The Hungry Tide

by Amitav Ghosh

  Most haunting of all, was I overreaching myself even in conceiving of these confusions? What had I ever done to earn the right to address such questions?

  I had reached the point where, as the Poet says, we tell ourselves

  Maybe what’s left

  for us is some tree on a hillside we can look at

  day after day…

  and the perverse affection of a habit

  that liked us so much it never let go.

  A SUNSET

  NEAR THE END of the day, when the sun was dipping toward the Bidya’s mohona, Piya decided to take advantage of Kanai’s invitation: she went up to the roof of the Guest House and knocked on the door of the study.

  “Ké?” He blinked as he opened the door and she had the impression that she had woken him from a trance.

  “Did I disturb you?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “I thought I’d take in the sunset.”

  “Good idea — I’m glad you came up.” He put away the cardboard-covered book he was holding and went to join her by the parapet. In the distance the sky and the mohona were aflame with the colors of the setting sun.

  “It’s magnificent, isn’t it?” said Kanai.

  “It is.”

  Kanai proceeded to point out Lusibari’s sights: the village maidan, the Hamilton House, the school, the hospital and so on. By the end of the recital they had done a turn around the roof and were facing in the direction of the path they had followed that morning, looking toward the staff quarters of the Lusibari Hospital. Piya knew they were both thinking about the morning’s meeting.

  “I’m glad it went well today,” she said.

  “Did you think it went well?”

  “Yes, I did,” she said. “At least Fokir agreed to go on this expedition. In the beginning I didn’t think he would.”

  “I didn’t know what to think, frankly,” Kanai said. “He’s such a peculiar, sulky fellow. One doesn’t know what to expect.”

  “Believe me,” said Piya, “he’s very different when he’s out on the water.”

  “But are you sure you’ll be all right with him?” said Kanai. “For several days?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” She was aware of a certain awkwardness in discussing Fokir with him, especially because she could tell that he was still smarting from the silent snub of the morning. Quietly she said, “Tell me about Fokir’s mother. What was she like?”

  Kanai stopped to consider this. “Fokir looks a lot like her,” he said. “But it’s hard to see any other resemblance. Kusum was spirited, tough, full of fun and laughter. Not like him at all.”

  “And what happened to her?”

  “It’s a long story,” said Kanai, “and I don’t know all of it. All I can tell you is that she was killed in some kind of confrontation with the police.”

  Piya caught her breath. “How did that happen?”

  “She’d joined a group of refugees who’d occupied an island nearby. The land belonged to the government, so there was a standoff and many people died. That was in 1979 — Fokir must have been five or six. But Horen Naskor took him in after his mother’s death: he’s been a father to him ever since.”

  “So Fokir wasn’t born here?”

  “No,” said Kanai. “He was born in Bihar — his parents were living there at the time. His mother came back here when his father died.”

  Piya remembered the family she had imagined for Fokir: the parents she had given him and the many siblings. She was shamed by her lack of insight. “Well, that’s one thing we have in common, then,” she said. “Fokir and me.”

  “What?”

  “Growing up without a mother.”

  “Did you lose your mother when you were little?” said Kanai.

  “I wasn’t as little as he was,” said Piya. “My mother died of cancer when I was twelve. But actually I felt I’d lost her long before.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’d kind of cut herself off from us — my dad and me. She was a depressive, you see — and her condition got worse over the years.”

  “It must have been very hard for you,” said Kanai.

  “Not as hard as it was for her,” said Piya. “She was like an orchid in a way, frail and beautiful and dependent on the love and labor of many, many people. She was the kind of person who should never have strayed too far from home. In Seattle she had no one — no friends, no servants, no job, no life. My father, on the other hand, was the perfect immigrant — driven, hardworking, successful. He was busy getting on with his career, and I was absorbed in the usual kid stuff. I guess my mother kind of fell through the cracks. At some point she just gave up.”

  Kanai put his hand on hers and gave it a squeeze. “I’m sorry.”

  There was a catch in his voice that surprised Piya: she had judged him to be too self-absorbed to pay much attention to other people. Yet his sympathy now seemed genuine.

  “I don’t get it,” she said with a smile. “You say you’re sorry for me, but you don’t seem to have much sympathy for Fokir. Even though you knew his mother. How come?”

  His face hardened and he gave a snort of ironic laughter. “So far as Fokir is concerned I’m afraid my sympathies are mainly with his wife.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Didn’t you feel for her this morning?” said Kanai. “Just imagine how hard it must be to live with someone like Fokir while also trying to provide for a family and keep a roof over your head. If you consider her circumstances — her caste, her upbringing — it’s very remarkable that she’s had the forethought to figure out how to get by in today’s world. And it isn’t just that she wants to get by — she wants to do well; she wants to make a success of her life.”

  Piya nodded. “I get it.” She understood now that for Kanai there was a certain reassurance in meeting a woman like Moyna, in such a place as Lusibari: it was as if her very existence were a validation of the choices he had made in his own life. It was important for him to believe that his values were, at bottom, egalitarian, liberal, meritocratic. It reassured him to be able to think, “What I want for myself is no different from what everybody wants, no matter how rich or poor; everyone who has any drive, any energy, wants to get on in the world — Moyna is the proof.” Piya understood too that this was a looking glass in which a man like Fokir could never be anything other than a figure glimpsed through a rear-view mirror, a rapidly diminishing presence, a ghost from the perpetual past that was Lusibari. But she guessed also that despite its newness and energy, the country Kanai inhabited was full of these ghosts, these unseen presences whose murmurings could never quite be silenced no matter how loud you spoke.

  Piya said, “You really like Moyna, don’t you?”

  “I admire her,” said Kanai. “That’s how I would put it.”

  “I know you do,” Piya said. “But has it occurred to you that she might look a little different from Fokir’s angle?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just ask yourself this,” said Piya. “How would you like to be married to her?”

  Kanai laughed and when he spoke again his voice had an edge of flippancy that made Piya grate her teeth. “I’d say Moyna is the kind of woman who would be good for a brief but exciting dalliance,” he said. “A fling, as we used to say. But as for anything more lasting — no. I’d say someone like you would be much more to my taste.”

  Piya raised her hand to her ear stud and fingered it delicately, as if for reassurance. With a wary smile she said, “Are you flirting with me, Kanai?”

  “Can’t you tell?” he said, grinning.

  “I’m out of practice,” she said.

  “Well, we have to do something about that, don’t we?”

  He was interrupted by a shout from below. “Kanai-babu.”

  Looking over the parapet, they saw that Fokir was standing on the path below. On catching sight of Piya he dropped his head and shuffled his feet. Then, after addressing a few words to Kanai, he turned abruptly on
his heel and walked away in the direction of the embankment.

  “What did he say?” said Piya.

  “He wanted me to tell you that Horen Naskor will be here tomorrow with the bhotbhoti,” said Kanai. “You can look it over and if it’s OK you can leave day after tomorrow.”

  “Good!” cried Piya. “I’d better go and organize my stuff.”

  She noticed that the interruption had annoyed Kanai as much as it had pleased her. He was frowning as he said, “And I suppose I’d better get back to my uncle’s notebook.”

  TRANSFORMATION

  And if it were not for Horen, perhaps I would have been content to live out my days in the embrace of all the habits that liked me so much they would never let go. But he sought me out one day and said, “Saar, it’s mid-January, almost time for the Bon Bibi puja. Kusum and Fokir want to go to Garjontola and I’m going to take them there. She asked if you wanted to come.”

  “Garjontola?” I said. “Where is that?”

  “It’s an island,” he said, “deep in the jungle. Kusum’s father built a shrine to Bon Bibi there. That’s why she wants to go.”

  This offered a dilemma of a new kind. In the past, I had always taken care to hold myself apart from matters of religious devotion. It was not just that I thought of these beliefs as false consciousness; it was also because I had seen at first hand the horrors that religion had visited upon us at the time of Partition. As headmaster I had felt it my duty not to identify myself with any set of religious beliefs, Hindu, Muslim or anything else. This was why, strange as it may seem, I had never seen a Bon Bibi puja or, indeed, taken any interest in this deity. But I was no longer a headmaster and the considerations that had once kept me aloof from such matters were no longer applicable.

  But what about Nilima’s injunctions? What about her plea that I stay away from Morichjhãpi? I persuaded myself that this trip would not count as going to Morichjhãpi, since we would, after all, be heading to another island. “All right, Horen,” I said. “But remember — not a word to Mashima.”

  “No, Saar, of course. No.”

  The next morning Horen came at dawn and we set off.

  A couple of months had passed since I was last at Morichjhãpi, and when we got there, it was clear at a glance that much had changed in the meanwhile: the euphoria of the time before had given way to fear and slow, nagging doubts. A wooden watchtower had been erected, for instance, and there were groups of settlers patrolling the island’s shore. When our boat pulled in, we were immediately surrounded by several men. “Who are you?” they asked. “What’s your business here?”

  We were a little shaken when we got to Kusum’s thatch-roofed dwelling. It was clear that she too was under strain. She explained that in recent weeks the government had been stepping up the pressure on the settlers: policemen and officials had visited and offered inducements for them to leave. When these proved ineffective, they had made threats. Although the settlers were unmoved in their resolve, a kind of nervousness had set in: no one knew what was going to happen next.

  The morning was quite advanced now, so we hurried on our way. Kusum and Fokir had made small clay images of Bon Bibi and her brother, Shah Jongoli. These we loaded on Horen’s boat and then pulled away from the island.

  Once we were out on the river, the tide lifted everyone’s spirits. There were many other boats on the waters, all out on similar errands. Some of them had twenty or thirty people on board. Along with massive, wellpainted images of Bon Bibi and Shah Jongoli, they also had singers and drummers.

  On our boat were just the four of us: Horen, Fokir, Kusum and me.

  “Why didn’t you bring your children?” I asked Horen. “What about your family?”

  “They went with my father-in-law and my wife’s family,” said Horen sheepishly. “Their boat is bigger.”

  We came to a mohona, and as we were crossing it, I noticed that Horen and Kusum had begun to make genuflections of the kind that are usually occasioned by the sight of a deity or a temple — they raised their fingertips to their foreheads and then touched their chests. Fokir, watching attentively, attempted to do the same.

  “What’s happening?” I asked in surprise. “What do you see? There’s no temple nearby. This is just open water.”

  Kusum laughed and at first wouldn’t tell me. Then, after some pleading and cajolery, she divulged that at that moment, in the very middle of that mohona, we had crossed the line Bon Bibi had drawn to divide the tide country. In other words we had crossed the border that separates the realm of human beings from the domain of Dokkhin Rai and his demons. I realized with a sense of shock that this chimerical line was, to her and to Horen, as real as a barbed-wire fence might be to me.

  And now, indeed, everything began to look new, unexpected, full of surprises. I had a book in my hands to while away the time, and it occurred to me that in a way a landscape is not unlike a book — a compilation of pages that overlap without any two ever being the same. People open the book according to their taste and training, their memories and desires: for a geologist the compilation opens at one page, for a boatman at another, and still another for a ship’s pilot, a painter and so on. On occasion these pages are ruled with lines that are invisible to some people, while being for others as real, as charged and as volatile as high-voltage cables.

  To me, a townsman, the tide country’s jungle was an emptiness, a place where time stood still. I saw now that this was an illusion, that exactly the opposite was true. What was happening here, I realized, was that the wheel of time was spinning too fast to be seen. In other places it took decades, even centuries, for a river to change course; it took an epoch for an island to appear. But here in the tide country, transformation is the rule of life: rivers stray from week to week, and islands are made and unmade in days. In other places forests take centuries, even millennia, to regenerate; but mangroves can recolonize a denuded island in ten to fifteen years. Could it be that the very rhythms of the earth were quickened here so that they unfolded at an accelerated pace?

  I remembered the story of the Royal James and Mary, an English ship making its passage through the shoals of the tide country in the year 1694. Night stole unawares upon the many-masted ship and it capsized after striking a sandbank. What would be the fate of such a shipwreck in the benign waters of the Caribbean or the Mediterranean? I imagined the thick crust of underwater life that would cling to the vessel and preserve it for centuries; I imagined the divers and explorers who would seek their fortunes in the wreck. But here? The tide country digested the great galleon within a few years. Its remains vanished without trace.

  Nor was this the only such. Thinking back, I remembered that the channels of the tide country were crowded with the graves of old ships. Wasn’t it true that in the great storm of 1737 more than two dozen ships had foundered in these waters? And didn’t it happen that in the year 1885 the British India Steam Navigation Company lost two proud steamers here, the Arcot and the Mahratta? And wasn’t the City of Canterbury added to that list in 1897? But today on these sites nothing is to be seen; nothing escapes the maw of the tides; everything is ground to fine silt, becomes something else.

  It was as if the whole tide country were speaking in the voice of the Poet: “life is lived in transformation.”

  It is afternoon now in Morichjhãpi and Kusum and Horen have just returned from a meeting of the settlers of this ward. The rumors have been confirmed. The gangsters who have massed on the far shore will be brought in to drive the settlers out. But the attack, they say, will likely start tomorrow, not today. I still have a few hours left.

  A PILGRIMAGE

  WHEN DINNER ARRIVED, Piya had the feeling that someone had spoken to Moyna about her eating preferences. Today, apart from the usual fare of rice and fish curry, she had also brought some plain mashed potatoes and two bananas. Touched, Piya put her hands together in a namaste to thank Moyna.

  Later, when Moyna had gone, she asked Kanai whether it was he who’d spoken to her and he s
hook his head: “No. It wasn’t me.”

  “Must have been Fokir, then.” Piya served herself an eager helping of mashed potatoes. “All I’m missing now is some Ovaltine.”

  “Ovaltine?” Kanai looked up from his food in surprise. “You like Ovaltine?” He began to laugh when she nodded. “Do they have Ovaltine in America?”

  “It was a habit my parents brought over,” Piya said. “They used to buy their groceries in Indian stores. I like it now because it’s easy to carry and convenient when you’re out on the water.”

  “So you live on Ovaltine while you’re tracking these dolphins of yours?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Kanai shook his head ruefully as he filled a plate with rice, dal and chhechki. “You go through a lot for these creatures, don’t you?”

  “That’s not how I think of it.”

  “So are they fetching, these beasts of yours?” said Kanai. “Do they hold one’s interest?”

  “They’re interesting to me,” said Piya. “And I can give you at least one good reason why they should be of interest to you.”

  “I’m listening,” said Kanai. “I’m willing to be persuaded. Why?”

  “Because some of the earliest specimens were found in Calcutta,” Piya said. “How’s that for a reason?”

  “In Calcutta?” Kanai said incredulously. “You’re telling me there were dolphins in Calcutta?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Piya. “Not just dolphins. Whales too.”

  “Whales?” Kanai laughed. “Now I know you’re pulling my leg.”

  “Not at all,” said Piya. “Kolkata was once a big place for cetacean zoology.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Kanai said flatly. “I think I’d know if that were the case.”

  “But it’s true,” Piya said. “And let me tell you — last week when I was coming through Kolkata? I actually went on a cetacean pilgrimage.”

  Kanai burst into laughter. “A cetacean pilgrimage?”

  “Yes,” said Piya. “My cousins laughed too. But that’s just what it was, a pilgrimage.”