The Hungry Tide

by Amitav Ghosh

  “Yes, Saar. What is it?”

  “Horen, I have to go to Kumirmari. Can you take me?”

  “Why, Saar, yes. For you, anything. Get in.” He gave his son a pat on the shoulder and told him to find his own way home. Then, without a backward glance, we set off in the direction of Kumirmari.

  Once we were on the water, it struck me that it was a long time since I had sat in a nouko like Horen’s. In recent years, when I felt the need to travel outside Lusibari — and this happened seldom enough — I generally took ferries and bhotbhotis. Sitting in the boat, the familiar scenery began to take on a different aspect: it was as if I were seeing it in a new way. Under the shade of my umbrella, I opened one of the books I had brought with me — my copy of Bernier’s Travels — and, as if by magic, the pages fell open to his account of his travels in the tide country.

  Presently Horen said, “Saar, what is that you’re reading? Are there any stories in it? Why not tell me too, since we have such a long way to go.”

  “All right, then,” I said. “Listen.”

  This book was by a Christian priest, I told him, a Frenchman who’d come to India in the year 1665. At that time, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s memory was still fresh in our villages and Emperor Aurangzeb was sitting on the Mughal throne. The priest’s name was François Bernier and he was of the Jesuit “shomproday.” He had with him two Portuguese pilots as well as a considerable company of servants. On their first day among the mangroves, they found themselves beset with hunger. Although they had food, they were nervous about going ashore to cook it. They had heard many stories of the ferocity of the local tigers and they wanted to take every possible precaution. Late in the day a suitable sandbank was found and two chickens and a fish were prepared. After consuming this meal, the Jesuit and his party set off again and rowed until dark. When night approached, they took their boat into a “snug creek” and anchored it at a distance from the shore where they judged themselves to be safe from predators. But they took the additional precaution of maintaining a watch through the night and this proved lucky for the priest. When his turn came he was privileged to witness a truly amazing spectacle: a rainbow made by the moon.

  “Oh!” cried Horen. “I know where this happened: they must have been at Gerafitola.”

  “Rubbish, Horen,” I said. “How could you know such a thing? This happened over three hundred years ago.”

  “But I’ve seen it too,” Horen protested, “and it’s exactly as you describe — a creek just off a big river. That’s the only place where you can see the moon’s rainbow — it happens when there’s a full moon and a fog. But never mind all that, Saar. Go on with the story.”

  “On the third day Bernier and his party discovered that they were lost. They wandered through creeks and rivers and became more and more distracted, thinking that they were trapped forever in this labyrinth of waterways. And then again an amazing thing happened. They saw some people in the distance working on a sandbank, so they headed in that direction. These would be local fishermen, they assumed, who would show them the way. But on getting there they discovered that these men were Portuguese. They were making salt.”

  “Ah!” said Horen with a long, drawn-out sigh. “I know that place. It’s on the way to Kedokhali. There’s a place there where people still sometimes go to make salt. My chhotokaka spent the night there once, and all night long he heard strange voices uttering strange words. It must have been those same ghosts they saw. But never mind all that, Saar — just go on.”

  “The fourth day found the priest and his party still in the tide country, and in the evening they withdrew once again into the shelter of a creek. Then there followed ‘a most extraordinary night.’ First the wind died down so that not a leaf stirred in the forest. Next the air around the boat began to heat up and it soon became so hot that the priest and his party could scarcely breathe. Then all of a sudden the mangroves around the boat seemed to burst into flame as the greenery was invaded by great swarms of glowworms. These insects hovered in such a way as to give the impression that fires were dancing in the mangroves’ roots and branches. This caused panic among the sailors, who, the Jesuit says, ‘did not doubt that they were so many devils.’”

  “But Saar,” said Horen with a puzzled look in my direction. “Why should they doubt it? What else could they be?”

  “I don’t know, Horen. I’m just telling you what the priest says.”

  “Go on Saar. Go on.”

  “The night that followed was still worse — ‘altogether dreadful and perilous,’ says the priest. With no warning, a violent storm arose and pursued the priest and his party into a creek. They took their boat close to shore and, using all their ropes, tied it to a tree. But the storm raged with such ferocity that their cables could not long withstand the wind. Soon the ropes snapped and it seemed certain the boat would be blown out of its shelter, into a storm-tossed mohona where the waves were sure to rip apart the hull. All the while ‘the rain fell as if poured into the boat from buckets,’ and the ‘lightning and thunder were so vivid and loud, and so near our heads, that we despaired of surviving this horrible night.’

  “At this juncture, in a ‘sudden and spontaneous movement’ the priest and his two Portuguese pilots took hold of a tree and entwined their arms into the mangroves’ twisted stilts. Their arms became living roots, like those of the tree that had given them shelter. In this way they clung on ‘for the space of two hours, while the tempest raged with unabated force.’”

  “Ei ré!” cried Horen. “They must have crossed the line.”

  “What line, Horen?”

  “Didn’t you say they were lost, Saar?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “That’s what happened, then. They crossed the line by mistake and ended up on one of Dokkhin Rai’s islands. Whenever you have a storm like that — one that appears so suddenly out of nowhere — you know it’s the doing of Dokkhin Rai and his demons.”

  I grew impatient and said, “Horen! A storm is an atmospheric disturbance. It has neither intention nor motive.”

  I had spoken so sharply that he would not disagree with me, although he could not bring himself to agree either. “As to that, Saar,” he said, “let us leave each other to our beliefs and see what the future holds.”

  Here was a man, I thought, whom the Poet would have recognized: “filled with muscle and simplicity.”

  I have gone on at too great a length — hours have passed, the ink in my ballpoint is running down. This is what happens when you have not written for years: every moment takes on a startling clarity; small things become the world in microcosm.

  Kusum and Horen have left me here with Fokir. They have gone to find out if the rumors are true; if Morichjhãpi is soon to be attacked, and if so, when the assault will come.

  To think of all the years when I had nothing but time and yet wrote not one word. And now, like some misplaced, misgendered Scheherezade, I am trying to stave the night off with a flying, fleeting pen . . .

  GARJONTOLA

  THE FINAL RUN brought Fokir’s boat into shallow water within a few feet of the shore. Piya’s guess had been amply confirmed by this time: her soundings showed that there was a half-mile-long depression in the sheltered crook of the river’s elbow. The declivity formed a gentle, kidney-shaped basin with a rounded bottom and sides: although the drop exceeded twenty-five feet in some places, on average it was only some fifteen feet deeper than the rest of the riverbed. The pool, in short, was similar in most particulars to those frequented by the Orcaella of the Mekong during the dry season.

  With the water running high, the band of mud on the shore had thinned to the width of a few paces, and the mangroves’ trunks were at last at eye level, neither above nor below the boat. The water was so shallow here that there was no point in taking soundings; for the first time in hours, Piya went “off effort,” dropping her binoculars and resting her eyes on the greenery of the shore. Presently her gaze was drawn to what seemed to be a fragment of bri
ck lying in the mud. She looked more closely and her glasses confirmed her impression: this was indeed a bit of broken brick, and it was not the only one — the shore was littered with them. Examining the tangled greenery, she discovered that some of the mangroves were growing out of mud walls, while others had chunks of brick entwined in their roots.

  She called out to Fokir, “Look — there.” He turned to glance at the shore and nodded. “Garjontola,” he said with a gesture in that direction. She guessed that this was the name of whatever settlement had once stood there. “Garjontola?” He nodded in confirmation. She was glad to know the name and noted it quickly: the dolphins’ tidal pool, she decided, would be named after this abandoned village — “the Garjontola pool.”

  All of a sudden Tutul jumped to his feet, rocking the boat. Looking up from her notebook, she saw that he was pointing into the middle distance, to a tree that was taller than the others, more like a birch than a mangrove: it was slender-limbed with light-colored bark and foliage that seemed almost silvery against the dense, heavy green of the surrounding mangroves.

  At the end of the run, Fokir surprised her by turning the boat’s bow in the direction of the shore. This was the closest she had been to the forest, and she felt as though she were facing it for the first time: before, it had been either half submerged or a distant silhouette, looking down on the water from the heights of the shore. Staring at it now, she was struck by the way the greenery worked to confound the eye. It was not just that it was a barrier, like a screen or a wall: it seemed to trick the human gaze in the manner of a cleverly drawn optical illusion. There was such a profusion of shapes, forms, hues and textures that even things that were in plain view seemed to disappear, vanishing into the tangle of lines like the hidden objects in children’s puzzles.

  Fokir pulled the oars in after a last, powerful stroke and the boat’s bow nudged into the mud. Then he rose to his feet and, as if by magic, his lungi became a loincloth, transformed by a single flick of his wrist. Swinging his legs over the side, he dropped into the water and gave the boat a push that sent it plowing deep into the bank. Piya, sitting in the bow, found herself lodged halfway up the bank, with a tangled barrier of mangrove blocking off the slope ahead.

  After lifting Tutul off the boat, Fokir made a beckoning motion with his arm, and she understood that he was asking her to follow him off the boat. But where was he going? She sketched an interrogatory gesture, and he responded by pointing in the direction of the island’s interior, past the first barrier of mangrove.

  “In there?”

  Now he was beckoning again, motioning to her to hurry. She hesitated for a moment, held back by her aversion to mud, insects and dense vegetation, all of which were present aplenty on the shore. In any other circumstances she would not even have considered heading into forest cover of that kind, but with Fokir it was different. Somehow she knew she would be safe.

  “OK. I’m coming.” Rolling her pants up to her knees, she swung her bare feet over the gunwale. The mud parted under her weight, sucking her feet in with a wet slurping sound. She was taken completely by surprise for the mud hadn’t seemed deep at all when Fokir was running up the bank. The slight forward momentum of her body as she came off the boat was enough to unbalance her: the grip of the mud pulled her ankles backward, away from her center of gravity. Suddenly she was tipping over, falling face forward, extending her arm to keep herself from slamming into the mud. But at just the right moment, Fokir appeared directly in front of her, with his body positioned to block her fall. She landed heavily on his shoulder and once again found herself soaking in the salty smell of his skin. In blocking her fall, she had thrown her arms around his torso, as though he were a pillar or a tree trunk, and one of her hands had caught hold of his shoulder blade, digging into the recess between muscle and bone. Her other hand had slid down his bare skin, coming to rest on the small of his back, and for an instant she was paralyzed with embarrassment. Then she became aware of Tutul’s voice somewhere nearby — he was laughing at her discomfiture, in childish delight — and she began to pull away from Fokir, withdrawing her fingers gingerly. When he put a steadying hand under her elbow, she saw he was laughing too, but not in a way that seemed unkind — he seemed to be amused more by her surprise at the depth of the mud than by her fall.

  After she was on her feet again he enacted a little pantomime to show her how to negotiate the bank: lifting up a foot, he curled his big toe like a crab’s claw and dug it into the mud. She tried it herself, and it worked for a couple of steps, but then her foot slipped again. Fortunately, he was still beside her and she held on to his arm until they had left the mud behind and pushed their way into the tangle of greenery that lined the shore.

  She saw now he had a machete with him. He went ahead of her, swinging the blade and clearing a path through the dense foliage. Soon the green barrier came to an end and they broke through to a grassy clearing dotted with stunted palm trees.

  Tutul ran ahead to the far side of the clearing and stopped in front of what seemed to be a small shack built on stilts. On approaching closer she saw it was not a shack at all but a leaf-thatched altar or shrine: it reminded her distantly of her mother’s puja table, except that the images inside didn’t represent any of the Hindu gods she was familiar with. There was a large-eyed female figure in a sari and beside it a slightly smaller figure of a man. Crouching between them was a tiger, recognizable because of its painted stripes.

  Piya stood by and watched as Fokir and Tutul performed a little ceremony. First they fetched some leaves and flowers and placed them in front of the images. Then, standing before the shrine, Fokir began to recite some kind of chant, with his head bowed and his hands joined in an attitude of prayer. After she had listened for a few minutes, Piya recognized a refrain that was repeated again and again — it contained a word that sounded like “Allah.” She had not thought to speculate about Fokir’s religion, but it occurred to her now that he might be Muslim. But no sooner had she thought this than it struck her that a Muslim was hardly likely to pray to an image like this one. What Fokir was performing looked very much like her mother’s Hindu pujas — and yet the words seemed to suggest otherwise.

  But what did it matter either way? She was glad just to be there as a witness to this strange little ritual.

  A few minutes later they headed back and on breaking free of the mangrove, Piya saw that the sun had dipped in the sky and the level of the water had begun to fall. She tiptoed carefully across the mud and was about to climb into the boat when Fokir waved to catch her attention. He was some fifty feet away, kneeling with his hand pointing toward the ground. Piya went over to look and saw that he was pointing to a depression in the mud filled with scurrying crabs. She raised her eyebrows, and he held up a hand, as if to tell her that that was what it was — the mark of a hand. She frowned in incomprehension: what hand could have touched that mud other than his? Then it struck her that maybe he meant not “hand” but “foot” or “paw.” “Tiger?” she was about to say, but he raised a finger to prevent her: she understood now that this was indeed some kind of superstition — to say that word or even to make a gestural reference to it was taboo.

  She looked at it again and could see nothing to suggest that it was what he had said. The placement of the mark contributed to her skepticism: the animal would have had to be in full view and she would have seen it from the water. And would Fokir himself be quite so unconcerned if there really was a tiger nearby? It just didn’t add up.

  Then she heard the sound of an exhalation, and all thought of the tiger was banished from her mind. Picking up her binoculars, she spotted two humps breaking the river’s surface: it was the adult Orcaella swimming in tandem with the calf. With the water ebbing, the dolphins had returned: their movements seemed to follow exactly the pattern she had inferred.

  A DISTURBANCE

  KANAI WAS STILL in his uncle’s study, reading, when the light above the desk flickered and went out. He lit a candle and sat st
ill as the throbbing of the generator faded and a cloud of stillness crept slowly over the island. As he listened to its advance, it occurred to him to wonder why, in English, silence is commonly said to “fall” or “descend” as though it were a curtain or a knife. There was nothing precipitous about the hush that followed the shutting off of the generator: the quiet was more like a fog or a mist, creeping in slowly, from a distance, wrapping itself around certain sounds while revealing others: the sawing of a cicada, a snatch of music from a distant radio, the cackle of an owl. Each of these made themselves heard briefly, only to vanish again into the creeping fog. It was in just this way that yet another sound, unfamiliar to Kanai, revealed itself, very briefly, and then died away again. The echo had carried across the water from such a distance that it would have been inaudible if the generator had been on; yet it bespoke a nakedness of assertion, a power and menace, that had no relationship to its volume. Small as it was, every other sound seemed to wither for an instant, only to be followed by a loud and furious outbreak of disquiet — marked most prominently by a frenzy of barking from all over the island.

  Shutting the door behind him, he stepped out onto the roof and discovered that the landscape, in its epic mutability, had undergone yet another transformation: the moonlight had turned it into a silvery negative of its daytime image. Now it was the darkened islands that looked like lakes of liquid, while the water lay spread across the earth like a vast slick of solid metal.

  “Kanai-babu?”

  He turned to see a woman standing silhouetted in the doorway with her sari drawn over her head.

  “Moyna?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you hear?” No sooner had he said the words than he heard the sound again: it was the same indistinct echo, not unlike the bellowing of a faraway train, and again it was followed by an outburst of barks as though all the island’s dogs had been waiting to hear it repeated.