Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

“All right, I’m coming.” Kanai was turning to jump when Fokir stopped him. “No. Wait. First roll up your pants and then take your slippers off, or else you’ll lose them in the mud. It’s better to be barefoot.”

Kanai kicked off his sandals and rolled his trousers up to his knees. Then, swinging his feet over the gunwale, he dropped over the side and sank into the mud. His body lurched forward and he reached quickly for the boat, steadying himself against the gunwale: to fall in the mud now would be a humiliation too painful to contemplate. He pulled his right foot carefully out of the mud and planted it a little way ahead. In this fashion, by repeating these childlike steps, he was able to get across to Fokir’s side without mishap.

“Look,” said Fokir, gesturing at the ground. “Here are the claws and there’s the pad.” He turned to point up the slope. “And see, that’s the way it went, past those trees. It might be watching you even now.”

There was a mocking note in his voice that stung Kanai. He stood up straight and said, “What are you trying to do, Fokir? Are you trying to frighten me?”

“Frighten you?” said Fokir, smiling. “But why would you be frightened? Didn’t I tell you what my mother said? No one who is good at heart has anything to fear in this place.”

Then, turning on his heel, Fokir went back to the boat, across the mudbank, and reached under the hood. When he straightened up again, Kanai saw that he had drawn out his dá.

As Fokir advanced toward him, blade in hand, Kanai recoiled reflexively. “What’s that for?” he said, raising his eyes from the instrument’s glistening edge.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Fokir. “It’s for the jungle. Don’t you want to go and see if we can find the maker of these marks?”

Even in that moment of distraction, Kanai noticed — so tenacious were the habits of his profession — that Fokir was using a different form of address with him now. From the respectful apni that he had been using before, he had switched to the same familiar tui Kanai had used in addressing him: it was as though in stepping onto the island, the authority of their positions had been reversed.

Kanai looked at the tangled barrier of mangrove ahead and knew that it would be madness to walk into that with Fokir: his dá could slip, anything could happen. It was not worth the risk.

“No,” said Kanai. “I’m not going to play this game with you anymore, Fokir. I want you to take me back to the bhotbhoti.”

“But why?” said Fokir with a laugh. “What are you afraid of? Didn’t I tell you? A man like yourself should have nothing to fear in this place.”

Stepping into the mud, Kanai shouted over his shoulder, “Stop talking nonsense. You may be a child, but I’m not —”

Then suddenly it was as though the earth had come alive and was reaching for his ankle. Looking down, he discovered that a rope-like tendril had wrapped itself around his ankles. He felt his balance going and when he tried to slide a foot forward to correct it, his legs seemed to move in the wrong direction. Before he could do anything to break the fall, the wetness of the mud slapped him full in the face.

At first he was completely immobile: it was as though his body were being fitted for a mold in a tub of plaster. Trying to look up, he discovered that he could not see: the mud had turned his sunglasses into a blindfold. Scraping his head against his arm, he shook the glasses off and allowed them to sink out of sight. When Fokir’s hand descended on his shoulder, he brushed it off and tried to push himself to his feet on his own. But the consistency of the mud was such as to create a suction effect and he could not break free.

He saw that Fokir was smiling at him. “I told you to be careful.”

The blood rushed to Kanai’s head and obscenities began to pour from his mouth: “ Shala, banchod, shuorer bachcha. ”

His anger came welling up with an atavistic explosiveness, rising from sources whose very existence he would have denied: the master’s suspicion of the menial; the pride of caste; the townsman’s mistrust of the rustic; the city’s antagonism toward the village. He had thought he had cleansed himself of these sediments of the past, but the violence with which they spewed out of him now suggested that they had only been compacted into an explosive and highly volatile reserve.

There had been occasions in the past — too many of them — when Kanai had seen his clients losing their temper in like fashion: when rage had made them cross the boundaries of selfhood, transporting them to a state in which they were literally beside themselves. The phrase was apt: their emotions were so intense as almost to spill outside the physical boundaries of their skin. And almost always, no matter what the proximate cause, he was the target of their rage: the interpreter, the messenger, the amanuensis. He was the life preserver that held them afloat in a tide of incomprehension; the meaninglessness that surrounded them became, as it were, his fault, because he was its only named feature. He had survived these outbursts by telling himself that such episodes were merely a professional hazard — “nothing personal” — it was just that his job sometimes made him a proxy for the inscrutability of life itself. Yet, despite his knowledge of the phenomenon, he was powerless to stop the torrent of obscenities that were pouring out of his mouth now.

When Fokir offered a hand to help him up, he slapped it aside: “ Ja, shuorer bachcha, beriye ja! Get away from me, you son of a pig!”

“All right, then,” said Fokir. “I’ll do as you say.”

Raising his head, Kanai caught a glimpse of Fokir’s eyes and the words withered on his lips. In Kanai’s professional life there had been a few instances in which the act of interpretation had given him the momentary sensation of being transported out of his body and into another. In each instance it was as if the instrument of language had metamorphosed — instead of being a barrier, a curtain that divided, it had become a transparent film, a prism that allowed him to look through another set of eyes, to filter the world through a mind other than his own. These experiences had always come about unpredictably, without warning or apparent cause, and no thread of similarity linked these occasions, except that in each of them he had been working as an interpreter. But he was not working now, and yet it was exactly this feeling that came upon him as he looked at Fokir: it was as though his own vision were being refracted through those opaque, unreadable eyes and he were seeing not himself, Kanai Dutt, but a great host of people — a double for the outside world, someone standing in for the men who had destroyed Fokir’s village, burnt his home and killed his mother; he had become a token for a vision of human beings in which a man such as Fokir counted for nothing, a man whose value was less than that of an animal. In seeing himself in this way, it seemed perfectly comprehensible to Kanai why Fokir should want him to be dead — but he understood also that this was not how it would be. Fokir had brought him here not because he wanted him to die, but because he wanted him to be judged.

Kanai lifted a hand to wipe the mud from his eyes, and when he looked up again he found that Fokir had stepped out of his field of vision. Something prompted Kanai to look back over his shoulder. Squirming in the mud, he turned just in time to see the boat slipping away. He could not see Fokir’s face, only his back; he was in the stern, rowing vigorously.

“Wait,” said Kanai. “Don’t leave me here.” It was too late: the boat had already vanished around a bend.

Kanai was watching the boat’s bow wave fanning across the river when he saw a ripple cutting slantwise over the water. He looked again carefully, and now it seemed certain that there was something beneath the water’s surface: obscured by the darkness of the silt, it was making for the shore, coming toward him.