Gun Island

by Amitav Ghosh

  Cinta glanced at me with knitted eyebrows. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Do you remember how you called me, almost accidentally, a couple of years ago? I was in Calcutta and you were in Venice, at the airport, waiting for a flight. You said you had had a dream.’

  ‘Yes, I remember. Go on.’

  ‘That day I had gone to see an elderly relative of mine – a remarkable woman who has spent most of her life living and working in the Sundarbans.’

  It occurred to me then that Cinta might not know what I was referring to. ‘Have you heard of the Sundarbans? The mangrove forest of Bengal?’

  ‘Sì, caro!’ Cinta smiled and patted my hand. ‘In Italy everyone knows about the Sundarbans. It is because of a famous children’s book that was set there. It was my daughter Lucia’s favourite book; she used to dream of that forest.’

  ‘The Sundarbans?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cinta, ‘but go on with what you were saying.’

  ‘So what happened was that my relative told me about a small temple in the jungle and asked me to visit it; she felt that someone needed to make a record of the structure before it was swallowed up by the mud. Her story was interesting but I wasn’t keen to go because I had to leave for New York in a couple of days and was very busy. Actually I had more or less decided not to go when you called, and then, for some reason, I changed my mind and went after all.’

  ‘And what did you find?’

  ‘The temple was there, just as she had said – it was quite distinctive in style, and I’m pretty sure that it was built in the seventeenth century. The temple was also associated with the goddess of snakes, Manasa Devi, about whom there are many legends, some of which are linked to the figure of a merchant. You may remember that I once gave you a piece I’d written about one of those legends.’

  ‘Sì, mi ricordo. Go on.’

  ‘The strange thing about this little temple is that the legend that’s associated with it was never written down or published – it was only meant to be passed down from mouth to mouth. Apparently there was some kind of prohibition on putting the legend in writing.’

  ‘That’s not so unusual,’ said Cinta. ‘There are many secret legends and stories.’

  ‘But if the story is meant to be a secret then why build a shrine to it? Doesn’t it defeat the purpose?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Cinta. ‘There could be many reasons why whoever built the shrine wouldn’t want the story to be written down.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Cinta smiled cryptically. ‘Maybe they believed the story wasn’t over – that it would reach out into the future?’

  ‘I don’t get that, Cinta,’ I said. ‘I don’t see how a legend could reach out into the future. After all, it’s just a story…’

  She stopped me with a rap on the knuckles.

  ‘You must never use that phrase, Dino,’ she said slowly and deliberately. ‘In the seventeenth century no one would ever have said of something that it was “just a story” as we moderns do. At that time people recognized that stories could tap into dimensions that were beyond the ordinary, beyond the human even. They knew that only through stories was it possible to enter the most inward mysteries of our existence where nothing that is really important can be proven to exist – like love, or loyalty, or even the faculty that makes us turn around when we feel the gaze of a stranger or an animal. Only through stories can invisible or inarticulate or silent beings speak to us; it is they who allow the past to reach out to us.’

  ‘Aren’t you exaggerating a bit, Cinta?’

  ‘No, caro, no. You mustn’t underestimate the power of stories. There is something in them that is elemental and inexplicable. Haven’t you heard it said that what makes us human, what separates us from animals, is the faculty of storytelling?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘But what if the truth were even stranger? What if it were the other way around? What if the faculty of storytelling were not specifically human but rather the last remnant of our animal selves? A vestige left over from a time before language, when we communicated as other living beings do? Why else is it that only in stories do animals speak? Not to speak of demons, and gods, and indeed God himself? It is only through stories that the universe can speak to us, and if we don’t learn to listen you may be sure that we will be punished for it.’

  I shifted uneasily in my seat, recalling those months in Brooklyn when I had been haunted by the feeling that something that had long lain dormant in the mud of the Sundarbans had entered me. Then an image flashed past my eyes, of that snake tumbling down through the skies, and as if by instinct I threw up my hands to shield my face.

  ‘What’s the matter, caro?’ said Cinta. ‘What just happened?’

  ‘Oh, nothing, Cinta, nothing.’

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about what had happened on the plane the day before. What could I say anyway? That I was having nightmares about snakes? That I had been arrested for disruptive behaviour on a plane? What could she possibly think except that I was losing my mind?

  ‘It’s just that I haven’t been too well of late.’

  ‘Yes I can see that.’ She looked at me closely and then leaned back in her seat.

  ‘I think you have been working too hard, caro,’ she said. ‘Come, let us take a break from this conference. My cousin’s daughter Gisella is here from Rome – did I ever tell you about her? Gisa, as we call her, is a very interesting girl. She makes documentary films for television and has won some major prizes. She lives in Trastevere, in Rome, with her girlfriend, and they have adopted two orphaned refugees – a six-year-old girl from Syria and a boy of seven from Eritrea. Now they are all here, in California: Imma, Gisa’s partner, does something big with computers, and her company has asked her to spend this year in LA. They have taken a house near Venice Beach.’

  Cinta gave a laugh. ‘Venice Beach! Isn’t that wonderful? Do you know that I have never been there – a Venetian who hasn’t seen Venice Beach! But today –’ she paused to tap my hand with a forefinger, for emphasis – ‘Gisa has asked me to come for an aperitivo: and you must come with me of course! We will skip the conference dinner – they are always very boring. Venice Beach will be more divertente, no?’

  She patted my hand. ‘You will like Gisa, caro. I am very fond of her: she was about the same age as my Lucia and they were very close. It is always nice for me to see her.’

  * * *

  At the end of the day’s sessions I called an Uber to take us to the address that Gisa had sent to Cinta. The driver dropped us off at a charming house in a canal-crossed neighbourhood adjacent to Venice Beach: Gisa’s partner was still at work when we arrived so it was Gisa who greeted us at the door.

  She was in her mid thirties, slim, willowy, and dressed in dark trousers and a baggy black sweater. She had a silver ring in her left nostril and her short, platinum-blonde hair had streaks that matched her pink eyeglasses. She spoke very fast, often outrunning her own thoughts, slipping unselfconsciously between Italian and English, and gesturing all the while with her slim, eloquent fingers.

  That day it was clear from the start that Gisa was on edge. And with good reason too: barely had she opened the door before her adopted children burst out of the house, followed by an excitable young Labrador who almost knocked Cinta over. The children were a lively, high-spirited pair and Gisa had to chase them around the yard for several minutes before she finally succeeded in herding them back inside. The dog, Leola, was the most recalcitrant and had to be literally pushed in: ‘Leola! Calmati!’

  By the end of it Gisa was panting and full of apologies: they weren’t always like this, it was just that she had kept the children home from school because of concerns about the air quality. There was too much smoke in the air, for one, but she also did not want to be separated from them at a time when wildfires were raging just a few miles away. She had been caught in a similar situation the year before, she told us, during a vacation in Sicily. They h
ad been sitting on a sun-drenched beach when the police had suddenly appeared to tell them that a wildfire had broken out nearby and was moving rapidly in their direction. In the ensuing melee she had been separated from her daughter for several agonizing minutes. It was not an experience that she wanted to repeat.

  All of this poured out of her while we were still outside.

  ‘I think the smoke is better now,’ Gisa said, anxiously scanning the sky. ‘Non è vero? Soon we can walk down to the beach. But first come in and have an aperitivo.’

  ‘Or why don’t we go to the beach first?’ said Cinta. ‘It will be sunset soon and it may get too dark later.’

  Gisa nodded in agreement and we set off after a few minutes, with the children running ahead with the dog. The sun was setting by the time we got to the beach and it looked empty and rather forlorn, with only a few runners and joggers dotting the broad, seemingly endless runway of sand. Gisa thought that it was the smoke that had kept people away – yet the air was fresher here than elsewhere, with a nice crisp breeze blowing in from the sea. Nor was that distant tsunami of smoke visible from the beach; the dark wave that I had seen the day before was obscured by a haze.

  Leola, the retriever, was eager to go into the water, so the children ran ahead, throwing a stick into the waves for her to fetch. The dog clearly loved the game. She watched the stick as though her life depended on it; her eyes stayed riveted on it even as she was plunging into the waves in pursuit – in a dozen throws she did not once fail to bring back the stick.

  Then all of a sudden, as she was on her way back to shore with the stick in her mouth, she came to an abrupt halt in about a foot of water. Dropping the stick, she gave a couple of excited barks while snapping at whatever it was that had attracted her attention.

  The children cupped their hands around their mouths and shouted to the dog to come back. But Leola paid them no heed and kept dipping her snout in the water. Then she raised her head again and we saw that there was something hanging from her mouth, something that seemed to be alive and writhing.

  Gisa was already running as the dog stepped towards the shore. Leola had barely reached the sand when she collapsed and dropped the thing that was in her mouth.

  Gisa’s adopted son was the first to approach the dog and he began to scream: ‘Serpente! Serpente!’ Gisa was only a step behind him; grabbing his shirt she pulled him back.

  When Cinta and I caught up, a few seconds later, Gisa was cradling the dog’s head in her lap. Her children were crouching around her, crying uncontrollably. A couple of feet away lay a two-foot snake; its colour was darkly metallic with a bright yellow underbelly. It was dead, its head crushed to a pulp.

  A couple of red-suited lifeguards appeared beside us now and they took the situation in at a glance.

  ‘Did the dog get bit? By that snake?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cinta. ‘It must have bitten her as she was chewing up its head.’

  ‘Too bad,’ said the guard. ‘What you’ve got over there is a yellow-bellied sea snake; its venom’s lethal.’

  ‘A sea snake?’ I said. ‘Are they common around here?’

  ‘Didn’t used to be,’ said the guard. ‘But we’ve had a bunch of yellow-bellies washing up here in the last few months. Wish I knew where the hell they’re coming from.’

  The guards carried the dog to the boardwalk while Gisa called her partner and Cinta tried to comfort the children. There was an agonizing wait as the dog lay moaning and twitching on the boardwalk. Fortunately the campus where Imma, Gisa’s partner, worked was nearby and she was able to run over in a few minutes. She lost no time in taking charge of the situation, quickly summoning an Uber to take them to the vet.

  Cinta and I waved them off and then stood on the sidewalk for a few minutes, trying to catch our breath. I was thinking of calling an Uber when I spotted a taxi approaching and flagged it down.

  ‘Come, Cinta, let’s go back to the hotel.’

  * * *

  The wildfires had caused so much disruption that we were soon trapped in bumper-to-bumper traffic: the driver warned us that it might take us two hours or more to reach the hotel.

  An hour later, as we sat idling on an expressway, Cinta’s phone rang; it was Gisa. They had a long talk, in low voices.

  Cinta was in tears when she got off the phone.

  ‘Non posso crederci,’ she said, brushing a hand across her eyes. ‘I don’t believe it. The dog is dead, of a snake bite! Here in LA.’

  ‘And how are the children?’

  ‘They’re all right. I imagine they’ve seen worse.’

  ‘And Gisa?’

  ‘She’s shaken.’

  I nodded. ‘That’s only to be expected. It must have been very upsetting, to see her pet die like that.’

  ‘It wasn’t just that.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Something strange happened while the dog was dying.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Cinta bit her lip. ‘I told you, didn’t I, that Gisa was very close to my daughter, Lucia?’

  ‘Yes, you mentioned that.’

  ‘Gisa said she felt Lucia was there today, with her, just a little while ago…’

  Cinta began to dab her eyes, and we were silent for a while, staring at the inferno-like landscape ahead of us where towering columns of flame were advancing upon orderly, neatly designed neighbourhoods.

  Then Cinta said in a whisper: ‘You know, I feel it too, sometimes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lucia’s presence. I feel that she is there, beside me. It is very comforting.’

  ‘And do you ever hear her voice? Like you did that time in Salzburg?’

  Cinta nodded. ‘I did – just one other time.’

  ‘When? Where?’

  ‘A few years after Giacomo and Lucia died. The investigation into the accident was dragging on, with no end in sight. Everyone knew that nothing would come of it – it was all just smoke and mirrors, or as we say specchietti per le allodole, “mirrors for larks”. The politicians and policemen were either afraid for their lives, or they were in the Mafia’s pocket. As time went on my faith in things began to erode until I no longer believed in anything – and I missed Giacomo and Lucia so much that the pain became unbearable and I no longer wanted to live. I almost stopped eating and one day, in that weakened state, it happened that I got wet in the rain and fell ill with pneumonia. To me it was like a deliverance and I embraced my sickness hoping that I would be carried quickly away. But while I was in the hospital – I can still see the room, with its neon lights and a table filled with bouquets – one day I heard Lucia’s voice quite clearly. I couldn’t see her but I had a sense that she was standing by a window, beside the curtain. She said: “Mamma, mamma – what is this you’re doing to yourself? This is not your time, you must fight to stay alive. You must not give in like this: something will happen to renew your faith in the world – you must believe me. Until then you must live and wait – for my sake if not yours. Because if you die now, neither you nor I will ever find peace.”’

  Cinta’s voice faded away and she gave me a halting smile.

  ‘It was a dream, perhaps, or maybe a hallucination. But anyway here I am, still waiting.’

  * * *

  It occurred to me, later that evening, that I knew only one person who might be able to shed some light on the incident at Venice Beach: Piya.

  On an impulse I went to my laptop and wrote her an email describing what had happened and asking if she knew of any similar occurrences.

  The message sounded a little brusque when I read it over so I added a couple of lines, asking about Tipu.

  I didn’t know where Piya was and didn’t expect to hear back soon, if at all, since she was probably in some distant time zone. But my message reached her in Oregon and she wrote back within fifteen minutes.

  Weird coincidence, she said, she had come upon a newspaper article about yellow-bellied sea snakes just the day before (she included the link, which was about an in
cident in Ventura Beach, California). These snakes generally lived in warmer waters, to the south, but sightings in southern California had become increasingly common: their distribution was changing with the warming of the oceans and they were migrating northwards. This was bad news for southern California because yellow-bellies were indeed extremely venomous – but fortunately fatalities were vanishingly rare. My friend’s dog had been very unlucky.

  ‘As for Tipu, thanks for asking about him. He’s still in Bangalore and seems to be doing well. He’s been very good about staying in touch with Moyna – she says he often calls and sends pictures of himself.’

  The message continued: ‘And I don’t know if you heard about what happened to that temple you visited? There was a bad storm a couple of months ago and it was swept away. I’d been meaning to go see it but I guess it wasn’t meant to happen. There’s nothing left of it now.’

  The message ended with a sunburst of emojis and ‘Take care, and let’s hope you don’t run into any more snakes!’

  Gun Island

  Cinta’s talk was the closing event of the conference and there wasn’t an empty seat in the hall when it began.

  It wasn’t just her books, and her position as Professoressa Emerita at the Università di Padova, that made Cinta such a draw: over the years she had also become an exceptionally compelling speaker. Her rich, rasping voice, her operatic accent and her manner, at once theatrical and impulsive, were the perfect complements of her erudition, and she knew exactly how to use them to the best advantage. Standing on a podium, with her fine features framed by a halo of brilliantly white hair, Cinta often made an unforgettable impression – and so she did that day as she spoke to us about the historical background of Shakespeare’s Venice.

  A real-life counterpart of Shylock, Cinta told us, would have lived in Venice’s Jewish enclave, which dated back to the year 1541, when the Venetian Republic had enacted a law allowing Jews to settle in the city on condition that they wore distinctive clothing, did not consort freely with Christians and lived on an island of their own, in the interior.