Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

“Yes, Horen. I feel it.”

“That’s good, Saar. That’s good.”

When the boat was some fifty feet from the shore, Horen stopped rowing and put away his oars. Shutting his eyes, he began to mumble and make gestures with his hands.

“What is he doing?” I said to Kusum.

“Don’t you know, Saar?” she said. “He is a bauley. He knows the mantras that shut the mouths of the big cats. He knows how to keep them from attacking us.”

Perhaps in another circumstance I would have laughed. But it was true that I was afraid now: I did not need to feign my fear. I knew Horen could no more shut the mouth of a tiger than he could conjure up a storm — but I was still reassured by his meaningless mumbles, by his lack of bravado. His manner was not that of a magician weaving a spell: he was more like a mechanic, giving a spanner an extra turn in order to leave nothing undone. This reassured me.

“Now listen to me, Saar,” said Horen. “Since you haven’t done this before, I must tell you a rule.”

“What rule, Horen?”

“The rule, Saar, is that when we go ashore, you can leave nothing of yourself behind. You cannot spit or urinate, you cannot sit down to relieve yourself, you cannot leave behind your morning’s meal. If you do, then harm will come to all of us.”

Although no one laughed, I was conscious of a mild sense of affront. “Why, Horen,” I said, “I have done my business already. Unless my fear reaches such a pitch as to overwhelm me, I will have no need to leave anything of myself behind.”

“That’s good, Saar. I just thought I’d tell you.”

Then he started to row again and when the shore had come closer, he leapt over the side to push the boat. To my astonishment, Fokir followed him almost instantly. Even though the water came up to his neck, the boy quickly put his shoulder to the boat and began to push.

No one else was surprised by the child’s adeptness. His mother turned to me and I saw she was choking with pride: “See, Saar, the river is in his veins.”

What would I not have given to be able to say that this was true also of myself, that the river flowed in my veins too, laden with all its guilty burdens? But I had never felt so much an outsider as I did at that moment. Yet I was glad at least that my years in the tide country had taught me how to use my feet in the mud: when it came time to step off the boat, I was able to follow them ashore without difficulty.

We headed into the badabon with Horen in the lead, clearing a path for us with his dá. Kusum was behind him with the clay image balanced on her shoulder. I was in the rear, and not for an instant did the thought leave my mind that if a tiger were to fall upon me then, in those dense thickets of mangrove, it would find me all but immobile, a caged feast.

But nothing untoward happened. We came to a clearing and Kusum led the way to the shrine, which was nothing more than a raised platform with bamboo sides and a thatched covering. Here we placed the images of Bon Bibi and Shah Jongoli, and then Kusum lit a few sticks of fragrant dhoop, and Fokir fetched some leaves and flowers and laid them at their feet.

So far there was nothing unusual about the ritual except its setting — otherwise it was very much like the small household pujas I remembered my mother performing in my childhood. But then Horen began to recite a mantra, and to my great surprise I heard him say:

Bismillah boliya mukhey dhorinu kalam / poida korilo jini tamam alam * baro meherban tini bandar upore / taar chhani keba achhe duniyar upore *

(In Allah’s name I begin to pronounce the Word / Of the whole universe He is the Begetter, the Lord * To all His disciples He is full of mercy / Above the created world, who is there but He *)

I was amazed. I’d thought I was going to a Hindu puja. Imagine my astonishment on hearing these Arabic invocations! Yet the rhythm of the recitation was undoubtedly that of a puja: how often, as a child, had I heard those endless chants, rolling on and on, in temples as well as in our home?

I listened enthralled as Horen continued his recitation: the language was not easy to follow — it was a strange variety of Bangla, deeply interpenetrated by Arabic and Persian. The narrative, however, was familiar to me: it was the story of how Dukhey was left on the shore of an island to be devoured by the tiger-demon Dokkhin Rai, and of his rescue by Bon Bibi and Shah Jongoli.

At the end, after the others had said their prayers, we picked up our things and made our way back across the clearing to the shore. When we were back on the boat, heading toward Morichjhãpi, I said, “Horen, where did you learn that long recitation?”

He looked startled. “Why Saar,” he said, “I’ve known it as long as I can remember. I heard my father reciting it, and I learned from him.”

“So is this legend passed on from mouth to mouth and held only in memory?”

“Why no, Saar,” he said. “There’s a book in which it was printed. I have a copy.” He reached down into that part of his boat where he stored his things and pulled out a tattered old pamphlet. “Here,” he said, “have a look.”

I opened the first page and saw it bore the title Bon Bibir Karamoti orthat Bon Bibi Johuranama (The Miracles of Bon Bibi or The Narrative of Her Glory). When I tried to open the book, I had another surprise: the pages opened to the right, as in Arabic, not to the left, as in Bangla. Yet the prosody was that of much of Bangla folklore: the legend was recounted in the verse form called dwipodi poyar — with rhymed couplets in which each line is of roughly twelve syllables, each with a break, or caesura, toward the middle.

The booklet was written by a Muslim whose name was given simply as Abdur-Rahim. By the usual literary standards the work did not have great merit. Although the lines rhymed, in a kind of doggerel fashion, they did not appear to be verse; they flowed into each other, being broken only by slashes and asterisks. In other words they looked like prose and read like verse, a strange hybrid, I thought at first, and then it occurred to me that no, this was something remarkable and wonderful — prose that had mounted the ladder of meter in order to ascend above the prosaic.

“When was this book written?” I asked Horen. “Do you know?”

“Oh, it’s old,” said Horen. “Very, very old.”

Very, very old? But on the first page was a couplet that read, “There are those who travel with an atlas in hand / while others use carriages to wander the land.”

It struck me that this legend had perhaps taken shape in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, just as new waves of settlers were moving into the tide country. And was it possible that this accounted for the way it was formed, from elements of legend and scripture, from the near and the far, Bangla and Arabic?

How could it be otherwise? For this I have seen confirmed many times, that the mudbanks of the tide country are shaped not only by rivers of silt, but also by rivers of language: Bengali, English, Arabic, Hindi, Arakanese and who knows what else? Flowing into one another they create a proliferation of small worlds that hang suspended in the flow. And so it dawned on me: the tide country’s faith is something like one of its great mohonas, a meeting not just of many rivers, but a roundabout people can use to pass in many directions — from country to country and even between faiths and religions.

I was so taken with this idea that I began to copy some passages of the pamphlet into the back of a notebook I was carrying in my jhola — this very one, as it happens. The print was tiny and I had to squint hard at the page to decipher it. Absent-mindedly, I handed the booklet to Fokir, as I might have to one of my pupils. I said, “Read it out aloud so I can copy it.”