Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

“I don’t get it,” she said with a smile. “You say you’re sorry for me, but you don’t seem to have much sympathy for Fokir. Even though you knew his mother. How come?”

His face hardened and he gave a snort of ironic laughter. “So far as Fokir is concerned I’m afraid my sympathies are mainly with his wife.”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you feel for her this morning?” said Kanai. “Just imagine how hard it must be to live with someone like Fokir while also trying to provide for a family and keep a roof over your head. If you consider her circumstances — her caste, her upbringing — it’s very remarkable that she’s had the forethought to figure out how to get by in today’s world. And it isn’t just that she wants to get by — she wants to do well; she wants to make a success of her life.”

Piya nodded. “I get it.” She understood now that for Kanai there was a certain reassurance in meeting a woman like Moyna, in such a place as Lusibari: it was as if her very existence were a validation of the choices he had made in his own life. It was important for him to believe that his values were, at bottom, egalitarian, liberal, meritocratic. It reassured him to be able to think, “What I want for myself is no different from what everybody wants, no matter how rich or poor; everyone who has any drive, any energy, wants to get on in the world — Moyna is the proof.” Piya understood too that this was a looking glass in which a man like Fokir could never be anything other than a figure glimpsed through a rear-view mirror, a rapidly diminishing presence, a ghost from the perpetual past that was Lusibari. But she guessed also that despite its newness and energy, the country Kanai inhabited was full of these ghosts, these unseen presences whose murmurings could never quite be silenced no matter how loud you spoke.

Piya said, “You really like Moyna, don’t you?”

“I admire her,” said Kanai. “That’s how I would put it.”

“I know you do,” Piya said. “But has it occurred to you that she might look a little different from Fokir’s angle?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just ask yourself this,” said Piya. “How would you like to be married to her?”

Kanai laughed and when he spoke again his voice had an edge of flippancy that made Piya grate her teeth. “I’d say Moyna is the kind of woman who would be good for a brief but exciting dalliance,” he said. “A fling, as we used to say. But as for anything more lasting — no. I’d say someone like you would be much more to my taste.”

Piya raised her hand to her ear stud and fingered it delicately, as if for reassurance. With a wary smile she said, “Are you flirting with me, Kanai?”

“Can’t you tell?” he said, grinning.

“I’m out of practice,” she said.

“Well, we have to do something about that, don’t we?”

He was interrupted by a shout from below. “Kanai-babu.”

Looking over the parapet, they saw that Fokir was standing on the path below. On catching sight of Piya he dropped his head and shuffled his feet. Then, after addressing a few words to Kanai, he turned abruptly on his heel and walked away in the direction of the embankment.

“What did he say?” said Piya.

“He wanted me to tell you that Horen Naskor will be here tomorrow with the bhotbhoti,” said Kanai. “You can look it over and if it’s OK you can leave day after tomorrow.”

“Good!” cried Piya. “I’d better go and organize my stuff.”

She noticed that the interruption had annoyed Kanai as much as it had pleased her. He was frowning as he said, “And I suppose I’d better get back to my uncle’s notebook.”

And if it were not for Horen, perhaps I would have been content to live out my days in the embrace of all the habits that liked me so much they would never let go. But he sought me out one day and said, “Saar, it’s mid-January, almost time for the Bon Bibi puja. Kusum and Fokir want to go to Garjontola and I’m going to take them there. She asked if you wanted to come.”

“Garjontola?” I said. “Where is that?”

“It’s an island,” he said, “deep in the jungle. Kusum’s father built a shrine to Bon Bibi there. That’s why she wants to go.”

This offered a dilemma of a new kind. In the past, I had always taken care to hold myself apart from matters of religious devotion. It was not just that I thought of these beliefs as false consciousness; it was also because I had seen at first hand the horrors that religion had visited upon us at the time of Partition. As headmaster I had felt it my duty not to identify myself with any set of religious beliefs, Hindu, Muslim or anything else. This was why, strange as it may seem, I had never seen a Bon Bibi puja or, indeed, taken any interest in this deity. But I was no longer a headmaster and the considerations that had once kept me aloof from such matters were no longer applicable.

But what about Nilima’s injunctions? What about her plea that I stay away from Morichjhãpi? I persuaded myself that this trip would not count as going to Morichjhãpi, since we would, after all, be heading to another island. “All right, Horen,” I said. “But remember — not a word to Mashima.”

“No, Saar, of course. No.”

The next morning Horen came at dawn and we set off.

A couple of months had passed since I was last at Morichjhãpi, and when we got there, it was clear at a glance that much had changed in the meanwhile: the euphoria of the time before had given way to fear and slow, nagging doubts. A wooden watchtower had been erected, for instance, and there were groups of settlers patrolling the island’s shore. When our boat pulled in, we were immediately surrounded by several men. “Who are you?” they asked. “What’s your business here?”

We were a little shaken when we got to Kusum’s thatch-roofed dwelling. It was clear that she too was under strain. She explained that in recent weeks the government had been stepping up the pressure on the settlers: policemen and officials had visited and offered inducements for them to leave. When these proved ineffective, they had made threats. Although the settlers were unmoved in their resolve, a kind of nervousness had set in: no one knew what was going to happen next.

The morning was quite advanced now, so we hurried on our way. Kusum and Fokir had made small clay images of Bon Bibi and her brother, Shah Jongoli. These we loaded on Horen’s boat and then pulled away from the island.

Once we were out on the river, the tide lifted everyone’s spirits. There were many other boats on the waters, all out on similar errands. Some of them had twenty or thirty people on board. Along with massive, wellpainted images of Bon Bibi and Shah Jongoli, they also had singers and drummers.

On our boat were just the four of us: Horen, Fokir, Kusum and me.

“Why didn’t you bring your children?” I asked Horen. “What about your family?”

“They went with my father-in-law and my wife’s family,” said Horen sheepishly. “Their boat is bigger.”

We came to a mohona, and as we were crossing it, I noticed that Horen and Kusum had begun to make genuflections of the kind that are usually occasioned by the sight of a deity or a temple — they raised their fingertips to their foreheads and then touched their chests. Fokir, watching attentively, attempted to do the same.

“What’s happening?” I asked in surprise. “What do you see? There’s no temple nearby. This is just open water.”

Kusum laughed and at first wouldn’t tell me. Then, after some pleading and cajolery, she divulged that at that moment, in the very middle of that mohona, we had crossed the line Bon Bibi had drawn to divide the tide country. In other words we had crossed the border that separates the realm of human beings from the domain of Dokkhin Rai and his demons. I realized with a sense of shock that this chimerical line was, to her and to Horen, as real as a barbed-wire fence might be to me.