Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

But Nilima took his words at face value. “I wanted to come,” she said. “It’s nice to get away from Lusibari sometimes. But tell me, how was your ride on the train? I hope you weren’t bored.”

“No,” said Kanai, “I wasn’t. Actually I met an interesting young woman. An American.”

“Oh?” said Nilima. “What was she doing here?”

“She’s doing research on dolphins and suchlike,” Kanai said. “I asked her to visit us in Lusibari.”

“Good. I hope she comes.”

“Yes,” said Kanai. “I hope so too.”

Suddenly Nilima came to a halt and snatched at Kanai’s elbow. “I sent you some pages that Nirmal had written,” she said anxiously. “Did you get them?”

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “In fact, I was reading them on the train. Were they from the packet he left for me?”

“No, no,” said Nilima. “That was just something he wrote long ago. There was a time, you know, when he was so depressed I thought he needed something to keep him going. I asked him to write a little thing about the Sundarbans. I was hoping to be able to use it in one of our brochures, but it wasn’t really appropriate. Still, I thought it might interest you.”

“ O, ” said Kanai. “I somehow assumed it was a part of whatever he’d left for me.”

“No,” said Nilima. “I don’t know what’s in the packet: it’s sealed and I haven’t opened it. I know Nirmal wanted you to see it first. He told me that, just before his death.”

Kanai frowned. “Weren’t you curious, though?”

Nilima shook her head. “When you get to my age, Kanai,” she said, “you’ll see it’s not easy to deal with reminders of loved ones who’ve moved on and left you behind. That’s why I wanted you to come.”

They stepped out of the station into a dusty street where paan shops and snack stands jostled for space with rows of tiny shops.

“Kanai, I’m very glad you’re here at last,” said Nilima. “But there’s one thing I don’t understand.”

“What?”

“Why did you insist on coming through Canning? It would have been so much easier if you had come through Basonti. No one comes this way nowadays.”

“Really? Why not?”

“Because of the river,” she said. “It’s changed.”

“How?”

She glanced up at him. “Wait. You’ll see soon enough.”

“ON THE BANKS of every great river you’ll find a monument to excess.”

Kanai recalled the list of examples Nirmal had provided to prove this: the opera house of Manaus, the temple of Karnak, the ten thousand pagodas of Pagan. In the years since, he had visited many of those places, and it made him laugh to think his uncle had insisted that Canning too had a place on that list: “The mighty Matla’s monument is Port Canning.”

The bazaars of Canning were much as he remembered, a jumble of narrow lanes, cramped shops and mildewed houses. There were a great many stalls selling patent medicines for neuralgia and dyspepsia — concoctions with names like Hajmozyne and Dardocytin. The only buildings of any note were the movie theaters; immense in their ungainly solidity, they sat upon the town like sandbags, as though to prevent it from being washed away.

The bazaars ended in a causeway that led away from the town toward the Matla River. Although the causeway was a long one, it fell well short of the river: on reaching its end Kanai saw what Nilima had meant when she said the river had changed. He remembered the Matla as a vast waterway, one of the most formidable rivers he had ever seen. But it was low tide now and the river in the distance was no wider than a narrow ditch, flowing along the center of a halfmile-wide bed. The freshly laid silt that bordered the water glistened in the sun like dunes of melted chocolate. From time to time, bubbles of air rose from the depths and burst through to the top, leaving rings on the burnished surface. The sounds they made seemed almost to form articulate patterns, as if to suggest they were giving voice to the depths of the earth itself.

“Look over there,” said Nilima, pointing downstream to a boat that had come sputtering along the remains of the river. Although the vessel could not have been more than thirty feet in length, it was carrying at least a hundred passengers: it was so heavily loaded that the water was within half a foot of its gunwales. It came to a halt and the crew proceeded to extrude a long gangplank that led directly into the mudbank.

Kanai froze in disbelief. What would happen now? How would the boat’s passengers make their way across that vast expanse of billowing mud?

On the boat, preparations for the crossing were already in train. The women had hitched up their saris and the men were rolling up their lungis and trousers. On stepping off the plank, there was a long, drawn-out moment when each passenger sank slowly into the mud, like a spoon disappearing into a bowl of very thick dal; only when they were in up to their hips did their descent end and their forward movement begin. With their legs hidden from sight, all that was visible of their struggles was the twisting of their upper bodies.

Nilima frowned as she watched the men and women who were floundering through the mud. “Even to look at that hurts my knees,” she said. “I could do it once, but I can’t anymore — it’s too much for my legs. That’s the problem, you see: there isn’t as much water in the river nowadays and at low tide it gets very shallow. We brought the Trust’s launch to take you to Lusibari, but it’ll be at least two hours before it can make its way here to pick us up.” She directed an accusatory glance at Kanai. “It really would have been so much easier if you had come through Basonti.”

“I didn’t know,” said Kanai ruefully. “I wish you’d told me. The only reason I wanted to come through Canning was that this was the route we took when you brought me to Lusibari in 1970.”

As he looked around, taking in the sights, Kanai had a vivid recollection of Nirmal’s silhouette, outlined against the sky. Nirmal had put him in mind of a long-legged waterbird — maybe a heron or a stork. The impression was heightened by his clothes and umbrella: his loose white drapes had flapped in the wind like a mantle of feathers, while the shape of his chhata was not unlike that of a long, pointed bill.

“I still remember him standing here while we were waiting for a boat.”

“Nirmal?”

“Yes. He was dressed in his usual white dhuti-panjabi and he had his umbrella in his hands.”

Suddenly Nilima seized his elbow. “Stop, Kanai. Don’t talk about it. I can’t bear it.”

Kanai cut himself short. “Is it still upsetting for you? After all these years?”

Nilima shivered. “It’s just this place — this is where he was found, you know. Right here on the embankment in Canning. He only lived another couple of months after that. He must have been out in the rain, because he caught pneumonia.”

“I didn’t know about that,” Kanai said. “What brought him to Canning?”

“I still don’t know for sure,” Nilima said. “His behavior had become very erratic, as it tended to when he was under stress. He had retired as headmaster some months before and was never the same again. He would disappear without leaving any word. It was around the time of the Morichjhãpi incident, so I was beside myself with worry.”

“Oh?” said Kanai. “What was that? I don’t recall it exactly.”

“Some refugees had occupied one of the islands in the forest,” Nilima said. “There was a confrontation with the authorities that resulted in a lot of violence. The government wanted to force the refugees to return to their resettlement camp in central India. They were being put into trucks and buses and taken away. In the meanwhile the whole district was filled with rumors. I was terrified of what might happen to Nirmal if he was found wandering around on his own: for all I knew he’d just been forced onto a bus and sent off.”