Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

She put a hand on Kanai’s arm. “Thank you. I appreciate it. I really do. And I’m sure Fokir does too.”

Kanai acknowledged this by dipping his head ironically. “Always glad to oblige.” In a graver tone of voice he added, “However, I do have to say, Piya, you really should think seriously of turning back. If they find you, there could be trouble. You could end up in jail and there’s not much I or anyone else could do. The proximity of the border changes everything.”

Piya looked into the distance as she considered this. She thought of Blyth and Roxburgh and the naturalists who had crossed these waters a hundred years before and found them teeming with cetaceans. She thought of all the years in between when, for one reason or another, no one had paid any heed to these creatures and so no one had known of their decimation. It had fallen to her to be the first to carry back a report of the current situation and she knew she could not turn back from the responsibility.

“I can’t return right now, Kanai,” she said. “It’s hard to explain to you how important my work is. If I leave, who knows how long it’ll be before another cetologist can come here? I’ve got to stay as long as I possibly can.”

Kanai frowned. “And what if they take you off to jail?”

Piya shrugged. “How long could they keep me, anyway? And when they let me out, the material will still be in my head.”

AT MIDDAY, with the sun blazing overhead, Piya took a break and came to sit beside Kanai in the shade of the awning. There was a troubled look in her eyes that prompted Kanai to say, “Are you still thinking about the forest guards?”

This seemed to startle her. “Oh, no. Not that.”

“Then?”

She tipped her head back to drink from her water bottle. “The village,” she said, wiping her mouth. “Last night: I still can’t get it out of my head. I keep seeing it again and again — the people, the flames. It was like something from some other time — before recorded history. I feel like I’ll never be able to get my mind around the —”

Kanai prompted her as she faltered. “The horror?”

“The horror. Yes. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to forget it.”

“Probably not.”

“But for Fokir and Horen and the others it was just a part of everyday life, wasn’t it?”

“I imagine they’ve learned to take it in their stride, Piya. They’ve had to.”

“That’s what haunts me,” said Piya. “In a way that makes them a part of the horror too, doesn’t it?”

Kanai snapped shut the notebook. “To be fair to Fokir and Horen, I don’t think it’s quite that simple, Piya. I mean, aren’t we a part of the horror as well? You and me and people like us?”

Piya ran a hand through her hair. “I don’t see how.”

“That tiger had killed two people, Piya,” Kanai said. “And that was just in one village. It happens every week that people are killed by tigers. How about the horror of that? If there were killings on that scale anywhere else on earth it would be called a genocide, and yet here it goes almost unremarked: these killings are never reported, never written about in the papers. And the reason is just that these people are too poor to matter. We all know it, but we choose not to see it. Isn’t that a horror too — that we can feel the suffering of an animal, but not of human beings?”

“But Kanai,” Piya retorted, “everywhere in the world dozens of people are killed every day — on roads, in cars, in traffic. Why is this any worse?”

“Because we’re complicit in this, Piya, that’s why.”

Piya dissociated herself with a shake of the head. “I don’t see how I’m complicit.”

“Because it was people like you,” said Kanai, “who made a push to protect the wildlife here, without regard for the human costs. And I’m complicit because people like me — Indians of my class, that is — have chosen to hide these costs, basically in order to curry favor with their Western patrons. It’s not hard to ignore the people who’re dying — after all, they are the poorest of the poor. But just ask yourself whether this would be allowed to happen anywhere else. There are more tigers living in America, in captivity, than there are in all of India — what do you think would happen if they started killing human beings?”

“But Kanai,” said Piya, “there’s a big difference between preserving a species in captivity and keeping it in its habitat.”

“And what is that difference exactly?”

“The difference, Kanai,” Piya said slowly and emphatically, “is that it was what was intended — not by you or me, but by nature, by the earth, by the planet that keeps us all alive. Just suppose we crossed that imaginary line that prevents us from deciding that no other species matters except ourselves. What’ll be left then? Aren’t we alone enough in the universe? And do you think it’ll stop at that? Once we decide we can kill off other species, it’ll be people next — just the kind of people you’re thinking of, people who’re poor and unnoticed.”

“That’s all very well for you to say, Piya — but it’s not you who’s paying the price in lost lives.”

Piya challenged him. “Do you think I wouldn’t pay the price if I thought it necessary?”

“You mean you’d be willing to die?” Kanai scoffed. “Come on, Piya.”

“I’m telling you the truth, Kanai,” Piya said quietly. “If I thought giving up my life might make the rivers safe again for the Irrawaddy dolphin, the answer is yes, I would. But the trouble is that my life, your life, a thousand lives would make no difference.”

“It’s easy to say these things —”

“Easy?” There was a parched weariness in Piya’s voice now. “Kanai, tell me, do you see anything easy about what I do? Look at me: I have no home, no money and no prospects. My friends are thousands of miles away and I get to see them maybe once a year, if I’m lucky. And that’s the least of it. On top of that is the knowledge that what I’m doing is more or less futile.”

She looked up and he saw that there were tears in her eyes. “There’s nothing easy about this, Kanai,” she said. “You have to take that back.”

He swallowed the quick retort that had come to his lips. Instead, he reached for her hand and placed it between his own. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that. I take it back.”

She snatched her hand away and rose to her feet. “I’d better get back to work.”

As she returned to her place, he called out, “You’re a brave woman. Do you know that?”

She shrugged this off in embarrassment. “I’m just doing my job.”

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Garjontola came into view and the water was at its lowest ebb. Piya was on watch as the Megha approached the pool, and her heart leapt when she saw that the dolphins had congregated there, punctually following the flow of the tides. For the sake of their safety, she signaled to Horen to drop anchor while the Megha was still half a mile or so away.

Kanai had come to the bow to stand beside her and she said, “Would you like to look at the dolphins close up?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “I’m anxious to meet the beast to which you’ve pledged your troth.”

“Come along, then. We’ll go in Fokir’s boat.”

They went aft to the Megha ’s stern and found Fokir waiting with his oars in hand. Piya stepped over and went to her usual place in the bow while Kanai seated himself in the boat’s midsection.

A few strokes of Fokir’s oars brought them to the pool and soon two dolphins approached the boat and began to circle around it. Piya recognized them as the cow-and-calf pair she had identified earlier and she was delighted to see them again. She had the impression — as she often did with Orcaella — that they had recognized her too, for they surfaced repeatedly around the boat, and on one occasion the adult even made eye contact.