attention back to the dolphins. They were still in the pool, even though the tide was now in full flood: evidently this meant they preferred not to hunt by night. It remained to be seen whether they would leave the pool when the tide rose again the next day.

She imagined the animals circling drowsily, listening to echoes pinging through the water, painting pictures in three dimensions — images that only they could decode. The thought of experiencing your surroundings in that way never failed to fascinate her: the idea that to “see” was also to “speak” to others of your kind, where simply to exist was to communicate.

In contrast, there was the immeasurable distance that separated her from Fokir. What was he thinking about as he stared at the moonlit river? The forest, the crabs? Whatever it was, she would never know: not just because they had no language in common but because that was how it was with human beings, who came equipped, as a species, with the means of shutting each other out. The two of them, Fokir and she, could have been boulders or trees for all they knew of each other, and wasn’t it better in a way, more honest, that they could not speak? For if you compared it to the ways in which dolphins’ echoes mirrored the world, speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through the eyes of another being.