The Hungry Tide

by Amitav Ghosh

  Piya had often envied those field biologists who had found monumental subjects to work on — Jane Goodall in the mountains of Kenya, Helene Marsh in the swamps of Queensland. Being unambitious by nature, she had never imagined that something similar might come her own way one day. And yet here it was, and she had stumbled on it by chance, exactly when things seemed to be going wrong. She recalled the mythologies of discovery that had attracted her to the sciences as a child, and how the most miraculous seemed always to be those that had the most quotidian origins — Archimedes and his bathtub, Newton and his apple. Not that her work would be in any way comparable or similar — but now at least she could see what it was about, how it happened that an idea floated unexpectedly into your mind and you knew in an instant that this was an errand that would detain you for the rest of your life.

  She had never had high aspirations for herself as a scientist. Although she liked cetaceans and felt an affinity for them, she knew it was not just for the animals that she did what she did. As with many of her peers, she had been drawn to field biology as much for the life it offered as for its intellectual content — because it allowed her to be on her own, to have no fixed address, to be far from the familiar while still being a part of a loyal but loose-knit community. This would not change any of that; for the most part it would be the usual grind of writing applications, trying to find funding and so on. Whatever came of it in the end, it was a certainty that it was not going to create an upheaval in science. But at the same time, who would have thought that it would be so intensely satisfying to have your future resolved, to know what you were going to be doing next year and the year after that until who knew when? And yes, it was true that whatever came of it would not revolutionize the sciences, or even a minor branch of them, but it was also true that if she was able to go through with it — even a part of it — it would be as fine a piece of descriptive science as any. It would be enough; as an alibi for a life, it would do; she would not need to apologize for how she had spent her time on this earth.

  MOYNA

  IT WAS WELL PAST NOON when Kanai went down to knock again on Nilima’s door. He was glad to find her dressed and on her feet.

  “Aré, Kanai,” she said, smiling. “There you are. Come in.”

  On her face there was no sign of the anguish Kanai had seen that morning, and he guessed that the change in her spirits was due to her being at her desk. It was in this way, he realized, that she had coped with Nirmal’s death and the years of loneliness that had followed — by immersing herself in her work.

  “Moyna should be here any minute now,” Nilima said. “I’ve asked her to show you around the hospital.”

  “What does Moyna do here?” said Kanai.

  “She’s one of our trainees,” replied Nilima. “She joined the Trust years ago, when we started our ‘barefoot nurse’ program. It’s an outreach project for providing medical assistance to people in out-of-the-way villages. We give the nurses some basic training in hygiene, nutrition, first aid, midwifery and other things that might be useful — how to cope with drowning, for instance, since that’s a situation they often have to face. Then they go back to their villages and hold training classes of their own.”

  “But I take it Moyna has risen in the ranks?”

  “Yes,” said Nilima. “She’s not a barefoot nurse anymore. She’s training to be a fully fledged nurse in the hospital. She applied a couple of years ago, and since her record was very good we were happy to take her in. The strange thing was that even though she had worked for us for a long time, we had no idea who she was — in the sense that we didn’t know she was married to Kusum’s son. And when I found out, it was almost by accident.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was in the market one day,” Nilima said, “and I saw her with a young man and a child. Now you have to remember I hadn’t seen Fokir since he was a boy of five, so of course I didn’t recognize him. I said to her, ‘Moyna, is this chhélé-chhokra your husband, then?’ and she replied, ‘Yes, Mashima, this is him.’ ‘So what’s his name then?’ I asked, and she said, ‘Fokir Mandol.’ It’s a common enough name, but I knew at once. I said, ‘Éki ré? Who are you? Are you our Kusum’s Fokir?’ And he said yes.”

  “So at least that part of it turned out well,” said Kanai. “He was here, safe in Lusibari.”

  “I wish it were that simple,” said Nilima. “But the truth is, it hasn’t gone well at all.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  Moyna was both ambitious and bright, Nilima said. Through her own efforts, with no encouragement from her family, she had managed to give herself an education. There was no school in her village, so she had walked every day to another village miles away. She had done well in her school final exams and had wanted to go on to college in Canning or some other nearby town. She had made all her preparations and had even gotten her Scheduled Caste certificate. But her family had balked at the prospect of her departure and to thwart her plans had insisted she get married. The man chosen to be her husband was Fokir — by all accounts a perfectly fine young fellow except that he could neither read nor write and made his living by catching crabs.

  “But the remarkable thing is that Moyna hasn’t abandoned her dreams,” said Nilima. “She’s so determined to qualify as a nurse that she made Fokir move to Lusibari while she was in training.”

  “And is Fokir happy about that?”

  “I don’t think so,” Nilima said. “I hear they’ve been having trouble — that might be why he disappears sometimes. I don’t know the details; the girls don’t tell me everything. But I do know that Moyna’s been having a difficult time. This morning, for instance, she looked completely distraught.”

  “So she came by, did she?”

  “Yes,” said Nilima. “In fact, she should be here again any minute. I sent her to the hospital to get me some medicine.”

  “But Fokir isn’t back yet?”

  “No,” said Nilima, “and Moyna’s sick with worry. I’ve asked her to show you around the hospital because I thought it would take her mind off this thing for a bit.”

  There was a tapping sound on the front door, and Nilima responded by calling out, “Moyna? Is that you?”

  “Yes, Mashima.”

  “Esho. Come.”

  Kanai turned around to see a young woman standing at the entrance with her sari drawn over her head. A stream of sunlight flooding in from the open doorway had cast her face into shadow, so that all he could see of her was the three glinting points of her earrings and her nose stud: in the dark oval of her face they seemed to shine like stars in a constellation.

  “Moyna, this is Kanai-babu,” said Nilima. “He’s my nephew.”

  “Nomoshkar,” she said, stepping in.

  “Nomoshkar.” The light had caught her face now, and seeing her close up, Kanai saw that the kajol had spilled over the rims of her eyes. Her complexion was dark and silky and her raven-black hair shone with oil. Her face was marked by a sharply outlined brow and a prominent jaw; he could tell at a glance that she was not one to be shy of pitting her will against the world. Yet from the redness of her eyes it was clear she had been crying.

  “Listen, Kanai,” said Mashima, switching to English so as not to be understood by Moyna. “Be careful with this girl — she’s clearly very upset.”

  “Of course,” said Kanai.

  “Righty-o, then,” said Nilima. “I suppose you had better be going.”

  Righty-o? It was not often that Kanai heard his aunt speak English, and he was struck by her distinctive and unexpected diction. Her Bengali, after years of living in the tide country, had almost converged with the local dialect, having been stripped of the inflections of her urban upbringing. But her English, possibly because she spoke it so rarely, had survived like a fern suspended in amber, untouched by time and unspoiled by the rigors of regular usage, a perfect specimen of a tongue learned in the schools of the Raj. It was like listening to a lost language, the dialect of a vanished colo
nial upper middle class, spoken with the crisp enunciation once taught in elocution classes and debating societies.

  AS THEY WERE starting down the path to the hospital, Kanai said to Moyna, “Did Mashima tell you I knew your mother-in-law?”

  “No!” cried Moyna, throwing him a look of surprise. “Mashima didn’t mention it. Did you really know her?”

  “Yes,” said Kanai. “I did. It was a long time ago, of course. She must have been about fifteen. And I was younger.”

  “What was she like?”

  “What I remember is her tej,” Kanai said. “Even at that age she was very spirited.”

  Moyna nodded. “I’ve heard people say she was like a storm, a jhor.”

  “Yes,” said Kanai. “That’s a good way of putting it. Of course, you never knew her yourself, did you?”

  “No,” said Moyna. “I was just a baby when she died. But I’ve heard many stories about her.”

  “Does your husband talk about her?”

  Moyna’s face had brightened in speaking of Kusum, but now, at the mention of Fokir, it fell again. “No,” she said. “He never speaks of her. I don’t think he remembers much of her either. After all, he was very little when she died —” She shrugged, cutting herself short, and Kanai thought it better to let the subject drop.

  They were nearing the hospital now, and seeing the building close up gave Kanai a renewed appreciation of the sheer scale of Nilima’s achievement. It was not that the building was overly large or particularly striking in its design; a mere two stories high, it was built in the shape of a squat shoebox. Its outer walls were painted gray, while the windows and the railings of its long corridors were outlined in white. There was a garden in front, planted largely with marigolds. Yet, plain as it was, in this tide country setting where mud and mildew encrusted everything, the building’s crisp lines and fresh paint were enough to give it the exclamatory salience of a skyscraper. Kanai could tell that the mere sight of it gave heart to the people it served.

  This was clearly the effect it had on Moyna, for there was a noticeable improvement in her demeanor as she led Kanai to the hospital. With every step her carriage seemed to become a little straighter and her movements more assured: it was as though the mere proximity of the building had caused a brisk professional to emerge from the chrysalis of a careworn wife and mother.

  Leading Kanai through the hospital’s entrance, Moyna ushered him to a door. Then, speaking in a voice hushed with pride, she announced, “And this is the Maternity Ward.”

  Hospitals were not, as a rule, of much interest to Kanai, but this was an exception: he could not help being impressed by the impeccable maintenance of the wards. Every part of the hospital seemed to be spotlessly clean and even though it had only forty beds, it was, for its size, well equipped. The equipment had come from donors, Moyna explained, some Indian and others foreign. There was a diagnostic laboratory, an x-ray room and even a dialysis machine. On the top floor lived two resident doctors, one of whom had been in Lusibari for ten years. The other was a new arrival who had just completed his residency requirements at the prestigious medical college of Vellore. They were both, Moyna said, prominent and muchbeloved figures on the islands. Every patient who came to the hospital made it a point to leave an offering at their door — a coconut, a few kewra fruit, a fish wrapped in leaves, sometimes a live chicken or two.

  Such was the hospital’s reputation, Moyna said, that people now came there from great distances. Many who could have traveled more conveniently to Canning or Kolkata chose to come to Lusibari instead: the hospital was known to provide, at a nominal fee, a standard of care that could not be had elsewhere even at exorbitant rates. This traffic, in turn, had led to the growth of a small service industry around the hospital’s perimeter. Over the years, a number of teashops, guest houses and stands for cycle-vans had taken root and flourished. Directly or indirectly the hospital now provided employment for the majority of Lusibari’s inhabitants.

  On the upper floor Moyna pointed out Nirmal’s single contribution to the hospital: a large ward specially equipped to withstand cyclones. The windows had thick wooden shutters and the doors were reinforced with steel. Although he had rarely interfered in anything to do with the Trust, when the hospital was under construction Nirmal had taken the trouble to find out if any anti-cyclone measures had been provided for. He was horrified to learn that they hadn’t: did nobody know about the tide country’s history of catastrophic cyclones? Did they think that Lusibari was the one place where history would not repeat itself ? It was at his insistence that this ward was built.

  From a veranda on the second floor, Moyna pointed to the stalls and clusters of huts that ringed the compound. “Look over there, Kanai-babu,” she said. “Look at the shops and stalls that have come up around the hospital. See how many there are?”

  Kanai was touched, moved even, by Moyna’s evident pride in the institution. “Have you ever brought Fokir here?” he said.

  She answered this with a small shake of her head. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She pulled a face. “He doesn’t like to come — he feels out of place.”

  “In the hospital, you mean? Or in Lusibari?”

  “Both,” she said. “He doesn’t like it here.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Things are different here than they were in the village.”

  “In what way?” Kanai asked.

  She shrugged. “Over there he was always with Tutul — our son,” she said. “Because of my work with the Trust I was out of the house a lot, so Tutul was with him on the river all day. But after we came here I had to put a stop to that.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Because Tutul has to go to school, doesn’t he?” she said sharply. “I don’t want him growing up catching crabs. Where’s the future in that?”

  “But that’s what Fokir does.”

  “Yes, but for how long?” she said. “Mashima says that in fifteen years the fish will all be gone, what with the new nets and all.”

  “What new nets?”

  “These new nylon nets, which they use to catch chingrir meen — the spawn of tiger prawns. The nets are so fine that they catch the eggs of all the other fish as well. Mashima wanted to get the nets banned, but it was impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “Why else?” she said. “Because there’s a lot of money in prawns and the traders had paid off the politicians. What do they care — or the politicians, for that matter? It’s people like us who’re going to suffer and it’s up to us to think ahead. That’s why I have to make sure Tutul gets an education. Otherwise, what’s his future going to be?”

  “I’m sure Fokir would understand if you explained,” Kanai said.

  “Do you think I haven’t tried?” she said, her voice rising. “I’ve tried so many times. But what does he understand? He’s illiterate — it’s impossible to explain these things to him.”

  It occurred to Kanai, as she was speaking, that for someone in her circumstances, Moyna possessed a sure grasp of the world and how to get by in it. It was astonishing to think of how much had changed in the tide country since his last visit, not just in material matters but in people’s hopes and desires. Nothing was better proof of this than the very existence of this hospital and the opportunities it provided and the aspirations it nurtured. This made it seem all the more unfortunate that someone with Moyna’s talents should be held back by a husband who could not keep up.

  “Look.”

  They had come to an operating room now, and Moyna broke off abruptly to look through the circular window that pierced the door. She lingered there so long that Kanai began to wonder whether there was an operation under way inside. But when at last she moved aside to let him look, he saw that the room was empty except for its equipment.

  “What were you looking at?” he said.

  “I just like to look at all the new equipment,” she said with a laugh. “Who knows? Maybe if I finish th
is course, one day I’ll be working in there myself.”

  “Of course you will.”

  She pursed her lips. “God knows.”

  Kanai could tell from the sound of Moyna’s voice that her dream of becoming a nurse was no ordinary yearning: it was the product of a desire as richly and completely imagined as a novel or a poem. It recalled for him what it meant to be driven to better yourself, to lay claim to a wider world. It was as though, in listening to Moyna, he were looking back on an earlier incarnation of himself.

  In the circular pane he saw Moyna’s face appear beside his own. She tapped on the glass and pointed into the dark interior of the operating room. “That was where my Tutul was born,” she said. “Mashima arranged for my admission. I was the first girl from my family to give birth in a hospital. There were three nurses to tend to me and they passed the baby to each other before they handed him to me. All I could think of was how fortunate they were and how much I wanted to be one of them.”

  Her ambition was so plainly written on her face that Kanai was assailed by the kind of tenderness we sometimes feel when we come across childhood pictures of ourselves — photographs that reveal all too unguardedly the desires people spend a lifetime learning to dissimulate.

  “Don’t worry, Moyna,” said Kanai. “You’ll be there soon.” It was only after he had spoken that he realized he had addressed her as tumi — using a familiar form, without asking the customary permission. There was an intimacy in this that he had not intended but he made no apology, for it seemed best to let it pass unremarked.

  CRABS

  AROUND MIDDAY, with the level of the water edging ever higher, it was clear that the dolphins had begun to disperse. Piya’s last set of sightings was of the newborn and its mother and they put on a display the like of which she had rarely seen. First there was a series of surfacings in which they exposed almost the entire length of their bodies: the calf was seen to be about three feet in length while the older animal was almost half as large again. Next she was afforded a couple of beautiful sightings in which they shot water from their mouths, creating fountains in the air. “Spitting behavior” of this kind was a characteristic of the species — she believed the dolphins used it as a strategy to confuse their prey. The sightings were so good that she put away her data sheets and picked up her camera. Minutes later she was rewarded with a rare view of a young Orcaella tossing a fish into the air and catching it in its mouth. The propensity to play with prey was a family trait — Orcaella shared it with its relative the killer whale — but Piya had witnessed it just half a dozen times in all her years of tracking Orcaella, and this was the only occasion on which she had gotten a clear shot of it.