Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

When the wind abated a little, they discovered that the water had deposited a great deal of debris in the tree, including some pans and utensils that had been swept out of the surrounding dwellings. Horen salvaged a round-bellied clay hãri, which he then used to collect some rainwater: if it wasn’t for his foresight, thirst would have driven them from the tree the next day.

In the morning the sky was bright and clear but a torrent was still raging under their feet: the floodwaters were so high they reached most of the way up the tree trunk. Looking around them, they saw that they were not the only people to take shelter in a tree: many others had saved their lives in a similar fashion. Whole families, young and old alike, were sitting on branches. When greetings were shouted from one tree to another, they learned that they had been blown nearly thirty miles from where they had been when the storm hit. They had been carried across the border and thrust ashore near the Agunmukha (“fire-mouthed”) River, not far from the town of Galachipa.

“It’s in Bangladesh now,” Horen said. “In Khulna District, I think.”

They spent two days in the tree, without food or any additional water. When the floodwaters subsided they tried to make their way to the nearest town. They had not gone far before they turned back: it was as if they were in the vicinity of some terrible battlefield massacre. There were corpses everywhere, and the land was carpeted with dead fish and livestock. They found out that three hundred thousand people had died.

“Like Hiroshima!” said Kanai under his breath.

Horen and Bolai were fortunate soon to meet up with some fishermen who had managed to salvage their own boat. Making their way along unfrequented creeks and khals, they had slipped back into India.

That was Horen’s experience of a cyclone, and the memory of it would last him through a second lifetime — he never wanted to have it repeated.

Horen finished his story just as Garjontola was coming into view.

A carpet of crimson light lay on the island’s watery threshold, covering the dolphin pool and stretching all the way to the sun, now setting on the far side of the distant mohona. The angle of the light was such that any boat, even a very low one, would have cast a long shadow. But there were no boats or other vessels in sight. Piya and Fokir had not returned.

AT SUNSET, taking a reading of the boat’s position, Piya saw that they were still a good seven miles from Garjontola. She knew then that it would be impossible to get back to the Megha by the end of the day — but it wouldn’t matter much, she decided; there was no reason to think that Horen would be especially worried. He would know that they had gone too far afield to make it back by nightfall.

She guessed that Fokir had come to the same conclusion, for it soon became clear that he was looking for a place to anchor the boat for the night. A likely spot showed itself just as the last glow of daylight was fading from the sky — a stretch of water where a small channel flowed, at a right angle, into a wider one. At this time, with the water at its height, even the narrower channel looked like a river of substantial size, but Piya knew that when the tide turned it would shrink to a comfortable creek. The land on every side was thickly forested and the failing light gave the mangroves the look of a solid barricade of greenery.

There was a patch of relatively calm water where the channels met, and it was here that Fokir dropped anchor. Before doing so, he made a gesture that took in their surroundings and told Piya the name of the place: Gerafitola.

Once the boat was at anchor, Piya noticed that the moon had risen. It was almost perfectly spherical, except for a thin shaving missing on one side. Around it was a halo with a faint copper tint. The moist, unmoving air seemed to have a magnifying effect, for this moon was larger and brighter than any she could ever remember seeing.

As she was taking in the sight, Fokir crawled through the boat’s hood and came to sit beside her; raising a finger, he traced an arc on the darkening purple backdrop of the sky. When Piya shook her head to tell him she saw nothing there, he gestured to her to look more closely. Again his finger described an arc, circling around and over the moon. Now, as her eyes grew accustomed to the silvery light, she saw a faint spectrum of colored light: it seemed to hang in the air for an instant and then it was gone. She glanced at Fokir to ask if he had seen it too, and he gave her an affirmative nod. Then his finger traced another arc in the sky, a vast one this time, spanning the horizon, and it dawned on her that he was thinking of a rainbow of some kind. Was that what he had shown her, a rainbow made by the moon? He gave her an earnest nod and she nodded too — she had seen it after all, or at least glimpsed it, so what did it matter that she had never heard of such a phenomenon before?

Piya’s eyes strayed from the moon and the shadows of the forest and then fell to the currents playing on the river’s surface: it was as if a hand hidden in the water’s depths were writing a message to her in the cursive script of ripples, eddies and turbulence. She remembered a snatch of something Kanai had said about Moyna — something about the unseen flow of the water and the visible play of the wind. Did he, Fokir, understand what it meant to be the kind of person who could inspire and hold such constancy, especially when it was overlaid with so much pain and so many difficulties? What could she, Piya, offer him that would amount to even a small part of what he already had?

They sat unmoving, like animals who had been paralyzed by the intensity of their awareness of each other. When their eyes met again it was as if he knew at a glance what she was thinking. He reached for her hand and held it between his, and then, without looking in her direction again, he moved off to the stern and began to kindle a fire in his portable stove.

When the meal was ready, he offered her a plate of rice and spiced potatoes. She could not bring herself to decline it, for the plate seemed like an offering, a valedictory gesture. It was as if their shared glimpse of the lunar rainbow had somehow broken something that had existed between them, as if something had ended, leaving behind a pain of a kind that could not be understood because it had never had a name. Afterward, when the stove and the utensils had been put away, Piya took one of Fokir’s blankets and went to her usual place in the bow, while he retreated to the shelter of the hood.

She remembered the letter Kanai had given her and took it out of her backpack. It would be good to have the distraction — she needed to think of something else. Fokir saw her peering at the envelope in the moonlight, and he passed her a matchbox and a candle. She lit the wick and placed the candle on the boat’s prow, using its own drippings to fasten it in its place. The night was so still and airless that the flame held perfectly steady.

Tearing open the envelope, she began to read.

Dearest Piya:

What does it mean when a man wants to give a woman something that is beyond price — a gift that she, and perhaps only she, will ever truly value?

This is not a purely rhetorical question. It is inspired by a genuine perplexity, for I have never known this impulse before. For someone like me, a man whose chief concerns have always been with the here and now — and, let us admit it, with myself for the most part — this is new ground, uncharted terrain. The emotions that have generated this impulse are of a shocking novelty. Would it be true then to say that I have never been in love before? I had always prided myself on the breadth and comprehensiveness of my experience of the world: I had loved, I once liked to say, in six languages. That seems now like the boast of a time very long past. At Garjontola I learned how little I know of myself and of the world.