Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

I am out of time. The candle is spluttering; my pencil is worn to a stub. I can hear their footsteps approaching; they seem, strangely, to be laughing as they come. Horen will want to leave immediately, I know, for daybreak is not far now. I hadn’t thought I’d be able to fill this whole notebook, but that is what I have done. It serves no purpose for me to keep it here: I will hand it to Horen in the hope it finds its way to you, Kanai. I feel certain you will have a greater claim to the world’s ear than I ever had. Maybe you will know what to do with it. I have always trusted the young. Your generation will, I know, be richer in ideals, less cynical, less selfish than mine.

They have come in now and I see their faces in the candlelight. In their smiles I see the Poet’s lines:

Look, I’m alive. On what? Neither childhood nor the future grows less. . More being than I’ll ever need springs up in my heart.

KANAI FOUND THAT his hands were shaking as he put down the notebook. The lamp had filled the cabin with kerosene fumes; he felt he was stifling. Picking a blanket off the bunk, he wrapped it around his shoulders and stepped out into the gangway. The sharp smell of a bidi came to his nose and he looked to his left, toward the bow.

Horen was seated there in one of the two armchairs. He was smoking with his feet up on the gunwale. He looked around as Kanai closed the door of his cabin.

“Still up?”

“Yes,” said Kanai. “I just finished reading my uncle’s notebook.”

Horen acknowledged this with an indifferent grunt.

Kanai seated himself in the adjoining chair. “It ends with you taking Fokir away in your boat.”

Horen angled his gaze downward, into the water, as if he were looking into the past. “We should have left a little earlier,” he said matter-of-factly. “We would have had the currents behind us.”

“And what happened in Morichjhãpi after that? Do you know?”

Horen sucked on the end of his bidi. “I know no more than anyone else knows. It was all just rumor.”

“And what were the rumors?”

A wisp of smoke curled out of Horen’s nose. “What we heard,” he said, “was that the assault began the next day. The gangsters who’d been assembling around the island were carried over in boats and dinghies and bhotbhotis. They burnt the settlers’ huts, they sank their boats, they laid waste to their fields.” He grunted in his laconic way. “Whatever you can imagine them doing, they did.”

“And Kusum and my uncle? What happened to them?”

“No one knows for sure, but what I’ve heard is that a group of women were taken away by force, Kusum among them. People say they were used and then thrown into the rivers, so they would be washed away by the tides. Dozens of settlers were killed that day. The sea claimed them all.”

“And my uncle?”

“He was put on a bus with the other refugees. They were to be sent back to the place they had come from — in Madhya Pradesh or wherever it was. But at some point they must have let him off because he found his way back to Canning.”

Here Horen broke off and proceeded to search his pockets with much fumbling and many muttered curses. By the time he’d found and lit another bidi it had become clear to Kanai that he was trying to create a diversion so as to lead the conversation away from Nirmal and Kusum. Kanai was not surprised when he said, in a comfortably affable tone, “What time do you want to leave tomorrow morning?”

Kanai decided he would not let him change the subject. “Tell me something, Horen-da,” he said, “about my uncle. You were the one who took him to Morichjhãpi. Why do you think he got so involved with that place?”

“Same as anyone else,” Horen said with a shrug.

“But after all, Kusum and Fokir were your relatives,” Kanai said. “So it’s understandable that you were concerned about them. But what about Saar? Why did it mean so much to him?”

Horen pulled on his bidi. “Your uncle was a very unusual man,” he said at last. “People say he was mad. As we say, you can’t explain what a madman will do, any more than you can account for what a goat will eat.”

“But tell me this, Horen-da,” Kanai persisted. “Do you think it possible he was in love with Kusum?”

Horen rose to his feet and snorted in such a way as to indicate that he had been goaded beyond toleration. “Kanai-babu,” he said in a sharp, irritated voice, “I’m an unlettered man. You’re talking about things city people think about. I don’t have time for such things.”

He flicked his bidi away and they heard it hiss as it hit the water. “You’d better go to sleep now,” Horen said. “We’ll make an early start tomorrow.”

PIYA HAD GONE to bed too early and around midnight found herself wide awake, sitting up in her bunk. She spent a few minutes trying to drift off again and then gave up. Wrapping a blanket around her shoulders, she stepped out on deck. The light of the waxing moon was so bright that she stood still for a moment, blinking. Then she saw, to her surprise, that Kanai was outside too. He was reading by the light of a small kerosene lantern. Piya went forward and slipped into the other chair. “You’re up late,” she said. “Is that your uncle’s notebook you’re reading?”

“Yes. I finished it, actually. I was just looking it over again.”

“Can I have a look?”

“Certainly.”

Kanai closed the book and held it out to her. She took the notebook gingerly and allowed it to fall open.

“The writing’s very small,” she said.

“Yes,” said Kanai. “It’s not easy to read.”

“And is it all in Bengali?”

“Yes.”

She closed the book carefully and handed it back to Kanai. “So what’s it about?”

Kanai scratched his head as he wondered how best to describe the notebook. “It’s about all kinds of things: places, people —”

“Anyone you know?”

“Yes. Actually, Fokir’s mother figures in it a lot. Fokir too — though Nirmal only knew him when he was very small.”

Piya’s eyes widened. “Fokir and his mother? How come they’re in it?”

“I told you, didn’t I, that Kusum, Fokir’s mother, was involved in an effort to resettle one of these islands?”

“Yes, you did.”

Kanai smiled. “I think, without knowing it, he may have been half in love with Kusum.”

“Does he say so in the book?”

“No,” said Kanai. “But then he wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Being what he was,” Kanai said, “a man of his time and place, with his convictions — he’d have thought it frivolous.”

Piya ran her fingers through her short, curly hair. “I don’t get it,” she said. “What were his convictions?”

Kanai leaned back in his chair as he thought this over. “He was a radical at one time,” he said. “In fact, if you were to ask my aunt Nilima, she would tell you that the reason he got mixed up with the settlers in Morichjhãpi was because he couldn’t let go of the idea of revolution.”

“I take it you don’t agree with her?”

“No,” said Kanai. “I think she’s wrong. As I see it, Nirmal was possessed more by words than by politics. There are people who live through poetry, and he was one of them. For Nilima, a person like that is very hard to understand — but that’s the kind of man Nirmal was. He loved the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, a great German poet, whose work has been translated into Bangla by some of our own best-known poets. Rilke said ‘life is lived in transformation,’ and I think Nirmal soaked this idea into himself in the way cloth absorbs ink. To him, what Kusum stood for was the embodiment of Rilke’s idea of transformation.”