The Hungry Tide

by Amitav Ghosh

  As the bhotbhoti was making its turn, Kanai headed toward his cabin to change, while Piya went, as if by habit, to her usual place at the head of the upper deck. Kanai assumed she would be back “on effort” in a matter of minutes. But when he came out again she was sitting slumped on the deck, leaning listlessly against a rail, and he knew from her posture that she had been crying.

  He went to sit beside her. “Look, Piya,” he said, “don’t torment yourself with this. There’s nothing we could have done.”

  “We could have tried.”

  “It would have made no difference.”

  “I guess.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Anyway, Kanai,” she said, “I feel I owe you an apology.”

  “For what you said back there?” Kanai smiled. “That’s all right — you had every right to be upset.”

  She shook her head. “No — it’s not just that.”

  “Then?”

  “Do you remember what you were telling me yesterday?” she said. “Fact is, you were right and I was wrong.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

  “You know,” said Piya. “What you said about there being nothing in common between —?”

  “You and Fokir?”

  “Yes,” said Piya. “You were right. I was just being stupid. I guess it took something like this for me to get it straight.”

  Kanai choked back the first triumphant comment that came to his mind, and said instead, in as neutral a voice as he could muster, “And how did this revelation come to be granted to you?”

  “By what just happened,” said Piya. “I couldn’t believe Fokir’s response.”

  “But what did you expect, Piya?” Kanai said. “Did you think he was some kind of grass-roots ecologist? He’s not. He’s a fisherman — he kills animals for a living.”

  “I understand that,” said Piya. “I’m not blaming him; I know this is what he grew up with. It’s just, I thought somehow he’d be different.”

  Kanai placed a sympathetic hand on her knee. “Let’s not dwell on this,” he said. “After all, you have a lot of work to do.” She raised her head and forced a smile.

  THE MEGHA HAD been under way for about an hour when a gray motorboat roared past it. Piya was in the bow with her binoculars and Kanai was sitting in the shade. They moved to the gunwale to watch as the boat sped downriver and they saw it was filled with khaki-uniformed forest guards. It seemed to be heading in the direction of the village they had left.

  Horen came to join them and said something that made Kanai laugh. “According to Horen,” Kanai explained to Piya, “if you’re caught between a pirate and a forester, you should always give yourself up to the pirate. You’ll be safer.”

  Piya nodded wryly, recalling her own experience with the forest guard. “What do you think they’re going to do to that village?” she said.

  Kanai shrugged. “There’ll be arrests, fines, beatings. Who knows what else?”

  Another hour went by and then, while crossing a mohona, they spotted a small flotilla of gray motorboats. These were heading in the same direction as the motorboat they had passed earlier.

  “Wow!” said Piya. “Looks like they mean business.”

  “I’m sure they do.”

  Suddenly one of the motorboats parted company with the others and swung around. As it picked up speed it became clear that it had set its course to intercept the Megha. On catching sight of it Horen thrust his head out of the wheelhouse and spoke urgently to Kanai.

  “Piya, you’ve got to go to your cabin,” said Kanai. “Horen says there’ll be trouble if they find you on the boat. It’s something to do with your being a foreigner and not having the right kind of permit.”

  “OK.” Piya carried her backpack to her cabin and pulled the door shut. She lay down on her bunk and listened to the sound of the motorboat’s engine as it grew gradually louder. When it was cut off, she knew the boat had pulled up alongside. She heard people conversing in Bengali, politely at first and then with increasing acrimony: Kanai’s voice was counterpointed against a number of others.

  A good hour passed. Arguments went back and forth and voices rose and fell. Piya was glad she had a bottle of water with her, for the cabin grew steadily hotter as the day advanced.

  At length the voices died down and the motorboat pulled away. A knock sounded on Piya’s door just as the Megha’s engine was coming alive again. She was relieved to find Kanai standing outside.

  “What was all that about?” she said.

  Kanai made a face. “Apparently they’d heard a foreigner was at the village yesterday when the tiger was killed. They’re very exercised about it.”

  “Why?”

  “They said it’s a security risk for a foreigner to be wandering about so close to the border without a guard. But my feeling is that they just don’t want the news to get out.”

  “About the killing?”

  “Yes.” Kanai nodded. “It makes them look bad. Anyway, it seems they know you’re at large in these parts and now they’re on the lookout. They kept asking if we’d seen you.”

  “What did you say?”

  Kanai smiled. “Horen and I adopted a policy of unyielding denial. It seemed to be working until they spotted Fokir. One of the guards recognized him and said you were last seen on his boat.”

  “Oh my God!” said Piya. “Was it a kind of weasel-looking guy?”

  “Yes,” said Kanai. “That’s the one. I don’t know what he told the others, but they were all set to drag Fokir off to jail. Fortunately I was able to persuade them to change their minds.”

  “And how did you do that?”

  Kanai’s voice became very dry. “Shall we say I mentioned the names of a few friends and parted with a few notes?”

  She guessed his ironic tone was intended to downplay the seriousness of the situation and she was suddenly grateful for his calm, urbane presence. What would have happened if he hadn’t been there? She knew that in all likelihood she would have ended up on one of those official motorboats.

  She put a hand on Kanai’s arm. “Thank you. I appreciate it. I really do. And I’m sure Fokir does too.”

  Kanai acknowledged this by dipping his head ironically. “Always glad to oblige.” In a graver tone of voice he added, “However, I do have to say, Piya, you really should think seriously of turning back. If they find you, there could be trouble. You could end up in jail and there’s not much I or anyone else could do. The proximity of the border changes everything.”

  Piya looked into the distance as she considered this. She thought of Blyth and Roxburgh and the naturalists who had crossed these waters a hundred years before and found them teeming with cetaceans. She thought of all the years in between when, for one reason or another, no one had paid any heed to these creatures and so no one had known of their decimation. It had fallen to her to be the first to carry back a report of the current situation and she knew she could not turn back from the responsibility.

  “I can’t return right now, Kanai,” she said. “It’s hard to explain to you how important my work is. If I leave, who knows how long it’ll be before another cetologist can come here? I’ve got to stay as long as I possibly can.”

  Kanai frowned. “And what if they take you off to jail?”

  Piya shrugged. “How long could they keep me, anyway? And when they let me out, the material will still be in my head.”

  AT MIDDAY, with the sun blazing overhead, Piya took a break and came to sit beside Kanai in the shade of the awning. There was a troubled look in her eyes that prompted Kanai to say, “Are you still thinking about the forest guards?”

  This seemed to startle her. “Oh, no. Not that.”

  “Then?”

  She tipped her head back to drink from her water bottle. “The village,” she said, wiping her mouth. “Last night: I still can’t get it out of my head. I keep seeing it again and again — the people, the flames. It was like something from some other time — before rec
orded history. I feel like I’ll never be able to get my mind around the —”

  Kanai prompted her as she faltered. “The horror?”

  “The horror. Yes. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to forget it.”

  “Probably not.”

  “But for Fokir and Horen and the others it was just a part of everyday life, wasn’t it?”

  “I imagine they’ve learned to take it in their stride, Piya. They’ve had to.”

  “That’s what haunts me,” said Piya. “In a way that makes them a part of the horror too, doesn’t it?”

  Kanai snapped shut the notebook. “To be fair to Fokir and Horen, I don’t think it’s quite that simple, Piya. I mean, aren’t we a part of the horror as well? You and me and people like us?”

  Piya ran a hand through her hair. “I don’t see how.”

  “That tiger had killed two people, Piya,” Kanai said. “And that was just in one village. It happens every week that people are killed by tigers. How about the horror of that? If there were killings on that scale anywhere else on earth it would be called a genocide, and yet here it goes almost unremarked: these killings are never reported, never written about in the papers. And the reason is just that these people are too poor to matter. We all know it, but we choose not to see it. Isn’t that a horror too — that we can feel the suffering of an animal, but not of human beings?”

  “But Kanai,” Piya retorted, “everywhere in the world dozens of people are killed every day — on roads, in cars, in traffic. Why is this any worse?”

  “Because we’re complicit in this, Piya, that’s why.”

  Piya dissociated herself with a shake of the head. “I don’t see how I’m complicit.”

  “Because it was people like you,” said Kanai, “who made a push to protect the wildlife here, without regard for the human costs. And I’m complicit because people like me — Indians of my class, that is — have chosen to hide these costs, basically in order to curry favor with their Western patrons. It’s not hard to ignore the people who’re dying — after all, they are the poorest of the poor. But just ask yourself whether this would be allowed to happen anywhere else. There are more tigers living in America, in captivity, than there are in all of India — what do you think would happen if they started killing human beings?”

  “But Kanai,” said Piya, “there’s a big difference between preserving a species in captivity and keeping it in its habitat.”

  “And what is that difference exactly?”

  “The difference, Kanai,” Piya said slowly and emphatically, “is that it was what was intended — not by you or me, but by nature, by the earth, by the planet that keeps us all alive. Just suppose we crossed that imaginary line that prevents us from deciding that no other species matters except ourselves. What’ll be left then? Aren’t we alone enough in the universe? And do you think it’ll stop at that? Once we decide we can kill off other species, it’ll be people next — just the kind of people you’re thinking of, people who’re poor and unnoticed.”

  “That’s all very well for you to say, Piya — but it’s not you who’s paying the price in lost lives.”

  Piya challenged him. “Do you think I wouldn’t pay the price if I thought it necessary?”

  “You mean you’d be willing to die?” Kanai scoffed. “Come on, Piya.”

  “I’m telling you the truth, Kanai,” Piya said quietly. “If I thought giving up my life might make the rivers safe again for the Irrawaddy dolphin, the answer is yes, I would. But the trouble is that my life, your life, a thousand lives would make no difference.”

  “It’s easy to say these things —”

  “Easy?” There was a parched weariness in Piya’s voice now. “Kanai, tell me, do you see anything easy about what I do? Look at me: I have no home, no money and no prospects. My friends are thousands of miles away and I get to see them maybe once a year, if I’m lucky. And that’s the least of it. On top of that is the knowledge that what I’m doing is more or less futile.”

  She looked up and he saw that there were tears in her eyes. “There’s nothing easy about this, Kanai,” she said. “You have to take that back.”

  He swallowed the quick retort that had come to his lips. Instead, he reached for her hand and placed it between his own. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that. I take it back.”

  She snatched her hand away and rose to her feet. “I’d better get back to work.”

  As she returned to her place, he called out, “You’re a brave woman. Do you know that?”

  She shrugged this off in embarrassment. “I’m just doing my job.”

  MR. SLOANE

  IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Garjontola came into view and the water was at its lowest ebb. Piya was on watch as the Megha approached the pool, and her heart leapt when she saw that the dolphins had congregated there, punctually following the flow of the tides. For the sake of their safety, she signaled to Horen to drop anchor while the Megha was still half a mile or so away.

  Kanai had come to the bow to stand beside her and she said, “Would you like to look at the dolphins close up?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “I’m anxious to meet the beast to which you’ve pledged your troth.”

  “Come along, then. We’ll go in Fokir’s boat.”

  They went aft to the Megha’s stern and found Fokir waiting with his oars in hand. Piya stepped over and went to her usual place in the bow while Kanai seated himself in the boat’s midsection.

  A few strokes of Fokir’s oars brought them to the pool and soon two dolphins approached the boat and began to circle around it. Piya recognized them as the cow-and-calf pair she had identified earlier and she was delighted to see them again. She had the impression — as she often did with Orcaella — that they had recognized her too, for they surfaced repeatedly around the boat, and on one occasion the adult even made eye contact.

  Kanai, meanwhile, was watching the dolphins with a puzzled frown. “Are you sure these are the right animals?” he said at last.

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “But look at them,” he said in a tone of plaintive complaint. “All they do is bob up and down while making little grunting sounds.”

  “They do a lot more than that, Kanai,” Piya said. “But mostly they do it underwater.”

  “I thought you were going to lead me to my Moby Dick,” said Kanai. “But these are just little floating pigs.”

  Piya laughed. “Kanai, you’re talking about a cousin of the killer whale.”

  “Pigs have impressive relatives too, you know,” Kanai said.

  “Kanai, Orcaella don’t look remotely like pigs.”

  “No — they do have that thing on their back.”

  “It’s called a fin.”

  “And I’m sure they don’t taste as good as pigs.”

  “Kanai,” said Piya. “Stop it.”

  Kanai laughed. “I just can’t believe we’ve come all this way to look at these ridiculous porcine things. If you’re going to risk jail for an animal, couldn’t you have picked something with a little more sex appeal? Or any appeal, for that matter.”

  “Orcaella have a lot of appeal, Kanai,” Piya said. “You just have to have the patience to discover it.”

  Despite his jocular tone, Kanai’s perplexity was genuine. In his imagination, dolphins were the sleek steel-gray creatures he had seen in films and aquariums. The appeal of those animals he could readily understand, but he could see nothing interesting in the phlegmatic, beady-eyed creatures circling the boat. He knitted his brows. “Did you always know you were going to be tracking these animals around the world?”

  “No. It was an accident,” said Piya. “I knew nothing about the species when I met my first Orcaella. It happened about three years ago.”

  She had been interning with a team doing a marine-mammal survey in the South China Sea. At the end of the survey, the ship stopped at Port Sihanouk, in Cambodia. A few members of the team went up to Phnom Penh to visit friends who wor
ked for an international wildlife conservation agency. That was how they learned that a river dolphin had been found stranded near a small village in central Cambodia.

  “I thought I’d go and take a look.”

  The village, it turned out, was an hour’s journey from Phnom Penh and a long way inland from the Mekong River: Piya was driven there on a hired motorcycle. The terrain was a patchwork of huts, rice fields, irrigation ditches and shallow reservoirs. It was in one of these reservoirs, a body of water no bigger than a swimming pool, that the dolphin had been confined. The animal had swum inland with the floodwaters of the rainy season and had failed to depart with the rest of its pod; meanwhile, the irrigation ditches had run dry, shutting off its escape routes.

  This was Piya’s first glimpse of Orcaella brevirostris: it was about five feet in length, with a steel-gray body and a short dorsal fin. It lacked the usual dolphin snout and its rounded head and large eyes gave it an oddly ruminative, bovine appearance. She named it Mr. Sloane, after a high school teacher to whom it bore a distinct resemblance.

  Mr. Sloane, the dolphin, was clearly in trouble: the water was drying up fast and there were no fish left in the reservoir. Piya went with her motorcycle driver to the next kampong and brought back some fish from the market: she spent the rest of the day sitting beside the reservoir, feeding the dolphin. Next day, she went back again with a cooler filled with fish. Although there were many farmers and children present, Mr. Sloane ignored the others and went straight over to Piya’s side of the reservoir.

  “I swear to you it recognized me.”

  Back in Phnom Penh there was much concern in the small wildlife community. The Orcaella population of the Mekong was known to be declining rapidly and was expected soon to fall below sustainable levels. The Mekong Orcaella had shared Cambodia’s misfortunes: in the 1970s they had suffered the ravages of indiscriminate American carpet bombing. Later they too had been massacred by Khmer Rouge cadres, who had hit upon the idea of using dolphin oil to supplement their dwindling supplies of petroleum. The once abundant population of Orcaella in the Tonle Sap, Cambodia’s great fresh-water lake, had been reduced almost to extinction. These dolphins were hunted with rifles and explosives and their carcasses were hung up in the sun so their fat would drip into buckets. This oil was then used to run boats and motorcycles.