by Amitav Ghosh
“I listened to them talk, and hope blossomed in my heart; these were my people, how could I stand apart? We shared the same tongue, we were joined in our bones; the dreams they had dreamt were no different from my own. They too had hankered for our tide country mud; they too had longed to watch the tide rise to full flood. If we stayed on in Dhanbad, what would our future be? A lifetime of toil in a city of rust? I gathered our things, put clothes on Fokir’s back; with Rajen in our hearts, we stepped away from the shack.
“And there you have it, Saar. I have told you the story. That’s how Fokir and I came to Morichjhãpi.”
And so we fell silent, each of us alone with our thoughts, Kusum and Fokir, Horen and I. In my mind’s eye I saw them walking, these thousands of people who wanted nothing more than to plunge their hands once again in our soft, yielding tide country mud. I saw them coming, young and old, quick and halt, with their lives bundled on their heads, and knew it was of them the Poet had spoken when he said:
Each slow turn of the world carries such disinherited
ones to whom neither the past nor the future belongs.
A HUNT
IN THE MORNING Fokir still showed no great eagerness to be gone, and Piya, for her part, saw no reason to hurry him: she was glad to be able to spend more time with the dolphins.
The animals remained in the pool till midmorning, when the waters began to rise. Then again, over a period of about half an hour, they vanished. It happened exactly as it had the day before, except for the difference in the timing of the tide.
What remained to be seen now was where they went when they left the pool: Fokir might know the answer to this. Through a combination of gestures she managed to convey to him that she wanted to follow the dolphins — would it be possible to track them in the boat? He nodded eagerly and quickly pulled in the anchor.
They left the pool while the tide was still coming in and the current added a little to their pace. Leaving Garjontola behind, they entered a mohona. Keeping watch in the bow, Piya saw that with the tide in flood the surrounding islands were sliding gradually beneath the water.
Looking ahead with her binoculars, she spotted a pair of fins far out in front. By the time they had crossed the mohona, the fins were nowhere in sight. But Fokir seemed sure of the way, for he turned unhesitatingly into a wide channel and then veered off into another that was narrower. Shortly afterward he downed his oars and pointed to the shore. Veering around with her binoculars, Piya spotted three crocodiles — she had missed them because her attention had been focused on the water. She guessed that Fokir had seen them before, in this very stretch of water. They were lying exposed to view but their mud-caked bodies blended so well into the surroundings that it was hard to judge their size. One had its jaws open and it seemed to Piya that the gap was wide enough to take the measure of a human being — certainly one of her own size.
The channel was a relatively narrow one, and if the tide had been low they would have passed very close to the crocodiles, but with the water running high, the reptiles were well up on the shore. They gave no indication of having noticed the boat’s passage, but a while later when Piya turned her binoculars on them again, she saw that there were only two animals left on the bank. The third had slithered into the water and the trough it had carved in the mudbank had begun to fill up again. Within minutes the depression vanished and the bank was restored to its lacquered smoothness.
Then Tutul uttered a wordless shout and pointed ahead. Piya swung her binoculars around just in time to catch a glimpse of a dolphin’s flukes. They disappeared almost at once and she was annoyed with herself for being distracted by the crocodiles. But a minute later the flukes appeared again, rising vertically out of the water, as if the animal were standing on its head. Then another pair of flukes appeared beside the first, similarly upended, and Piya recognized the mother-and-calf couple she had observed before in the pool. The flood tide had created dozens of tiny creeks that reached deep into the interior of the surrounding banks and islands. It was in one of these that the dolphins were foraging, a gully clearly too shallow even for Fokir’s boat.
Piya knew what the dolphins were doing: they had herded a school of fish into shallow water and the hunted creatures had buried themselves in the mud in a futile effort to evade their pursuers. Now, much like rabbits uprooting a harvest of carrots, the dolphins were picking the fish from the riverbed.
Piya had witnessed a variation on this very scene once, on the Irrawaddy River. In the course of a survey, she had made time to visit two fishermen who lived in a small village north of Mandalay. The visit had come about at the urging of a fellow cetologist who’d told her that these men would show her something she would find hard to believe.
The two fishermen proved to be a middle-aged man and his teenage son. At eleven in the morning they took Piya and her interpreter out on the river in their fishing boat. The boat was about the same size as Fokir’s, but it had no hood. The heat was so fierce that even the water seemed to be in a stupor, showing few discernible signs of movement. Piya was relieved to find they had not far to go. When they were some fifty feet from shore the older man produced a wooden stick and began to drum on the boat’s gunwale. A few minutes later a sharply raked dorsal fin broke the water’s surface, soon to be followed by several others. Then the younger man picked up a fishing net and began to rattle the metal weights that were attached to its fringe. The sound prompted a pair of dolphins to break off from the pod. While the others hung back, this pair made a close approach to the boat. When they were about ten feet from the bow, they began to swim in circles, almost as if they were chasing each other’s tails. Through the interpreter, the fishermen explained that the dolphins were herding a school of fish toward the boat.
For a while the fishermen observed in silence, and then the younger man rose to his feet. Giving voice to a strange, gobbling call, he swirled the net around his head and made a cast. The net landed right in the center of the perimeter the dolphins had been patrolling. Now, as the net sank, the water’s surface began to froth. Small silver fish leapt in the air while the two patrolling dolphins swam faster and faster in tightening circles. The other dolphins in the pod joined in and began to make darting charges, thrashing the surface with their flukes in order to drive the fast-scattering fish back toward the net.
The fishermen pulled in the net and a wriggling, writhing mass of silver spilled out and lay scattered around the deck: it was as though a piñata had burst, releasing a great mass of tinsel. The dolphins, meanwhile, were celebrating a catch of their own. In sinking to the bottom, the net had pushed a great number of fish into the soft floor of the river; the dolphins were now free to feast on this underwater harvest. They fell to it with gusto, upending themselves in the water, creating a small thicket of wriggling flukes.
Piya was awestruck. Did there exist any more remarkable instance of symbiosis between human beings and a population of wild animals? She could not think of one. There was truly no limit, it seemed, to the cetacean gift for springing surprises.
DREAMS
With the storm raging outside, there was no question of trying to get back to Lusibari that night.
“Saar,” Horen said at last with a sigh, “I think we’ll have to sleep here on Kusum’s floor tonight.”
“It’s for you to judge, Horen,” I said. “I’ll do what you say.”
Later, Kusum boiled some rice and cooked a few small fish, a handful of little tangra-machh that Fokir had caught. After we had eaten, Kusum laid out mats for Horen and me at one end of the room while she went with Fokir to sleep in the far corner. Late at night, when the storm had died down, I heard the door open and knew that Horen had gone to see to the safety of his boat. I fell into a fitful, feverish sleep, stirring and tossing.
“Saar.” I heard Kusum’s voice, although I couldn’t see her face in the dark. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m fine. Why do you ask?”
“Because you cried ou
t in your sleep.”
I felt her hand stroking my forehead, and tears came to my eyes. “Just an old man’s nighttime fears,” I said at last. “But I’m fine now. Go back to your son. Go back to sleep.”
I rose in the morning to find, as so often after a storm, that there was not a cloud in the sky. The island and river were bathed in brilliant sunshine. I stepped away from Kusum’s dwelling and saw others nearby. I walked a little farther and saw still more dwellings, scattered over cleared fields. These were huts, shacks and shanties built with the usual materials of the tide country — mud, thatch and bamboo — yet a pattern was evident here: these dwellings had not been laid out at random.
What had I expected? A mere jumble perhaps, untidy heaps of people piled high upon each other? That is, after all, what the word rifugi has come to mean. But what I saw was quite different from the picture in my mind’s eye. Paths had been laid; the bãdh — that guarantor of island life — had been augmented; little plots of land had been enclosed with fences; fishing nets had been hung up to dry. There were men and women sitting outside their huts, repairing their nets and stringing their crab lines with bits of bait and bone.
Such industry! Such diligence! Yet it was only a few weeks since they had come.
Taking in these sights, I felt the onrush of a strange, heady excitement: suddenly it dawned on me that I was watching the birth of something new, something hitherto unseen. This, I thought, is what Daniel Hamilton must have felt when he stood upon the deck of his launch and watched the mangroves being shorn from the islands. But between what was happening at Morichjhãpi and what Hamilton had done there was one vital aspect of difference: this was not one man’s vision. This dream had been dreamt by the very people who were trying to make it real.
I could walk no more. I stood transfixed on the still wet pathway, leaning on my umbrella while the wind snatched at my crumpled dhoti. I felt something changing within me: how astonishing it was that I, an aging, bookish schoolmaster, should live to see this, an experiment, imagined not by those with learning and power, but by those without!
I felt all of existence swelling in my veins. Letting my umbrella drop, I flung back my head to open myself to the wind and the sun. It was as though in the course of one night I had cast away the emptiness I had so long held in my arms.
In great excitement, I went back to Kusum’s door.
“What’s the matter, Saar?” she said in alarm. “Why are your clothes muddy, your face red? Where have you left your umbrella?”
“Never mind all that,” I said impatiently. “Tell me, who is in charge? Is there a committee? Are there leaders?”
“Yes, of course. Why?”
“I want to meet with them.”
“Why, Saar?”
“Because I want to have some part in what is happening here. I want to be of help.”
“Saar, if that’s what you want, who am I to say no?”
The island, she said, had been divided into wards. People in charge of each of these wards made decisions and helped organize every essential activity.
“Take me to the head of your ward,” I said, and she led me to a door a short distance away.
The leader of the ward was a sharp, energetic man, no dreamer, and not someone to put up with trespasses on his time: in his demeanor I glimpsed the euphoric reticence of someone who knows that success is within reach. Of course he was busy, but when he heard I was a headmaster — although soon to be retired — he took the time to show me around. We walked along the newly cleared paths and he pointed out all that had been done in the weeks since they had first arrived. I was amazed, not just by what they had built but the care they had invested in creating organizations, institutions. They had set up their own government and taken a census — there were some thirty thousand people on the island already and there was space for many more. The island had been divided into five zones and each family of settlers had been given five acres of land. Yet they had also recognized, shrewdly enough, that their enterprise could not succeed if they didn’t have the support of their neighbors on the surrounding islands. With this in mind they had reserved one quarter of the island for people from other parts of the tide country. Hundreds of families had come flocking in.
At the end of the brief tour, I clasped my guide’s hand: “Destiny is on your side, comrade.”
He smiled and said, “But still, we cannot succeed without help.”
It was clear at once that he was thinking of all the ways in which I might be of use to him. This impressed me. It was a good sign, I thought, that he was applying his mind in this practical way.
“I want to be of help,” I said. “Tell me what I can do.”
“That depends,” he said. “What’s most important to us at this time is to mobilize public opinion, to bring pressure on the government, to get them to leave us alone. They’re putting it out that we’re destroying this place; they want people to think we’re gangsters who’ve occupied this place by force. We need to let people know what we’re doing and why we’re here. We have to tell the world about all we’ve done and all we’ve achieved. Can you help us with this? Do you have contacts with the press in Calcutta?”
I didn’t begrudge him his attitude; it seemed to me he was right to take this approach. “There was a time once,” I said regretfully, “when I knew people in the press. But no more.”
“Then do you know anyone with power? Policemen? Forest rangers? Politicians?”
“No,” I said. “No one.”
“Then what can you do for us?” he said, growing peevish. “Of what use could you be?”
What use indeed, was I? There are people in this world who are truly useful, who lead useful lives: Nilima for instance. But a schoolteacher such as me?
“There’s only one thing I know to do,” I said. “And that is to teach.”
“Teach?” I could see he was struggling to suppress a smile. “What could you teach here?”
“I could teach your children about this place that you’ve come to, the tide country. I have time — I am soon to retire.”
He lost interest in me. “Our children here have no time to waste,” he said. “Most of them have to help their families find food to eat.” Then, after a little more thought, he added, “However, if you can find pupils who’re willing, then why should I prevent you? It’s up to you: teach all you want.”
I went back to Kusum triumphantly and told her what had transpired. In evident alarm, she said, “But whom will you teach, Saar?”
“Why?” I said. “There’s your son, Fokir. There must be others like him. Mustn’t there?” A look of reluctance had come into her face, so I added, almost pleading, “It wouldn’t be every day. Maybe just for a little while each week. I’ll come over from Lusibari.”
“But Saar,” she said, “Fokir can’t write or read, and that’s true of many of these children. What will you teach them?”
I hadn’t given this matter any thought, but the answer came to me at once. I said, “Kusum, I’ll teach them to dream.”
PURSUED
WHILE THE DOLPHIN and its calf foraged in the creek, Fokir was fighting hard to hold his boat steady in the adjoining channel. The water was flowing fast here and he was turning the boat around in circles so that Piya could keep the dolphins in view. Even though there was no wind, the water’s surface was so densely marked with ripples and eddies that it seemed almost to be simmering as it flowed.
Having filled in six data sheets, Piya decided to measure the water’s depth. She was in the bow, as usual, while Fokir was in the midsection, turning rapidly from left to right as he dipped his oars alternately on either side of the boat. He happened to look up just as Piya was lowering her depth sounder into the water. His eyes flared and he uttered a shout that made her freeze, with her wrist still submerged beneath the surface. Pulling his oars into the boat, Fokir threw himself at Piya, diving forward, snatching wildly at her wrist. Piya fell over backward and her arm snapped out of the water, c
atapulting the depth sounder over the boat.
Suddenly the water boiled over and a pair of huge jaws came shooting out of the river, breaking the surface exactly where Piya’s wrist had been a moment before. From the corner of one eye, Piya saw two sets of interlocking teeth make a snatching, twisting movement as they lunged at her still extended arm: they passed so close that the hard tip of the snout grazed her elbow and the spray from the nostrils wetted her forearm. A second later the boat shook under the impact of a massive underwater blow. The shock was powerful enough to send bilge water shooting up out of the innards of the craft; there was a creaking sound and the boat tipped to such an angle that it seemed almost inevitable it would roll over. Piya’s clipboard, which was lying at her feet, slipped into the water, and many of the plywood slats that covered the deck tumbled out like falling dominoes.
Tutul, who’d been sitting in the shade of the hood, curled himself into a ball and rolled forward to correct his balance. The boat righted itself with a thump that threw up a curtain of water. A moment later there was another massive blow to its underside, somewhere near the stern. With the boat rolling wildly, Fokir rose to a kneeling position and took hold of one of his oars. Raising it above his head, he turned it so that its head became a blade and brought it crashing down into the water. The oar hammered into the head of the crocodile just as it was surfacing to make another lunge, and the force of the impact snapped shut the gaping jaws. The oar splintered and the blade broke from the handle and went cartwheeling across the water. The river bubbled again as the reptile sank out of sight: for a moment after its submersion a ghostly outline of its shape remained imprinted on the surface and Piya saw that it was almost as large as the boat.
