Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

When the dolphins were just five hundred feet ahead of the boat, she caught sight of a steel-gray form lying inert on the mudbank. Instantly she shut her eyes, knowing what it was and yet hoping it would be something else. When she looked again it was still there, and it was exactly what she had feared: the carcass of an Irrawaddy dolphin.

A closer look brought yet another shock: the animal’s body was relatively small, and she knew at once that it was probably the newborn calf she had watched for the past several days, swimming beside its mother. Its body appeared to have been deposited on the shore some hours before by the falling tide. Now, with the water rising again, it seemed to be teetering on the water’s edge.

Piya’s intuition told her that these dolphins belonged to the same pod that usually congregated at Garjontola at low tide. The carcass explained the dolphins’ departure from their routine: it seemed they were reluctant to return to their pool while one of their number lay dead in plain view. Piya had the sense that they were waiting for the tide to set it afloat again.

Fokir had spotted the carcass too, Piya knew, for the boat’s bow had turned to point toward the shore. As the boat was pulling slowly up to the bank a smell caught the back of Piya’s throat. The full heat of the sun was on the dead animal and the stench was such that she had to wrap a length of cloth around her head before she could step off the boat.

Looking down on the carcass, she saw that there was a huge gash behind the blowhole where a large wedge of flesh and blubber had been torn out of the dolphin’s body. The shape of the injury suggested that the dolphin had been hit by the propeller of a fast-moving motorboat. This puzzled Piya, because she had seen so few such boats in these waters. It was Fokir who suggested a solution to the mystery, by sketching a peaked cap with his hands. She understood that it was probably some kind of official boat used by uniformed personnel — maybe from the coast guard or the police or even the Forest Department. It had gone speeding down the channel earlier in the day, and the inexperienced calf had been slow to move out of its way.

Piya took a tape measure out of her backpack and spent a while taking the measurements required by the Norris protocols. Then, pulling out a small pocketknife, she took samples of skin, blubber and a few internal organs. These she wrapped in foil and slipped into Ziploc bags. Armies of crabs and insects were now swarming all over the dead calf, eating into the exposed flesh of its wound.

Piya remembered how her heart had leapt when she first saw the newborn surfacing beside its mother and she could not bear to look at the carcass any longer. She gestured to Fokir to pick it up by the flukes while she took hold of the fins. Between them, they swung it back and forth a couple of times and then heaved it out into the river. She had expected it to bob up again immediately, but to her surprise it sank quickly from view.

This was as much time as Piya could stand to spend in this place. She went back to the boat, threw in her equipment and helped Fokir push it away from the bank.

As the current was pulling them away, Fokir stood up and began to point upriver and downriver, east and west. Presently, as his gestures became more explicit, she understood he was telling her that what she had seen was not an uncommon sight. He had come upon three such carcasses: one of them had washed up a short distance downriver from this very place — that was why he had thought of coming this way.

By the time they were in midriver, the dolphins appeared to be dispersing — except for one, which seemed to be lingering in the wake of the pod. Piya had the sense that this animal was circling over the sunken carcass as the currents rolled it along the riverbed. Was this the mother? There was no way of knowing for sure.

Then, all at once, the dolphins sounded and disappeared. Piya would have liked to follow them, but she knew it would be impossible. It was a little past four in the afternoon now and the tide was flooding in. The currents, which had favored them in the morning, were now pushing powerfully against them. Even with two of them rowing, their progress was certain to be painfully slow.

AFTER THREE HOURS of unrewarded wandering, Horen said, in a tone of gruff vindication, “We’ve looked enough. We have to turn back now.”

Kanai’s eyes were weary from the effort of peering into creeks and gullies. Now that the sun was dipping toward the horizon, the light would be directly in their eyes and it would be even harder to maintain an effective watch. But the anxiety gnawing at his stomach would not go away and he could not bring himself to accept that there was nothing more to be done. “Do we have to turn back already?” he said.

Horen nodded. “We’ve wasted a lot of fuel. Any more and we won’t be able to get back to Lusibari tomorrow. Besides, the boat is probably back at Garjontola now.”

“And what if it’s not?” said Kanai sharply. “Are we just going to abandon them?”

Horen turned to squint at him through narrowed eyes. “Look,” he said, “Fokir is like a son to me. If there was anything more to be done, I would do it.”

Kanai was quick to acknowledge the justice of this reproof. “Yes,” he said with a nod. “I know that, of course.” He felt a twinge of shame for having doubted Horen’s diligence during the search. As the Megha changed course, he said, in a more conciliatory voice, “Horen-da, you have experience of these things. Tell me — what’ll happen here when the cyclone strikes?”

Horen looked pensively around him. “It’ll be as different as night from day.”

“You were caught in a cyclone once, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Horen in his slow, laconic way. “That was the year when you visited, 1970.”

It was well after the end of the monsoons, and Horen had gone out to sea in his uncle Bolai’s boat. The crew consisted of three men: Horen, his uncle and a man he didn’t know. They were on the edge of the Bay of Bengal, a couple of miles from the mouth of the Raimangal River, within sight of land. There was no formal warning system in those days and the storm had taken them completely by surprise. One minute there was sunshine and a stiff breeze; half an hour later a gale had hit them from the southwest. Visibility had become very poor and they had lost sight of all their usual landmarks. They had had no compass on board: their eyes were the only instruments they used in navigating and in any case it was rare for them to venture out of sight of the coast. Nor would any instrument have been of much help, for the gale did not leave them the option of steering in a direction of their choice. The wind was so fierce that there was no resisting its thrust. It had swept them before it in a northeasterly direction. For a couple of hours they could do nothing other than cling to the timbers of their boat. Then, all of a sudden, they had found themselves heading toward a stretch of flooded land: they could see the crowns of some trees and the roofs of a few dwellings — huts and shacks for the most part. The storm’s surge had drowned most of the shoreline; the flood was so deep that they didn’t know they had made landfall until their boat slammed into a tree trunk. The boat’s planks came apart instantly, but Horen and his uncle managed to save themselves by clinging to the tree. The third member of their crew also took hold of a branch, but it broke under his weight. He was never seen again.

Horen, then just twenty years old, had great strength in his arms. He was able to pull both himself and his uncle out of the raging water, into the tree’s higher branches. The two men used their gamchhas and lungis to tie themselves to the tree. They joined hands and held on as the gale howled around them. At times the wind was so fierce that it shook the tree as though it were a giant jhata, a reed broom — but somehow Horen and Bolai had managed to cling on.