Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

Once his two specimens had been secured, Pilleri’s next step was to transport them to his laboratory in Switzerland. The story of this journey, Piya recalled, was so complicated that it had made her laugh out loud as she was reading it. The animals had been wrapped in wet cloths and taken by motorboat to a roadhead on the Indus. A waiting truck took them to a railway station and they traveled by train to Karachi. All through the journey their bodies were regularly moistened with water from their native river. A Land Rover met the train in Karachi and transported them to a hotel, where a swimming pool had been prepared for the two cetaceans. After the dolphins had rested there for a couple of days, the Land Rover came back to take them to Karachi Airport. There they were driven to the tarmac and loaded onto a Swissair plane. With the two dolphins in its hold, the plane made a stopover in Athens before proceeding to Zurich, where the temperature was well below freezing. Warmed by blankets and hot-water bottles, the animals were put in a heated ambulance and driven to an anatomical institute in Bern, where a special pool awaited them — a tank in which the water was kept at a temperature similar to that of the Indus.

It was in this strange habitat — this Indus in the Alps — that Pilleri had observed a curious and previously unknown aspect of Platanista behavior. These animals were very sensitive to atmospheric pressure: weather fronts passing over Bern would cause them to behave in markedly unusual ways.

Piya was trying to recall the exact details of their behavior when her glasses strayed from the river and gave her a glimpse of the horizon to the southeast. Although the rest of the sky was cloudless, at this point of the compass the horizon had acquired a peculiar steely glow.

Piya let her glasses drop and looked from the sky to the dolphins and back again. Now she understood. Without thinking she began to shout, “Fokir, there’s a storm coming! We have to get back to the Megha. ”

HOREN’S FINGER POINTED Kanai’s eyes to the southeastern quadrant of the sky, where a dark stain had spilled over the horizon like antimony from an eyelid. “It’s come quicker than I thought,” Horen said, glancing at his watch. “It’s half past five now. I’d say we can wait for thirty minutes more. Any longer than that and we won’t be able to make it back to Lusibari.”

“But Horen-da,” Kanai said, “how can we leave them here to face the cyclone on their own?”

“What else can we do?” Horen said. “It’s either that or we’ll all go down with this bhotbhoti, right here. It’s not just my life or yours I’m concerned about: there’s my grandson to think of too. As for safety, don’t think too much about that — I’m not sure we’re going to make it back either.”

“But couldn’t you find a sheltered spot somewhere nearby?” Kanai said. “Someplace where we could wait out the storm?”

Horen’s forefinger swept over the landscape. “Kanai-babu, look around. Where do you see any shelter? Do you see all these islands around us? When the storm hits, they’re going to be under several feet of water. If we stay here, this bhotbhoti would either capsize in midstream or be driven aground. We have no chance here. We have to go.”

“And what about them?” said Kanai. “What are their chances?”

Horen put a hand on Kanai’s shoulder. “Look. It won’t be easy, but Fokir knows what to do. If anyone has a chance, he does; his grandfather is said to have survived a terrible storm on Garjontola. Beyond that, what can I say? It’s not in our hands.”

IT WAS JUST AFTER five-thirty when Fokir nudged his boat out of the creek’s mouth. Although the wind had stiffened, Piya took heart from the fact that the sky was clear for the most part. And in the beginning the wind and the waves were more a help than a hindrance, pushing the boat in the direction they wanted to go, so it was like having extra pairs of hands to help with the rowing. Piya had her back to the bow, so at the outset, when the wind was behind them, she was able to watch the waves as they advanced on the boat from the rear. At this point they were just undulations on the water’s surface and there was no foam on their crests — they swept up quietly from behind the boat, raising the stern and then dropping it again before moving on.

After half an hour Piya took a reading of their position and was reassured by the result. If they managed to keep up the pace, she calculated they would be back at Garjontola in a couple of hours — probably before the storm broke.

But as the minutes crept by, the wind kept strengthening and the dark stain in the sky seemed to spread faster and faster. Their route, in any case, was a circuitous one, involving many changes of direction. Every time they turned, the wind came at them from a different angle, sometimes hitting them in such a way as to make the boat list. As the speed of the wind mounted, the waves grew taller and flecks of white appeared along their crests. Although there was no rain, the wind carried the churning spray right into their faces. Piya’s clothes were soon wet and she had to lick her lips to keep them from developing a crust of salt.

On entering their first mohona, they ran into waves much taller than those they had already faced. When the water curled up ahead of them, they had to strain against the oars to carry the boat over the crests. They seemed to be working twice as hard to cover half the distance: it was as if a once level track had now been stretched over a range of hills and valleys.

Piya took her next GPS reading after they had crossed the mohona — brief as it was, the operation gave her a minute to catch her breath. But there was nothing heartening about the reading itself: it confirmed her impression about the drop in their pace — it had slowed to a crawl.

Piya was reaching for her oars when something brushed against her cheek and fell into her lap. She glanced at it and saw that it was a mangrove leaf. She looked to her left, the direction from which the leaf had come. It so happened that they were in the center of a widebodied river — she estimated that the wind had carried the leaf a good mile and a half, from the shore to the boat.

They made another turn and now Piya found herself rowing with her back to the wind. It was oddly disorienting to be hit by a wave coming from her blind side; after it had lifted her up there would be a dizzying moment when the boat seemed to hang on the crest of the watery ridge. Then suddenly she would find herself tobogganing backward into the wave’s trough, clutching at the gunwales to keep her balance. Water came sluicing over the bow with each wave and it felt as if a bucket were being emptied on her back.

The impact of these descents soon began to shake loose the assorted bits of plywood that covered the boat’s deck. They began to quiver and rattle and the wind caught hold of one of them and tore it off the boat; it vanished in an instant. Minutes later, another slat of plywood went spinning away, and then another, exposing the boat’s bilges. Piya found she could see right into the hold where Fokir stored his crabs.

Another turn brought the wind around so that it was hitting them side-on, tilting the boat steeply to one side. The oar in Piya’s right hand was now almost a foot higher than the other: she had to lean sideways over the gunwale to bring it into contact with the water. As the boat tilted, her backpack began to roll around under the hood.

She had thought it would be dry there, but now it hardly seemed to matter. The spray was coming at them from so many different angles that everything was soaked. The boat lurched again and the pack was tossed into the air; it would have gone over but for the hood. Piya dropped her oars and scrambled forward to throw herself on the backpack. All her equipment was in it — her binoculars, her depth sounder, everything except her GPS monitor, which she had attached to a belt loop on her pants. The backpack also contained all the data she had gathered over the past nine days: she had put the sheets in a plastic bag and fastened it to her clipboard.