Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

“No,” Kanai replied, taking the other chair. “And how long have you been up?”

“About an hour.”

“Were you watching for the boat?”

Horen made a rumbling noise at the back of his throat. “Maybe.”

“But is there enough light right now?” Kanai said. “Could they find their way back at this time of night?”

“Look at the moon,” said Horen. “It’s so bright tonight. Fokir knows these khals better than anybody else. He could find his way back — if he wanted to, that is.”

Kanai could not immediately unravel the suggestion implicit in this. “What do you mean by that, Horen-da?”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to come back tonight.” Horen looked him full in the eyes and his face creased into a slow, wide smile. “Kanai-babu,” he said, “you’ve seen so many places and done so many things. Do you mean to tell me you don’t understand what it is for a man to be in love?”

The question struck Kanai with the force of a blow to the chest — not just because he could not summon an immediate answer, but also because it seemed so out of character, so strangely fanciful, coming from a man like Horen.

“Do you think that’s what it is?” Kanai said.

Horen laughed. “Kanai-babu, are you just pretending to be blind? Or is it just that you cannot believe that an unlettered man like Fokir could be in love?”

Kanai bridled at this. “Why should you say that, Horen-da? And why should I believe any such thing?”

“Because you wouldn’t be the first,” Horen said quietly. “It was the same with your uncle, you know.”

“Nirmal? Saar?”

“Yes, Kanai-babu,” Horen said. “That night when he and I landed on Morichjhãpi in my boat? Do you really think it was just the storm that blew us there?”

“Then?”

“Kanai-babu, as you know, Kusum and I were from the same village. She was six or seven years younger than me and when I was married off she was still a child. I was fourteen at the time and had no say in the matter — as you know, these things are often decided by the elders. But Kusum’s father I knew well because I sometimes worked on his boat. I was with him on his last trip, and I was standing on the bãdh with Kusum at the time he was killed. After that, I felt I had a special obligation to Kusum and her mother, even though there was little I could do for them. I was young, barely twenty, and I had a wife and children of my own. I knew things had become very bad for them when her mother told me she had approached Dilip to find her a job. I tried to warn her; I tried to tell her about the kind of job he would find for her. She wouldn’t listen to me, of course — she knew so little of the world that these things were beyond her imagining. But after she left, I felt that Kusum was more than ever my responsibility. That was why I brought her to your aunt, in Lusibari. But when it became clear that even this would not be enough to protect Kusum from Dilip, I helped her get away — from Lusibari, from the tide country. I thought I was protecting Kusum, but she was, in her own way, much stronger than me: she did not need my protection or anyone else’s. This I discovered on the day I took her to the station at Canning, so she could go to look for her mother. Once we got there, I realized I might never see her again. I told her not to go; I begged her to stay. I feared for her safety, a girl wandering so far afield alone. I told her I would leave my wife, my children; I said I would live with her and marry her. But she wouldn’t hear of it. She was determined to do what she wanted and so she did. To this day, I remember the sight of her as I put her on the train. She was still wearing a frock and her hair had not grown out yet. She looked more like a child than a grown woman. The train vanished, but that image stayed in my heart.

“Eight years went by and then we began to hear rumors about refugees coming to lay claim to Morichjhãpi. People said Kusum was with them, that she had returned from the mainland as a widow and had brought her son with her. I found out where she was living and two or three times rowed past her house in my boat, but I could not summon the courage to go in. That day when I took your uncle to Kumirmari, all I could think of was Kusum and how close she was. And then, on the way back, the storm came up, as if it had been willed by none other than Bon Bibi.

“And from that day on, I could not stop going to Morichjhãpi.

Your uncle became my excuse for going there, just as I became his. I saw that he, like me, could not stop thinking of her: she had entered his blood just as she had mine. At her name he would come alive, his step would change, words would come pouring out of him. He was a man of many words, your uncle — and I had very few. I knew he was wooing her with his stories and tales — I had nothing to give her but my presence, but in the end it was me she chose.

“The night before the killing, Kanai-babu, while your uncle was writing his last words in his notebook, Kusum said to me, ‘Give him some more time. Come, let’s go outside.’ She led me to my boat and there she gave me proof of her love — all that a man might need. It was high tide and the boat, which I had hidden among the mangroves, was rocking gently in the water. We climbed in and I wiped the mud from her ankles with my gamchha. Then she took my feet between her hands and washed them clean. It was as if the barriers of our bodies had melted and we had flowed into each other as the river does with the sea. There was nothing to say and nothing to be said; there were no words to chafe upon our senses: just an intermingling like that of fresh water and salt, a rising and a falling as of the tides.”

AT DAYBREAK, when Piya woke, her face and hair were wet with dew, but the water’s surface was almost completely clear of fog. She guessed this had something to do with the unusually warm night and was pleased to notice that a brisk breeze had started up and was stirring the river: it looked as though the weather would be somewhat more pleasant than it had been the day before.

Fokir was still asleep, so she lay motionless in her place, taking in the sounds of the early morning: the hooting of a distant bird, the rustle of the wind blowing through the mangroves and the lapping of the swift currents of high tide. As her ears grew attuned to her surroundings, she became aware of a sound that did not fit with the rest — a brief, breathy noise not unlike a sigh. It sounded like an exhalation, and yet it was not at all like the breathing of an Irrawaddy dolphin. She turned over onto her stomach and reached for her binoculars: her instincts told her it had to be a Gangetic dolphin, Platanista gangetica. Moments later she spotted a finless back rolling through the water some five hundred feet from the boat’s bow. Yes, that was what it was; she was excited to have her intuition so quickly confirmed. Nor was it just a single animal: there were maybe three of them in the immediate vicinity of the boat.

Piya sat up. So far the paucity of her encounters with Platanista had disappointed her — this sighting was an unexpected bonus. She took a GPS reading and then reached into her backpack for some data sheets.

It was the data sheets that made her suspect something was amiss. Logging the dolphins’ appearances, she saw that they were surfacing with unusual frequency, with barely a minute or two separating their exhalations. And more than once, along with the breathing, she heard a sound not unlike a squeal.

There was something odd here, she decided; this was not the way these animals normally behaved. She put away her data sheets and raised her glasses to her eyes.

As she was puzzling over the dolphins’ behavior, her mind wandered idly back to an article she had read some years before. It was by a Swiss cetologist, Professor G. Pilleri, one of the pioneers in river dolphin studies, a doyen of the field. As far as she could recall, the article had been written in the 1970s. Pilleri’s research had taken him to the Indus River, in Pakistan, and he had paid some fishermen to catch a pair of Platanista, a male and a female. The article, she remembered, had described the process in great detail. It was no easy task to capture these dolphins, for Platanista’s echolocation was so accurate that they were usually able to detect and evade a net once it had been lowered into the water. The fishermen had resorted to a strategy of luring unwary dolphins into places where nets could be dropped on them from above.