The Hungry Tide

by Amitav Ghosh

  Shortly afterward the pair vanished. Now it remained to be seen whether they would come back when the water ebbed again, in the evening.

  While Piya was in the bow watching the water, Fokir and Tutul were sitting in the stern, patiently tending a set of fishing lines. The lines had worried Piya at first, for dolphins had been known to get themselves tangled in certain kinds of fishing gear. But a close look had shown that Fokir’s tackle was too flimsy to pose a threat to animals of that size and she had let the matter pass, deciding that it was all right to ignore such lightweight lines. The fish evidently had come to the same conclusion for neither father nor son had a single strike all morning. But this didn’t seem to worry them — they looked content where they were, at least for the time being.

  But when would Fokir and Tutul demand to leave? The night before, she had hoped they would set off at first light. But the dolphins had changed everything: she saw now that it was imperative that she stay till the next day. This was the only way she could discover whether there was any truth to her intuition that these dolphins had adapted their behavior to suit the ebb and flow of the water — by staying here through a whole cycle of tides. It was possible, of course, that this was just a fantasy and in any event it would take years to gather supportive data. For now all she needed was a few more shreds of evidence, a few indications to suggest that she was thinking along the right lines. If only she could remain here till the next sunrise — that would be enough.

  As the hours passed, Piya’s anxiety shifted focus, moving away from the dolphins and settling on Fokir and the boy. How much longer before they grew impatient and demanded to leave? What would she have to do to persuade them to remain here? She had noticed that their clay stove had not been lit all morning — they had eaten nothing but some dry chapatis. This was not a good sign; it could mean they were running low on supplies. In other circumstances she might have offered Fokir a bonus, as compensation for whatever inconvenience he might have to suffer. But this was not an option here: the child could not be expected to defer his hunger in order to earn money for his father.

  Her own supply of water was running low, but she knew she could make it last. It was the two of them she was worried about, and her anxiety prompted her to do something unprecedented: digging into her carefully hoarded stock of nutrition bars, she offered them some. Fokir declined, but Tutul accepted one and ate it with evident relish. This reassured her a little. If need be, she would sacrifice a few more bars — it would be well worth it if she could only persuade them to stay on. But her nerves would not be quieted: even as she was filling in her data sheets, she kept casting glances in their direction. Their every movement made her start: Was this it? Had they decided to leave now?

  Unaccountably, nothing happened. Neither of them seemed to have any interest in getting the boat under way. After a meager midday meal of chapatis and honey, they both lay down in the shade of the shelter.

  Piya was now in a state of such anxiety and expectation that she knew she would not be able to sit still and wait for the hours to pass. Instead, she decided to spend the rest of the afternoon mapping the riverbed to see whether or not there was an underwater pool where the Orcaella had gathered. She had some experience of this kind of mapping and knew it to be a simple, if painstaking, task: it would require her to take depth soundings that could be linked together to create contour lines. Thanks to the Global Positioning System it was easy to ensure the exact placement of each sounding, so that the readings were taken along regular, geometric quadrants.

  But how could she explain this to Fokir?

  She made her way to the shelter and found Fokir and the boy fast asleep. They were lying on their sides, with Tutul’s small form nested inside the larger curve of his father’s body. The boy, she noticed, had a slight pudginess that contrasted sharply with his father’s near-skeletal leanness: Fokir was all muscle and bone, a male anatomy reduced to its essentials. Was the boy better fed than his father? There was a story here that she wished she understood: Who looked after the boy? Did someone have to deprive himself to make sure Tutul was properly fed?

  Their chests were moving in unison as they slept and the rhythm of their breathing reminded her of the pair of dolphins she had been watching earlier. It calmed her to see them sleeping so peacefully — the contrast with her own state of mind could not have been more marked. She hesitated in extending her arm to wake Fokir: Would he be annoyed at being woken from his siesta? Was this when he would demand to leave for home? She noticed a bead of sweat traveling down his temple toward the corner of his eye, and without thinking she put out a finger to flick it away.

  He awoke instantly and sat up, rubbing the spot where her fingertip had touched his skin. She backed away in embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean —” He shrugged indifferently and dug his fists into his eyes, as though he were trying to rub away the remnants of sleep.

  “Look.” She thrust her positioning monitor in front of him and pointed to the screen. “Over here.” To her surprise, his attention was caught immediately. He looked closely as she tried to show him the meaning of the dots and the lines.

  The hardest part was to explain the correspondence between their own position and their place on the screen. She tried pointing, in various combinations, to the screen, to herself, to him and the boy. But the purpose was not served: she saw he had grown flustered and realized that her gestures had given him the impression that she wanted him to move closer to her. The misunderstanding disconcerted her and she fetched a sheet of paper, deciding on a change in strategy. Surely it would be easier if she reduced the problem to two dimensions, by drawing a simple diagram with stick figures, like those familiar to every child. The trouble was, she had never been much good at drawing, and now, halfway into the sketch she was brought up short by an unanticipated misgiving. In the past, she had always used a triangular skirt to distinguish her stick women from her men — but this didn’t quite make sense in a situation where the man was in a lungi and the woman in pants. She crumpled up the sheet and would have tossed it away if Fokir hadn’t taken it from her hands, to save for kindling.

  With her next drawing she started with the outlines of the landscape, sketching in the curve of the shore before indicating their own position. Just as she had thought, the reduction to two dimensions made all the difference: once she had shown him how the diagram corresponded with the lines on the monitor’s screen, the rest was easy. It took only a few strokes of her pencil to convey that she needed him to row the boat in parallel lines over a quadrant shaped roughly like a triangle, with its apex almost touching the far shore.

  She had expected some reluctance, and possibly even resistance.

  But there was none. On the contrary, he seemed quite pleased and went so far as to rouse Tutul with a cheerful shout. It was the prospect of traversing the water in straight lines that seemed to enthuse him most — and she discovered why when he pulled a roll of line out of the hold. Evidently he wanted to use this opportunity to do some fishing.

  But the line puzzled her; in all the time she had spent on Asian rivers she had never seen its like. It was made of thick, strong nylon, and all along its length, at intervals of a yard or so, were weights — small fragments of broken tile. Stranger still, there were no hooks. Instead, spaced between the weights were bits of fish bone and dried cartilage, tied to the line with cord. It was difficult to see how the tackle worked: the expectation seemed to be that a fish would just attach itself to the line and permit itself to be reeled in. But surely no fish would do that. Then what could he be fishing for? She was at a loss for an answer. It was clear in any event that the line presented no threat to the dolphins and she could see no reason to object to his laying it so long as the boat kept to the right course.

  She went back to the bow and readied herself to proceed with her mapping. With her monitor in hand she directed Fokir to the position from which they were to start. Then, just as Tutul was dropping the first weigh
t in the water, she dipped the echo sounder and pressed the button.

  The initial run was about a half mile long, and by the time they reached the end the whole line had been paid out. It was after they had turned to retrace their course that Piya discovered what the line was for: it was pulled in with a live crab hanging on to every ninth or tenth morsel of bait. The creatures had snapped their claws on the cartilage and would not let go. Fokir and Tutul had only to peel them off with a net and drop them into a pot filled with leaves. The sight made Piya laugh: so this was where the word “crabby” came from, a creature so stubborn that it would rather be captured than let go?

  It took only a few more runs to confirm Piya’s guess that the dolphins had congregated in a declivity. Her soundings showed that the riverbed dipped by a good fifteen to twenty feet there, more than enough to provide for the dolphins’ comfort when the water was running low.

  But it was not just for dolphins that the pool was a hospitable habitat: crabs too seemed to flourish there, and Fokir’s catch grew steadily with each successive run. At the start she had thought they might end up disrupting each other’s work — that her soundings would get in the way of his fishing or the other way around. But to her surprise no such difficulties arose: the stops required for the laying of the line seemed to be ideally timed for the taking of soundings. What was more, the line acted like a guide rail, keeping the boat on a straight and unvarying tack, and at the end of each run it led them right back to the precise starting point. In other circumstances Piya would have had to use the Global Positioning System to be sure of this, but here the line served the same purpose. She needed her monitor only to make sure that each run began at a point fifteen feet farther along the quadrant. This was just as much to Fokir’s advantage as it was to hers, since it ensured that his line never fell twice in the same place.

  It was surprising enough that their jobs had not proved to be utterly incompatible — especially considering that one of the tasks required the input of geostationary satellites while the other depended on bits of shark bone and broken tile. But that it had proved possible for two such different people to pursue their own ends simultaneously — people who could not exchange a word with each other and had no idea of what was going on in one another’s heads — was far more than surprising: it seemed almost miraculous. Nor was she the only one to remark on this: once, when her glance happened accidentally to cross Fokir’s, she saw something in his expression that told her that he too was amazed by the seamless intertwining of their pleasures and their purposes.

  When the crab pot was full, Fokir covered its mouth with an aluminum plate and passed it to her so she could release the catch into the hold. Looking in, she saw that there were some fifteen crabs inside the pot, eyeing her balefully, snapping their claws. When she tipped the pot over they tumbled out in a chain and disappeared into the hold with an angry outburst of clicking and clattering. The unlikely eloquence of the sound drew a laugh from Piya. Her birthday was in July and she had often wondered why the ancients had included a crab in the zodiac when there were so many other, more interesting animals to choose from. But now, as she watched the creatures scuttling about in the hold, she found herself wishing that she knew more about crabs. She recalled a class in which the teacher had demonstrated how some kinds of crabs actually laundered the mud they lived in, scrubbing it grain by grain. Their feet and their sides were lined with hairs that formed microscopic brushes and spoons. They used these to scrape off the diatoms and other edible matter attached to each grain of sand. They were a sanitation department and a janitorial team rolled into one: they kept the mangroves alive by removing their leaves and litter; without them the trees would choke on their own debris. Didn’t they represent some fantastically large proportion of the system’s biomass? Didn’t they outweigh even the trees and the leaves? Hadn’t someone said that intertidal forests should be named after crabs rather than mangroves since it was they — certainly not the crocodile or the tiger or the dolphin — who were the keystone species of the entire ecosystem?

  She had thought of these concepts — keystone species, biomass — as ideas that applied to things other than herself. To nature, in short — for who was it who had said that the definition of “nature” was that it included everything not formed by human intention? But it was not her own intention that had brought her here today; it was the crabs — because they were Fokir’s livelihood and without them he would not have known to lead her to this pool where the Orcaella came. Maybe the ancients had it right after all. Perhaps it was the crab that ruled the tide of her destiny.

  TRAVELS

  RETURNING TO THE Guest House, Kanai found that Moyna had left him his lunch in a tiffin carrier. The meal was simple: plain rice, musuri’r dal, a quick-cooked chorchori of potatoes, fish bones and a kind of green leaf he could not identify. Finally there was a watery jhol of a tiny but toothsome fish called murola. Even cold, the food was delicious. Kanai’s cook was from Lucknow, and his table at home in New Delhi tended to be set with elaborate Mughlai dishes. It was a long time since Kanai had eaten simple Bengali food and the tastes seemed to explode in his head. At the end of the meal he was giddily replete.

  After he had put away the utensils, Kanai made his way up the stairs to Nirmal’s study. Shutting the door behind him, he pulled a chair up to the desk and flipped open the notebook.

  You, Kanai, were among the last to see Kusum in Lusibari, in 1970. That year, on the eve of the performance of the Bon Bibi Johuranama, she vanished as if into the eye of a storm. No one knew where she went; no trace of her remained. That was the last we heard of Kusum and, to be truthful, we paid little mind to her fate. Sadly, it is all too common in these parts for young people and children to disappear into the city: there are so many such that one loses track of them.

  The years went by and the time of my retirement approached. I would be lying if I did not admit that the prospect filled my heart with trepidation. I had been headmaster for close to thirty years: the school, my pupils, my teaching — these things had become my life. Without the pattern and order of a classroom routine, what would become of me? I remembered my days of disorder when the world looked so irredeemably confused that to lie abed seemed the best possible course. Would this condition beset me again? You can imagine my despondency.

  The true tragedy of a routinely spent life is that its wastefulness does not become apparent till it is too late. For years I had been telling Nilima that I’d been writing, up in my study. She was glad for me; she took no pleasure in the fact that she enjoyed so much esteem in the world and I so little. She wanted me to be known for what she believed me to be — a writer, a poet. But the truth was that I had not written a single word in all my time in Lusibari; not just that, I had even abandoned my other great pleasure — reading. Regret and remorse attacked me on all these counts as the day of my superannuation neared. One day I went to Calcutta and scoured my favorite stalls and bookshops — only to realize that I could no longer afford to buy books. I returned to Lusibari with only one new volume in my possession — the copy of Bernier’s Travels that you were so kind as to buy for me.

  As my final day in school drew nigh it became increasingly apparent that the other masters were keenly awaiting my departure — not, I think, out of a spirit of malice, but merely from an eagerness to see what the future might hold. Someone who has stayed in the same job for thirty years becomes like mildew on the wall — everybody longs to see it wither in the bright light of anew day.

  As word of my impending retirement spread, I began to receive invitations to visit schools on other islands. In the past perhaps I would have declined, but I now recalled the Poet’s dictum — “To stay is to be nowhere” — and I was happy to accept. One such invitation was from an old acquaintance who lived in Kumirmari, which is a good distance from here: to get to it requires several changes of ferry. I decided to go.

  The morning came and it so happened that Nilima was away, making one of her trips on beha
lf of the Trust. Left to my own devices, I spent too much time packing the jhola I had planned to take with me. I put in one book and then another — the journey was not a short one, after all, and I would need plenty to read. In the process I misjudged many things — the timing of the ferries, how long it would take to get to the jetty and so on. Suffice it to say that I missed the first connection, which meant that I would miss all the rest.

  I was sitting in despair on the bãdh when suddenly I spotted a familiar figure going by in a boat. I had not seen Horen Naskor for many years, but I recognized at once his squat build and narrowed eyes. There was a teenage boy with him and I knew this must be his oldest son.

  I hurried down the embankment and accosted them: “Horen! Horen! Wait!”

  When I drew level with them, he said in amazement, “Saar? You here? I was bringing my son to see you — he wants to enroll in your school.”

  I put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I’ll make sure he gets in. But in return there’s something you must do for me.”