Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

I will think about it, she cried. I think about it all the time — in school, walking down the road, everywhere. It’s the only thing I think about.

Then, he said, that’s the best reason for not doing anything about it. As you grow older, it’ll matter less and less. You’ll see. And the day it doesn’t matter at all you’ll know you’re a woman at last.

She shrank back, frightened by the finality of his tone. Then, choking on her sobs, she pounded on his chest: It’ll always matter; it’ll always matter. How can you know? You don’t have to live with it.

He caught her hands and kissed them. I’ll show you, he said. He turned and pulled a book out of his old bookcase. I’ll translate something for you. When I read it to you, you’ll see that things like these don’t matter.

She pushed herself angrily out of his lap and didn’t talk to him for a week. A translation. What difference would a translation make to the laughter in her classroom?

But the old man had been right about one thing: almost imperceptibly every passing year dulled the wounding edge of those glances. Nowadays it took her only a few minutes to recover.

So, after a while, almost cheerfully, she said to Kulfi: It’s a small town, isn’t it? One day I’ll take you to the top of a minaret and you can see it all spread out below you. Actually we’ve been here just two years ourselves. We’re leaving soon. Our children won’t let us stay away any longer. They’re back home in Dehra Dun.

Oh, said Kulfi, glad to have the silence broken. So you’ve come here with only your husband, then? I suppose there aren’t any other Indians here?

Oh, no, Mrs Verma laughed. There are five of us. There’s Miss Krishnaswamy — she’s a nurse. Then there’s Dr Mishra. He’s the seniormost among us. He’s a surgeon. He’s very good; some people say he’s brilliant. He looks it; you’ll see when you meet him. Then there’s his wife, but she’s not a doctor. They’re both from Lucknow.

It must have been lonely, Kulfi said thoughtfully, coming to a foreign place; having to work with people you didn’t know. You know, in al-Ghazira, I must say, in the beginning, though there were all his colleagues in the firm, I really—

People I didn’t know? Mrs Verma interrupted her. You mean Dr Mishra? Yes, I suppose it’s true that we didn’t know him, but it didn’t feel like that. You see, I’d heard about him for years. My father knew his father quite well once upon a time, and he talked about them quite a lot. So in a way, when we first met him at the interviews in Delhi, it was like meeting someone we’d known for a long time. Besides, he talks a lot …

Her voice trailed off. You’ll see, she added lamely. You’ll meet him this evening. I’ll ask them over so that we can make arrangements for …

She stopped and looked intently at Kulfi. Kulfi stopped beside her.

Tell me, Mrs Bose, she said, can you act?

Perhaps, Zindi said hesitantly, she could do something about your hands, too. After all, she’s a doctor.

Alu jerked his head quickly from side to side and his hands slid behind his chair. Much later she saw him sitting with his hands in his lap, staring at his fingers. The thumbs had stiffened and the skin had sagged over the bones, like a shroud on a skeleton. He tried to move them and he couldn’t. The bones were as rigid as a corpse’s; she half-expected them to clatter, dice-like. Then Alu caught her looking at him, and at once his hands disappeared under him and he went back to staring vacantly ahead of him.

That was the only time she had referred to his thumbs. She first saw them long after they had slipped past the frowning heights of Perim, through the Bab al-Mandab, into the Red Sea. They had already been at sea for — it seemed like months, with months left to go.

Somewhere on the journey, soon after Zeynab had swung through the Red Sea in a great arc and tacked close to the coast between Dhofar and Makalla, a very old man appeared in the ship. Nobody saw him arrive; he was just there one day. Nobody wondered, either, for there were boats enough drawing alongside Zeynab on that stretch of the coast, though always under the cover of darkness. He was a small man, with a gritty, hollowed-out face. He wore a string vest, a hat like in American movies, and khaki trousers many sizes too large for him (there were plenty of British soldiers in those parts, some dead). Nobody knew his name, for he couldn’t talk. His tongue had been torn out from the roots; he would wag the stump for anyone who cared to look. Nobody needed to ask how it had happened: there were more wars than villages along those shores.

Fikry, the dark, towering nakhuda of Zeynab , was said to know all about him. But despite Zindi’s efforts he never gave anything away, not even his name.

In the end the old man was named by the half-dozen boys of various ages who manned Zeynab . His one possession happened to be a Japanese umbrella, a thing of great mechanical beauty, which grew at the press of a button from a foot-long stump into a vast canopy, as shady as a banyan tree. It was dubbed, naturally, the Japanese Miracle, and it gave him his name: Abu Karamat il-Yabani.

He of the Japanese Miracle never lost his smile, all through the days after Makalla when they swung out again towards the open sea and their barrels of fresh water were found to be empty; nor even afterwards when they ran out of food somewhere in the Red Sea, along the Eritrean coast, and not one of the boats Fikry waited for in three different places turned up. Even then he kept smiling, though for everyone else it was nothing less than torture to have to watch the fires of the fishing villages on the coast and smell the delicious warmth of cow-dung smoke on empty stomachs.

Provisions reached them soon after, but then they had to suffer a torture of another kind. Fikry decided one evening that a coastguard or some other busybody had sniffed their trail. So with a few powerful bursts of her engines (rescued from a Centurion tank somewhere in Iraq) Zeynab lost herself in the basaltic maze of the Dahlak Archipelago. For the next few days they had to pick their way through hell. While two boys hung over the prow examining the colour of the water and shouting instructions to Fikry, at the wheel, they had to sit motionless as those tortured, jagged anvils of rock flung themselves at the boat’s side; watch while the magnificent, muted colours of the coral reefs leapt up without warning to scrape Zeynab ’s prow.

It was somewhere there that a tail of sharks attached itself to Zeynab . No one knew what drew them: perhaps it was the sight of those two boys hanging so close to the water. It couldn’t have been the meagre remains of their rice-and-lentils meals.

No, said Fikry, they hang close because they like the smell of human shit. And, certainly, it was under the holes in the stern that they usually hung, jaws snapping, waiting for fresh turds.

All through those days the old man never once stopped smiling. He and Alu were drawn to each other by their silences, and soon they were spending the days sitting together on a little ledge near the stern, silently meditating under the banyan shade of the Japanese Miracle.

Things grew a little better after the Dahlak Archipelago. But their progress was still slow; for Fikry, in his keenness to stay safely away from the main shipping lanes, kept them close to the mangrove-encrusted shores where they had to pick their way through unpredictable sand-shoals. In the stretch between Trinkitat and Suakin they swung out towards the main shipping lanes again, to avoid Port Sudan, and somewhere there Fikry sniffed the air one morning and said: Big ships ahead — I can smell them. He laughed at the alarm his announcement caused: Nothing to worry about — these fish are too big to stop for shrimps like us.