Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

Not bad, no? he said. He stopped and stared wistfully out to sea.

At dawn on their second day at sea, while two boils quivered ripely on Alu’s left leg, Mariamma ’s engine spluttered, broke into a whine, and then coughed sullenly into silence. Sajjan was at the wheel then: a lean, sunken-cheeked boy, not yet sixteen though already stamped with that dour arrogance which sometimes marks the mechanically skilled. Hajji Musa Koya, who usually took the wheel at dawn, was still dozing, propped against the wheelhouse with a sun-bleached blanket draped over his chest. An almost-empty arrack-bottle had been tucked with drunken parsimony into the waist of his lungi.

Sajjan went to the rails, leant over and spat into the sea. For a moment he stood looking down at Hajji Musa’s skullcap and wispy white beard. Then, shaking him by the shoulder, he shouted: Get up, Hajji, get up, up.

Hajji Musa, hovering near wakefulness, snorted into his beard: All right, boy, stop shouting. You know what to do — go and do something.

Sajjan stepped over him and bent down to run his hands over the steel hoop of a hatch. Then, spreading his legs, he took a firm grip on the hoop and pulled. The hatch creaked but would not open. He pulled off his oil-soaked vest and wound it around his hands. Then he spat on the hinges and pulled again, grunting, and now the hatch squeaked open, leaking whiffs of acrid diesel fumes.

Mariamma was not a big boat, and at first glance her unusually broad waist made her seem smaller than her twenty-eight-odd feet. Her hull sat high in the water, squat and ungainly, but strong. She had a low cabin, deep in the waist, and a tiny wheelhouse with barely enough space for two men to squeeze into, set well forward, close to her bows. Fence-like wooden rails, warped by the sea air, ringed her splintering decks. A rusty tube-well, which was sometimes used to pump water out of the bilges, perched on the stern like a heron, with its spout angled sharply over the rails.

In the many long and peaceful years she had spent in Calicut harbour and the backwaters around Alleppey, Mariamma ’s prow and the sides of her cabin and wheelhouse had acquired a dense coating of murals — out of the cabin grew emerald palms and houses with banks of crimson tiles; ochre tigers leapt on the wheelhouse; and fiery-eyed silvery fish stared out of the prow into the horizon. When Hajji Musa had decided to turn Mariamma to the lucrative al-Ghazira trade he had had her painted a nondescript bluish grey in the hope that it would make her less visible to coastguards and harbour police. But the contractor had mixed water in the paint and every year splashes of blue-grey flaked off till only a few patches, floating like clouds on the colours beneath, remained.

Hajji Musa had also installed a 400-horsepower diesel engine and he had strengthened Mariamma ’s bulkheads so that jerrycans of diesel fuel could be stored below deck. Over very short distances, when, for example, prudence required her to drop quickly below a horizon, Mariamma could do 35 miles per hour and sometimes even 40, but at the cost of a shuddering that threatened to dismember her. At her usual cruising speed of 20 to 25 knots she took the heaviest seas with the placid confidence of a tug in a harbour.

When he first took to the business Hajji Musa had listened carefully to the stories people told up and down the Malabar coast of boats setting off for al-Ghazira with twenty, forty and even (so they said) a hundred eager emigrants, but only to run out of fuel halfway, or else to be swallowed into the sea with the first mild gale, borne down by sheer weight. Unlike many other boat-owners, the Hajji’s cupidity was easy-going, and he had that love of life peculiar to the morose. So he took note of the stories and made a few rules which he never broke — he sailed only in winter, after the retreat of the north-east monsoon when the sea was like a lagoon and he could be sure of a gentle breeze behind him. And he never took more than eight passengers, but he charged them almost three times the going rate. Yet, despite his high rates, he never had any trouble finding passengers, for he had a considerable reputation and people were willing to pay extra to make sure that they were not left stranded on a sandbank at low tide somewhere in the Arabian Sea. His overheads he covered by a little discreet trafficking in the highly priced hashish of the Idikki hills. And he always carried enormous quantities of diesel fuel: apart from the mounds of jerrycans below deck, there were a few drums in the cabin and a couple in the stern which also served to curtain off a plastic slop-bucket.

Alu and the two other male passengers, Rakesh and Professor Samuel, had found themselves a place to sleep not far from the bucket, in the narrow space that was shielded from the wind by the cabin. There they had erected a rain-shelter, a sheet of tarpaulin which was harnessed to the cabin at one end and to the deck-rails at the other. Hajji Musa often looked at the flapping sheet with melancholy misgiving: It’ll overturn the whole boat if it catches a gust. But Rakesh, who was very thin and a little sickly, insisted that they keep it; they had to have something to keep the deadly morning dew from their chests, especially in winter and at sea; there was no telling …

The men were not alarmed when they heard the engine die out: twice before the engine had coughed and spluttered, only to drum back into its regular rhythm moments later. After a while, yawning and stretching, they drifted to the wheelhouse. Hajji Musa was squatting near the open hatch, silently smoking a biri. Sajjan was idly shining a torch down at the engine. It was still dark, though the eastern sky behind them had turned scarlet. The sea, tinged with violet, was lapping gently at Mariamma ’s sides.

Alu squatted beside Hajji Musa: What’s happened? Hajji Musa, in his perfunctory Hindi, scratching his skeletal ribs, answered: Don’t know. Let’s see. We’ll have to let it cool before we do anything.

For a while they all looked silently down the hatch. Then, Rakesh, leaning his thin, lanky frame over the rails, began to clean his teeth with a twig of neem. Soon Professor Samuel wandered away towards the cabin. He was a short, stocky man, bespectacled and balding. He folded his lungi up to his waist and climbed down the three steps which led to the cabin. When he reached the curtain which hung across the cabin’s entrance he turned, averting his eyes from the interior with painstaking modesty, and reached inside. He drew out a large pot of tapioca, a bottle of coconut oil and a tin of salt. Then he leapt back up the steps and, squatting in the passageway, began to knead the tapioca with coconut oil and salt.

Suddenly he stopped, cocked his head and beckoned at Alu: It’s her again. A moment later a long, pain-racked groan rasped out of the cabin, shaking the whole boat. The Professor wagged his head: Yes, it’s her again — Karthamma.

They had only had a glimpse of her once, when she clambered on at Mahé: tall and luminously black, heavy with child, her belly straining before her like a full sail. God, said the Professor with his ear to the cabin wall, it’s a strong woman who can groan like that.

At midday when the sea shone like a white light Mariamma was still sitting on the glassy water, rocking in the occasional gusts of wind that gently corrugated the surface. Rakesh, Professor Samuel and Alu soon bored of keeping a look-out for coastguards as Hajji Musa had told them to. Gradually they drifted towards a patch of shade near the cabin. Alu propped himself up against the cabin wall and stretched his legs stiffly ahead of him to dull the pain of his boils. Rakesh and Professor Samuel squeezed in beside him. They could hear Sajjan tinkering with the engine: in that shimmering silence it seemed as though the sound was echoing back at them from the horizon.