Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

The channel was a relatively narrow one, and if the tide had been low they would have passed very close to the crocodiles, but with the water running high, the reptiles were well up on the shore. They gave no indication of having noticed the boat’s passage, but a while later when Piya turned her binoculars on them again, she saw that there were only two animals left on the bank. The third had slithered into the water and the trough it had carved in the mudbank had begun to fill up again. Within minutes the depression vanished and the bank was restored to its lacquered smoothness.

Then Tutul uttered a wordless shout and pointed ahead. Piya swung her binoculars around just in time to catch a glimpse of a dolphin’s flukes. They disappeared almost at once and she was annoyed with herself for being distracted by the crocodiles. But a minute later the flukes appeared again, rising vertically out of the water, as if the animal were standing on its head. Then another pair of flukes appeared beside the first, similarly upended, and Piya recognized the mother-and-calf couple she had observed before in the pool. The flood tide had created dozens of tiny creeks that reached deep into the interior of the surrounding banks and islands. It was in one of these that the dolphins were foraging, a gully clearly too shallow even for Fokir’s boat.

Piya knew what the dolphins were doing: they had herded a school of fish into shallow water and the hunted creatures had buried themselves in the mud in a futile effort to evade their pursuers. Now, much like rabbits uprooting a harvest of carrots, the dolphins were picking the fish from the riverbed.

Piya had witnessed a variation on this very scene once, on the Irrawaddy River. In the course of a survey, she had made time to visit two fishermen who lived in a small village north of Mandalay. The visit had come about at the urging of a fellow cetologist who’d told her that these men would show her something she would find hard to believe.

The two fishermen proved to be a middle-aged man and his teenage son. At eleven in the morning they took Piya and her interpreter out on the river in their fishing boat. The boat was about the same size as Fokir’s, but it had no hood. The heat was so fierce that even the water seemed to be in a stupor, showing few discernible signs of movement. Piya was relieved to find they had not far to go. When they were some fifty feet from shore the older man produced a wooden stick and began to drum on the boat’s gunwale. A few minutes later a sharply raked dorsal fin broke the water’s surface, soon to be followed by several others. Then the younger man picked up a fishing net and began to rattle the metal weights that were attached to its fringe. The sound prompted a pair of dolphins to break off from the pod. While the others hung back, this pair made a close approach to the boat. When they were about ten feet from the bow, they began to swim in circles, almost as if they were chasing each other’s tails. Through the interpreter, the fishermen explained that the dolphins were herding a school of fish toward the boat.

For a while the fishermen observed in silence, and then the younger man rose to his feet. Giving voice to a strange, gobbling call, he swirled the net around his head and made a cast. The net landed right in the center of the perimeter the dolphins had been patrolling. Now, as the net sank, the water’s surface began to froth. Small silver fish leapt in the air while the two patrolling dolphins swam faster and faster in tightening circles. The other dolphins in the pod joined in and began to make darting charges, thrashing the surface with their flukes in order to drive the fast-scattering fish back toward the net.

The fishermen pulled in the net and a wriggling, writhing mass of silver spilled out and lay scattered around the deck: it was as though a piñata had burst, releasing a great mass of tinsel. The dolphins, meanwhile, were celebrating a catch of their own. In sinking to the bottom, the net had pushed a great number of fish into the soft floor of the river; the dolphins were now free to feast on this underwater harvest. They fell to it with gusto, upending themselves in the water, creating a small thicket of wriggling flukes.

Piya was awestruck. Did there exist any more remarkable instance of symbiosis between human beings and a population of wild animals? She could not think of one. There was truly no limit, it seemed, to the cetacean gift for springing surprises.

With the storm raging outside, there was no question of trying to get back to Lusibari that night.

“Saar,” Horen said at last with a sigh, “I think we’ll have to sleep here on Kusum’s floor tonight.”

“It’s for you to judge, Horen,” I said. “I’ll do what you say.”

Later, Kusum boiled some rice and cooked a few small fish, a handful of little tangra-machh that Fokir had caught. After we had eaten, Kusum laid out mats for Horen and me at one end of the room while she went with Fokir to sleep in the far corner. Late at night, when the storm had died down, I heard the door open and knew that Horen had gone to see to the safety of his boat. I fell into a fitful, feverish sleep, stirring and tossing.

“Saar.” I heard Kusum’s voice, although I couldn’t see her face in the dark. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m fine. Why do you ask?”

“Because you cried out in your sleep.”

I felt her hand stroking my forehead, and tears came to my eyes. “Just an old man’s nighttime fears,” I said at last. “But I’m fine now. Go back to your son. Go back to sleep.”

I rose in the morning to find, as so often after a storm, that there was not a cloud in the sky. The island and river were bathed in brilliant sunshine. I stepped away from Kusum’s dwelling and saw others nearby. I walked a little farther and saw still more dwellings, scattered over cleared fields. These were huts, shacks and shanties built with the usual materials of the tide country — mud, thatch and bamboo — yet a pattern was evident here: these dwellings had not been laid out at random.

What had I expected? A mere jumble perhaps, untidy heaps of people piled high upon each other? That is, after all, what the word rifugi has come to mean. But what I saw was quite different from the picture in my mind’s eye. Paths had been laid; the bãdh — that guarantor of island life — had been augmented; little plots of land had been enclosed with fences; fishing nets had been hung up to dry. There were men and women sitting outside their huts, repairing their nets and stringing their crab lines with bits of bait and bone.

Such industry! Such diligence! Yet it was only a few weeks since they had come.

Taking in these sights, I felt the onrush of a strange, heady excitement: suddenly it dawned on me that I was watching the birth of something new, something hitherto unseen. This, I thought, is what Daniel Hamilton must have felt when he stood upon the deck of his launch and watched the mangroves being shorn from the islands. But between what was happening at Morichjhãpi and what Hamilton had done there was one vital aspect of difference: this was not one man’s vision. This dream had been dreamt by the very people who were trying to make it real.

I could walk no more. I stood transfixed on the still wet pathway, leaning on my umbrella while the wind snatched at my crumpled dhoti. I felt something changing within me: how astonishing it was that I, an aging, bookish schoolmaster, should live to see this, an experiment, imagined not by those with learning and power, but by those without!

I felt all of existence swelling in my veins. Letting my umbrella drop, I flung back my head to open myself to the wind and the sun. It was as though in the course of one night I had cast away the emptiness I had so long held in my arms.