The Hungry Tide

by Amitav Ghosh

  “Did you tell her we’re going to visit them tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” said Kanai. “They’ll be expecting us.”

  They were back upstairs now in the Guest House, and Kanai had placed the tiffin carrier on the dining table. “I hope you’re hungry,” he said, taking the containers apart. “She always brings too much food so there should be plenty for both of us. Let’s see what we have here — there’s rice, dal, fish curry, chorchori, begun bhaja. What would you like to start with?”

  She gave the containers a look of dubious appraisal. “I hope you won’t be offended,” she said, “but I don’t think I want any of that. I have to be careful about what I eat.”

  “What about some rice, then?” said Kanai. “You could have some of that, couldn’t you?”

  She nodded. “Yes. I guess I could — if it’s just plain white rice.”

  “There you are,” he said, ladling a few spoonfuls of rice on her plate. Rolling up his sleeves, he gave her a spoon and then dug into the rice on his own plate with his hands.

  During dinner, Kanai talked at length about Lusibari. He told Piya about Daniel Hamilton, the settling of the island and the circumstances that had led to Nirmal and Nilima’s arrival. He seemed so knowledgeable that Piya remarked at last, “It sounds like you’ve spent a lot of time here. But you haven’t, have you?”

  He was quick to confirm this. “Oh, no. I only came once as a boy. To be honest, I’m surprised by how vividly I still remember the place — especially considering it was a kind of punishment.”

  “Why are you surprised?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not the kind of person who dwells on the past,” he said. “I like to look ahead.”

  “But we’re in the present now, aren’t we?” she said with a smile. “Even here, in Lusibari?”

  “Oh, no,” he said emphatically. “For me Lusibari will always be a part of the past.”

  Piya had finished her rice, so she rose from the table and started clearing away the plates. This seemed to fluster Kanai.

  “Sit down,” he said. “You can leave those for Moyna.”

  “I can do them just as well as she can,” said Piya.

  Kanai shrugged. “All right, then.”

  As she was rinsing her plate, Piya said, “Here you are, putting me up, feeding me and everything. And I feel like I know nothing about you — beyond your name that is.”

  “Is that so?” Kanai gave a startled laugh. “I wonder how that could have happened? I’m not known for being unusually reticent.”

  “It’s true, though,” she said. “I don’t even know where you live.”

  “That’s easily remedied,” he said. “I live in New Delhi. I’m fortytwo and I’m single most of the time.”

  “Oh?” Piya was quick to turn the conversation in a less personal direction. “And you’re a translator, right? That’s one thing you did tell me.”

  “That’s right,” said Kanai. “I’m an interpreter and translator by profession — although right now I’m more of a businessman than anything else. I started a company some years ago when I discovered a shortage of language professionals in New Delhi. Now I provide translators for all kinds of organizations: businesses, embassies, the media, aid organizations — in short, anyone who can pay.”

  “And is there much of a demand?”

  “Oh, yes.” He nodded vigorously. “New Delhi’s become one of the world’s leading conference cities and media centers; there’s always something happening. I can barely keep up. The business just seems to keep growing and growing. Recently we started a speechtraining operation, to do accent modification for people who work in call centers. It’s become the fastest-growing part of the business.”

  The idea that the currency of language could be used to build a business came as a surprise to Piya. “So I guess you know many languages yourself, right?”

  “Six,” he said immediately, with a grin. “Hindi, Urdu and Bengali are my mainstays nowadays. And then there’s English, of course. But I have two others I fall back on from time to time: French and Arabic.”

  She was intrigued by the odd combination: “French and Arabic! How did you come by those?”

  “Scholarships,” he said with a smile. “I always had a head for languages, and as a student I used to frequent the Alliance Française in Calcutta. One thing led to another and I won a bourse. While I was in Paris an opportunity turned up to learn Arabic in Tunisia. I seized it and have never looked back.”

  Raising a hand, Piya pinched the silver stud in her right ear, in a gesture that was childlike in its unselfconsciousness yet adult in its grace. “Did you know then that translation would be your profession?”

  “Oh no,” he said. “Not at all. When I was your age I was like any other Calcutta college student — my mind was full of poetry. At the start of my career I wanted to translate Jibanananda into Arabic, and Adonis into Bangla.”

  “And what happened?”

  He breathed a theatrical sigh. “To put it briefly,” he said, “I quickly discovered that while both Bengali and Arabic possess riches beyond accounting, in neither is it possible to earn a living by translating literature alone. Rich Arabs have no interest in Bengali poetry, and as for rich Bengalis, it doesn’t matter what they want — there aren’t enough of them to make a difference anyway. So at a certain point I reconciled myself to my fate and turned my hand to commerce. And I have to say I was lucky to get into it when I did: there’s a lot going on in India right now and it’s exciting to be a part of it.”

  Piya recalled the stories her father had told her about the country he had left: it was a place where there were only two makes of car and where middle-class life was ruled by a hankering for all things foreign. She could tell that the world Kanai inhabited was as distant from the India of her father’s memories as it was from Lusibari and the tide country.

  “Do you ever feel you might want to translate literature again?” she said.

  “Sometimes,” he replied. “But not often. On the whole, I have to admit I like running an office. I like knowing I’m giving people work, paying salaries, employing students with otherwise useless degrees. And let’s face it, I like the money and the comfort. New Delhi is a good place for a single man with some money. I get to meet lots of interesting women.”

  This took Piya by surprise and for a moment she was not sure how to respond. She was standing at the basin, stacking the dishes she had just washed. She put away the last plate and yawned, raising a hand to cover her mouth.

  “Sorry.”

  He was immediately solicitous. “You must be tired after everything you’ve been through.”

  “I’m exhausted. I think I have to go to bed.”

  “Already?” He forced a smile, although it was clear he was disappointed. “Of course. You’ve had a long day. Did I tell you that the electricity would be switched off in an hour or so? Be sure to keep a candle with you.”

  “I’ll be asleep long before that.”

  “Good. I hope you get a good night’s rest. And if you need anything, just come up and knock: I’ll be up on the roof, in my uncle’s study.”

  STORMS

  I would have gone back to Morichjhãpi the very next week but was prevented by the usual procedures and ceremonies that accompany a schoolmaster’s retirement. At the end, however, it was all over and I was officially reckoned a man who had reached the completion of his working life.

  A few days later Horen knocked on my study door. “Saar!

  “I’ve just come from the market at Kumirmari,” he said. “I met Kusum there and she insisted I bring her here.”

  “Here!” I said with a start. “To Lusibari? But why?”

  “To meet with Mashima. The Morichjhãpi people want to ask Mashima for help.”

  I understood at once: this too was a part of the settlers’ efforts to enlist support. Yet I could have told them that in this instance it was unlikely to bear fruit.

  “Horen, you should have stopped Kusum f
rom coming,” I said. “It’ll serve no purpose for her to meet with Nilima.”

  “I did tell her, Saar. But she insisted.”

  “So where is she now?”

  “She’s downstairs, Saar, waiting to see Mashima. But look who I’ve brought upstairs.” He stepped aside and I saw now that Fokir had been lurking behind him all this while. “I’ve got to go to the market, Saar, so I’ll just leave him here with you.” With that he went bounding down the stairs, leaving me alone with the five-year-old.

  As a schoolteacher I was accustomed to dealing with children in the plural. Never having had a child of my own, I was unused to coping with them in the singular. Now, subjected to the scrutiny of a lone pair of wide-open, five-year-old eyes, I forgot everything I had planned to say. In a near panic I led the boy across the roof and pointed to the Raimangal’s mohona.

  “Look, comrade,” I said. “Look. Follow your eyes and tell me. What do you see?”

  I suppose he was asking himself what I wanted. After looking this way and that, he said at last, “I see the bãdh, Saar.”

  “The bãdh? Yes, of course, the bãdh.”

  This was not the answer I had expected, but I fell upon it with inexpressible relief. For the bãdh is not just the guarantor of human life on our island; it is also our abacus and archive, our library of stories. So long as I had the bãdh in sight, I knew I would not lack for something to say.

  “Go on, comrade. Look again; look carefully. Let’s see if you can pick out the spots where the embankment has been repaired. For each such repair I’ll give you a story.”

  Fokir lifted a hand to point. “What happened there, Saar?”

  “Ah, there. That breach happened twenty years ago, and it was neither storm nor flood that caused it. It was made by a man who wanted to settle a score with the family who lived next door to his. In the depths of the night he made a hole in the dyke, thinking to drown his neighbor’s fields. It never entered his mind to think that he was doing just as much harm to himself as to his enemy. That’s why neither family lives here anymore — for ten years afterward nothing grew in their fields.”

  “And there, Saar? What happened there?”

  “That one began simply enough, with an exceptionally high tide, a kotal gon, that came spilling over the top. The contract for the repairs was given to a man who was the brother-in-law of the head of the Panchayat. He swore he would fix it so that never again would a drop of water leak through. But they found later that the contractor had put in only half the materials he had been paid for. The profits had been shared by many different brothers-in-law.”

  “And over there, Saar?”

  Even storytellers know that discretion is sometimes a wiser course than valor. “As for that one, comrade, I had better not tell you too much. Do you see the people who live there, in those dwellings that run beside the embankment? It happened once that the people of that “para” had voted for the wrong party. So when the other party came to power, they decided to settle scores. Their way of doing it was to make a hole in the bãdh. Of such things, my friend, are politicians made, but let’s not dwell on this too much — it may not be good for our health. Look there instead; follow my finger.”

  I pointed him in a direction where half a mile of the embankment had been beaten down, in the 1930s, by a storm.

  “Imagine, Fokir,” I said. “Imagine the lives of your ancestors. They were new to this island, freshly arrived in the tide country. After years of struggle they had managed to create the foundations of the bãdh; they had even managed to grow a few handfuls of rice and vegetables. After years of living on stilt-raised platforms, they had finally been able to descend to earth and make a few shacks and shanties on level ground. All this by virtue of the bãdh. And imagine that fateful night when the storm struck, at exactly the time that a kotal gon was setting in; imagine how they cowered in their roofless huts and watched the waters rising, rising, gnawing at the mud and the sand they had laid down to hold the river off. Imagine what went through their heads as they watched this devouring tide eating its way through the earthworks, stalking them wherever they were. There was not one among them, I will guarantee you, my young friend, who would not rather have stood before a tiger than have looked into the maws of that tide.”

  “Were there other storms, Saar?”

  “Yes, many. Look there.” I pointed to an indentation in the island’s shore, a place that looked as if some giant had bitten off a part of Lusibari’s coast. “Look. That was done by the storm of 1970. It was a bhangon, a breaking: the river tore off a four-acre piece of land and carried it away. In an instant it was gone — its huts, fields, trees were all devoured.”

  “Was that the worst storm of all, Saar?”

  “No, comrade, no. The worst storm of all, they say, was long before my time. Long before the settlers first came to this island.”

  “When, Saar?”

  “It was in 1737. The Emperor Aurangzeb had died some thirty years before and the country was in turmoil. Calcutta was a new place then — the English had seized their opportunity and made it the main port of the east.”

  “Go on, Saar.”

  “It happened in October — that’s always when the worst of them strike, October and November. Before the storm had even made landfall the tide country was hit by a huge wave, a wall of water forty feet in height. Can you imagine how high that is, my friend? It would have drowned everything on your island and on ours too. Even we on this roof would have been underwater.”

  “No!”

  “Yes, comrade, yes. There were people in Calcutta, Englishmen, who took measurements and recorded all the details. The waters rose so high that they killed thousands of animals and carried them upriver and inland. The corpses of tigers and rhinoceroses were found miles from the river, in rice fields and in village ponds. There were fields covered with the feathers of dead birds. And as this monstrous wave was traveling through the tide country, racing toward Calcutta, something else happened — something unimaginable.”

  “What, Saar, what?”

  “The city was hit by an earthquake.”

  “No!”

  “Yes, my friend. Yes. That’s one of the reasons why this storm became so famous. There are people, scientists, who believe there is a mysterious connection between earthquakes and storms. But this was the first known instance of these two catastrophes happening together.”

  “So what happened, Saar?”

  “In Kolkata tens of thousands of dwellings fell instantly to the ground — Englishmen’s palaces as well as houses and huts. The steeple of the English church toppled over and came crashing down. They say there was not a building in the city left with four walls intact. Bridges were blown away, wharves were carried off by the surging waters, godowns were emptied of their rice, and gunpowder in the armories was scattered by the wind. On the river were many ships at anchor, large and small, from many nations. Among them there were two English ships of five hundred tons each. The wind picked them up and carried them over the tops of trees and houses; it threw them down a quarter of a mile from the river. People saw huge barges fluttering in the air like paper kites. They say that over twenty thousand vessels were lost that day, including boats, barges, dinghies and the like. And even among those that remained, many strange things happened.”

  “What, Saar? What?”

  “A French ship was driven on shore with some of its cargo intact. The day after the storm, the remaining members of the crew went out into the fields to try to salvage what they could from the wreckage. A crewman was sent down into one of the holds to see what had been spared. After he had been gone a while, his mates shouted to ask him what was taking him so long. There was no answer, so they sent another man. He too fell quickly silent, as did the man who followed him. Now panic set in and no one else would agree to go until a fire had been lit to see what was going on. When the flame was kindled they saw that the hold was filled with water, and swimming in this tank was an enormous crocodile — it
had killed those three men.

  “And this, my friend and comrade, is a true story, recorded in documents stored in the British Museum, the very place where Marx wrote Das Kapital.”

  “But Saar, it couldn’t happen again, Saar, could it?”

  I could see Fokir was trying to gauge the appetite of our rivers and I would have liked to put his young mind at rest. But I knew also that it would have been wrong to deceive him. “My friend, not only could it happen again — it will happen again. A storm will come, the waters will rise, and the bãdh will succumb, in part or in whole. It is only a matter of time.”

  “How do you know, Saar?” he said quietly.

  “Look at it, my friend, look at the bãdh. See how frail it is, how fragile. Look at the waters that flow past it and how limitless they are, how patient, how quietly they bide their time. Just to look at it is to know why the waters must prevail, later if not sooner. But if you’re not convinced by the evidence of your eyes, then perhaps you will have to use your ears.”

  “My ears?”

  “Yes. Come with me.”

  I led him down the stairs and across the fields. People must have stared to see us, me in my flapping white dhoti with my umbrella unfurled against the sun, and Fokir in his ragged shorts racing along at my heels. I went right up to the embankment and put my left ear against the clay. “Now put your head on the bãdh and listen carefully. Tell me what you hear and let’s see if you can guess what it is.”

  “I hear a scratching sound, Saar,” he said in a while. “It’s very soft.”

  “But what is making this sound?”

  He listened a while longer and then his face lit up with a smile. “Are they crabs, Saar?”

  “Yes, Fokir. Not everyone can hear them but you did. Even as we stand here, untold multitudes of crabs are burrowing into our bãdh. Now ask yourself: how long can this frail fence last against these monstrous appetites — the crabs and the tides, the winds and the storms? And if it falls, who shall we turn to then, comrade?”