Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

Hearing a note of muted complaint in his voice, Piya said, “It sounds like you weren’t too eager to go.”

“No, I wasn’t, to be honest,” he said. “I have a lot to attend to and this was a particularly busy time. It wasn’t easy to take a week off.”

“Is this the first time you’ve come, then?” said Piya.

“No, it’s not,” said Kanai. “I was sent down here once, years ago.”

“Sent down? Why?”

“It’s a story that involves the word ‘rusticate,’” said Kanai with a smile. “Are you familiar with it?”

“No. Can’t say I am.”

“It was a punishment, dealt out to schoolboys who misbehaved,” said Kanai. “They were sent off to suffer the company of rustics. As a boy I was of the opinion that I knew more about most things than my teachers did. There was an occasion once when I publicly humiliated a teacher who had the unfortunate habit of pronouncing the word ‘lion’ as if it overlapped, in meaning as in rhyme, with the word ‘groin.’ I was about ten at the time. One thing led to another and my tutors persuaded my parents I had to be rusticated. I was sent off to stay with my aunt and uncle in Lusibari.” He laughed at the memory. “That was a long time ago, in 1970.”

The train had begun to slow down now and Kanai was interrupted by a sudden blast from the engine’s horn. Glancing through the window, he spotted a yellow signboard that said CANNING.

“We’re here,” he said. He seemed suddenly regretful that their conversation had come to an end. Tearing off a piece of paper, he wrote a few words on it and pressed it into her hands. “Here — this’ll help you remember where to find me.”

The train had ground to a halt now and people were surging toward the doors of the compartment. Rising to her feet, Piya slung her backpacks over her shoulders. “Maybe we’ll meet again.”

“I hope so.” He raised a hand to wave. “Be careful with the maneaters.”

“Take care yourself. Goodbye.”

KANAI WATCHED Piya’s back with interest as she disappeared into the crowd on the platform. Although unmarried, he was, as he liked to say, rarely single: over the past many years, several women had drifted in and out of his life. More often than not, these relationships ended — or persisted — in a spirit of affectionate cordiality. The most recent however, which was with a well-known young Odissi dancer, had not ended well. Two weeks earlier she had stormed out of his house and forbidden him ever to call her again. He hadn’t taken this seriously until he tried to call her cell phone, only to find that she had given it to her driver. This had come as a considerable blow to his pride, and in the aftermath he had tried to plunge himself into a short affair of the kind that might serve to suture the wound suffered by his vanity: that is to say, he had sought, without success, a liaison where it would fall to him to decide both the beginning and the end. In coming to Lusibari, he had resigned himself to the idea of briefly interrupting this quest — but if life had taught him any lesson, it was that opportunities often arose unexpectedly. Piya appeared to be a case in point. It was not often such a perfectly crafted situation presented itself: with his departure foreordained in nine days, his escape was assured. If Piya decided to avail herself of his invitation, then there was no reason not to savor whatever pleasures might be on offer.

Kanai waited till the crowd had thinned before stepping down to the platform. Then, with his suitcase resting between his feet, he paused to cast an unhurried glance around the station.

It was late November and the weather was crisp and cool, with a gentle breeze and honeyed sunlight. Yet the station had a look of bleak, downtrodden fatigue, like one of those grassless city parks where the soil has been worn thin by the pressure of hurrying feet: the tracks glistened under slicks of shit, urine and refuse, and the platform looked as if it had been pounded into the earth by the sheer weight of the traffic that passed over it.

More than thirty years had gone by since he first set foot in this station, but he still remembered vividly the astonishment with which he had said to his uncle and aunt, “But there are so many people here!”

Nirmal had smiled in surprise. “What did you expect? A jungle?”

“Yes.”

“It’s only in films, you know, that jungles are empty of people. Here there are places that are as crowded as any Kolkata bazaar. And on some of the rivers you’ll find more boats than there are trucks on the Grand Trunk Road.”

Of all his faculties, Kanai most prided himself on his memory. When people praised him for his linguistic abilities, his response was usually to say that a good ear and a good memory were all it took to learn a language, and he was fortunate to possess both. It gave him a pleasurable feeling of satisfaction now to think that he could still recall the precise tone and timbre of Nirmal’s voice, despite the decades that had passed since he had last heard it.

Kanai smiled to recall his last encounter with Nirmal, which dated back to the late 1970s when Kanai was a college student in Calcutta. He had been hurrying to get to a lecture, and while running past the displays of old books on the university’s footpaths he’d barreled into someone who was browsing at one of the stalls. A book had gone flying into the air and landed in a puddle. Kanai was about to swear at the man he had bumped into — Bokachoda! Why didn’t you get out of my way? — when he recognized his uncle’s wide, wondering eyes blinking behind a pair of thick-rimmed eyeglasses.

“Kanai? Is that you?”

“Aré tumi!” In bending down to touch his uncle’s feet, Kanai had also picked up the book Nirmal had dropped. His eyes had fallen on the now damaged spine, and he had noticed it was a translation of François Bernier’s Travels in the Mughal Empire.

The bookseller, meanwhile, had begun to yell: “You have to pay — it’s expensive, that book, and it’s ruined now.” A glance at his uncle’s stricken face told Kanai that he didn’t have the money to buy the book. It so happened that Kanai had just been paid for an article he had sent to a newspaper. Reaching for his wallet, Kanai had paid the bookseller and thrust the book into Nirmal’s hands, all in one flowing motion. Then, to forestall an awkward expression of gratitude on his uncle’s part, he had mumbled, “I’m late, have to run,” and fled, leaping over a puddle.

In the years since he had always imagined that when he next ran into Nirmal it would be in a similar fashion — Nirmal would be in a bookshop fondling some volume he could not afford and he, Kanai, would reach discreetly into his own pocket to buy him the book. But it hadn’t happened that way: two years after that accidental encounter, Nirmal had died in Lusibari after a long illness. Nilima had told Kanai then that his uncle had remembered him on his deathbed: he had said something about some writings that he wanted to send to him. But Nirmal had been incoherent for many months and Nilima had not known what to make of this declaration. After his death, she had looked everywhere, just in case there was something to it. Nothing had turned up, so she had assumed Nirmal’s mind had been wandering, as it often did.

Then suddenly one morning, two months before, Nilima had called Kanai at his flat in New Delhi’s Chittaranjan Park; she was in Gosaba, a town near Lusibari, calling from a telephone booth. Kanai was sitting at his dining table, waiting for his cook to bring him his breakfast, when the telephone rang.

“Kanai-ré?”

They were exchanging the usual greetings and polite inquiries when he detected a note of constraint in her voice. He said, “Is something the matter? Are you calling for some special reason?”