The Hungry Tide

by Amitav Ghosh

  They were drenched by the time they reached the shelter of the stairwell, but the extra layers of covering had kept Nilima dry underneath. Unwinding the towels, she wrung them out before following Kanai up the stairs. Once they stepped into the Guest House, the storm seemed suddenly to recede. With the shutters securely fastened, the wind could be heard but not felt: it was strangely pleasurable to be able to listen to it from within the safety of four solid walls.

  Kanai put the suitcases down and reached for one of Nilima’s wrung-out towels. After drying his hair, he pulled off his mud-soaked shirt and wrapped the towel around his shoulders. Nilima, meanwhile, had seated herself at the dining table.

  “Kanai,” she said, “where are the others? Piya? Fokir?”

  “We couldn’t find Piya or Fokir,” Kanai said grimly. “We had to leave them behind. We waited as long as we possibly could, and then Horen said we had to go. We’re going to return tomorrow to look for them.”

  “So they’re going to be outside?” Nilima said. “During the storm?”

  Kanai nodded. “Yes. There was nothing to be done.”

  “Let’s hope —” Nilima didn’t finish her sentence, and Kanai cut in.

  “And I have some other bad news.”

  “What?”

  “The notebook.”

  “What about it?” she said, sitting up in alarm.

  Kanai went around the table and sat beside her. “I had it with me till this morning,” he said. “I was bringing it back here, but I slipped in the water and it was swept out of my hands.”

  Her mouth shaped itself into a horrified circle as she took this in.

  “You can’t imagine how I feel,” he said. “I would have done anything to save it.”

  She nodded, collecting herself. “I know. Don’t blame yourself,” she said softly. “But tell me, Kanai, did you read it?”

  “Yes.” He nodded.

  She looked closely at him. “And what was it about?”

  “Many different things,” he said. “History, poetry, geology — many things. But mainly it was about Morichjhãpi. He wrote all of it in the course of one day and the better part of a night. He must have finished writing just hours before the assault started.”

  “So it doesn’t describe the attack?”

  “No,” said Kanai. “By that time he’d given it to Horen, who had left Morichjhãpi earlier that day with Fokir. It was a lucky thing: that’s how it survived.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Nilima said, “is how it got into his study.”

  “It’s a strange story,” Kanai said. “Horen wrapped it up very carefully in plastic with the intention of sending it to me. But it got lost, then it was found again recently. Horen gave it to Moyna, who slipped it into the study.”

  Nilima fell silent as she thought about this. “Tell me, Kanai,” she said, “did Nirmal say why he didn’t leave the notebook to me?”

  “Not in so many words,” Kanai said. “But I suppose he felt you wouldn’t be very sympathetic.”

  “Sympathetic?” Rising angrily to her feet, Nilima began to pace the room. “Kanai, it’s not that I wasn’t sympathetic. It’s just that my sympathies had a narrower focus. I am not capable of dealing with the whole world’s problems. For me the challenge of making a few little things a little better in one small place is enough. That place for me is Lusibari. I’ve given it everything I can, and yes, after all these years it has amounted to something. It’s helped people; it’s made a few people’s lives a little better. But that was never enough for Nirmal. For him it had to be all or nothing, and of course that’s what he ended up with — nothing.”

  “Except for the notebook,” Kanai corrected her. “He did write that.”

  “And that’s gone too now,” said Nilima.

  “No,” said Kanai. “Not in its entirety. A lot of it is in my head, you know. I’m going to try to put it back together.”

  Nilima put her hands on the back of his chair and looked into his eyes. “And after you’ve put together his notebook, Kanai,” she said quietly, “will you put my side of it together too?”

  Kanai could not fathom her meaning. “I don’t understand.”

  “Kanai, the dreamers have everyone to speak for them,” she said. “But those who’re patient, those who try to be strong, who try to build things — no one ever sees any poetry in that, do they?”

  He was moved by the directness of her appeal. “I do,” he said. “I see it in you —” Suddenly the dining table began to rattle and he was cut short. Somewhere in the distance was a rushing sound, powerful enough to make itself heard above the gale.

  Kanai went to the shutters and put his eye to a chink between the slats of wood. “It’s the tidal surge,” he said to Nilima. “It’s coming down the channel.”

  A wall of water was shooting toward them. On its side, where it was cut off by the embankment, a huge plume of spray was shooting into the air. The island was filling with water, like a saucer tipped on its side, as the wave encircled it. Kanai and Nilima watched aghast as the water rose and kept rising, up the flight of stairs that led into Nilima’s flat, stopping just short of the door.

  “It’ll take a long time to get the water out of the soil again, won’t it?” Kanai said.

  “Yes, but people’s lives matter more.” Nilima had inclined her head to catch a glimpse of the hospital. A row of people could be seen on the second floor, braving the wind in order to look at the floodwaters.

  “Just think of all the people who’ve been saved by that cyclone shelter,” Nilima said. “And it was Nirmal who convinced us to build it. If it weren’t for his peculiar interest in geology and meteorology we would never have thought of it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” said Nilima. “Making us build it was probably the most important thing he did in his whole life. You can see the proof of that today. But if you’d told him that, he’d have laughed. He’d have said, ‘It’s just social service — not revolution.’”

  THE DIMINUTION OF the noise was the first indication of the eye’s arrival. The sound didn’t stop; it just pulled back a little, and as it retreated the wind slowed down and seemed almost to die. Piya opened her eyes and was amazed by what she saw. A full moon hung above the top of what seemed to be a whirling stovepipe that reached far into the heavens. The light of the moon, shining through this spinning tube, illuminated the still center of the storm.

  Stretching away from them in every direction, as far as Piya’s eye could reach, was a heaving carpet of leaves. Almost nothing was visible of the water’s surface; the usual ripples, eddies and currents had disappeared under this layer of green. As for the island itself, it was entirely submerged, and its shape could be deduced only from the few thickets of trees whose uppermost reaches were still visible above water. These trees had a skeletal, forlorn look; few had any branches remaining and there was scarcely one that still had a leaf attached. Many had been snapped in half and reduced to shattered stumps.

  A white cloud floated down from the sky and settled on the remnants of the drowned forest. It was a flock of white birds, and they were so exhausted as to be oblivious of Piya and Fokir. Piya loosened the knot in the sari and pushed back from the tree to stretch her aching limbs. One of the birds was so close she was able to pick it up in her hands: it was trembling and she could feel the fluttering of its heart. Evidently the birds had been trying to stay within the storm’s eye. How far had they flown? Piya could not imagine. Releasing the bird, she rested against the tree.

  Fokir, she noticed, was already standing, balancing on the branch and stretching his legs. She had the impression that he was looking around urgently, searching for another branch to move to. But there was nothing in sight: their tree had lost all its limbs except the one they were sitting on.

  Fokir lowered himself to a crouch and touched her knee, making a small, barely perceptible gesture. She saw that he was pointing into the distance to another thicket of trees. Following his finger, she
saw a tiger pulling itself out of the water and into a tree on the far side of the island. It seemed to have been following the storm’s eye, like the birds, resting whenever it could. It became aware of their presence at exactly the same moment they spotted it; although it was several hundred yards away, she could tell that it was an immense animal, so large it seemed incredible that the tree could sustain its weight. Without blinking, the tiger watched them for several minutes; during this time it made no movement other than to twitch its tail. She could imagine that if she had been able to put a hand on its coat, she would have been able to feel the pounding of its heart.

  The tiger seemed to sense the storm’s return, for it glanced over its shoulder before slipping off the branch. They saw its head bobbing in the water for a few minutes and then the moonlight dimmed and the roar of the wind filled their heads again.

  Piya swung her legs on the branch and turned quickly to resume her position. When she was facing the tree, they looped the sari around the trunk and Fokir tied it in a knot. They had barely had time to get back in place when the storm was upon them. Again the air was full of hurtling projectiles.

  But something had changed and it took Piya a moment to register the difference. The wind was now coming at them from the opposite direction. Where she had had the tree trunk to shelter her before, now there was only Fokir’s body. Was this why he had been looking for a branch on another tree? Had he known right from the start that his own body would have to become her shield when the eye had passed? She tried to break free of his grasp, tried to pull him around so that for once she could be the one who was sheltering him. But his body was unyielding and she could not break free of it, especially now that it had the wind’s weight behind it. Their bodies were so close, so finely merged, that she could feel the impact of everything hitting him, she could sense the blows raining down on his back. She could feel the bones of his cheeks as if they had been superimposed on her own; it was as if the storm had given them what life could not; it had fused them together and made them one.

  THE DAY AFTER

  EVEN THOUGH it was moving very slowly, the Megha had covered two-thirds of the distance to Garjontola when a boat appeared in the distance — the first to be seen in hours.

  It was a bright, crisp day, cool but windless. Although the level of the water had been declining steadily since the passage of the storm, the mangroves were still mostly submerged. The water’s surface was covered in an undulating carpet of green, while the forest — or what little could be seen of it — was completely denuded of leaves, stripped down to trunks and stalks. With the drowning of the landscape the channels’ shores had disappeared, making navigation doubly difficult. As a result, since its departure from Lusibari at dawn, the Megha’s speed had rarely risen above a crawl.

  Horen was the first to recognize the craft in the distance. With its hood gone, its appearance was so changed that neither Kanai nor Moyna had thought to associate it with Fokir’s boat. But Horen had built the boat with his own hands, and it had been with him for many years before he passed it on: he knew it at once. “That’s Fokir’s boat,” he said. “I’m sure of it. The storm’s ripped off the hood, but the boat is the same.”

  “Who’s in it?” Kanai asked, but this elicited no response from Horen.

  Kanai and Moyna went to stand in the Megha’s bow. The water seemed to congeal as the two craft inched toward each other. In a while Kanai realized that there was only one person on the boat: it was impossible to tell who it was, man or woman, for the figure was caked from head to toe in mud. Moyna’s hands, like his own, were fastened on the gunwale, and he saw that her knuckles had paled, just like his own. Even though they were right next to each other, a chasm seemed to open between them as they peered into the distance at the boat, trying to guess whom it was carrying toward them.

  “It’s her,” Moyna said at last, in a whisper that rose quickly to a cry. “I can see. He’s not there.” Balling her hands into fists, she began to pound the marital bangles on her head. One of them broke, drawing blood from her temple.

  Kanai snatched at her wrists to keep her from hurting herself. “Moyna, wait!” he said. “Wait and see...”

  She froze and again they stared across the water, as if hypnotized by the approaching boat.

  “He’s not there! He’s gone.” Moyna’s legs folded under her and she dropped to the deck. There was an outbreak of pandemonium as Horen came running out of the wheelhouse, shouting to Nogen to cut the engine. Between the two of them, Horen and Kanai carried Moyna into one of the cabins and laid her on a bunk.

  By the time Kanai stepped out on deck again, Piya had drawn alongside the Megha. She was standing unsteadily upright, clutching the GPS monitor that she had been using to find her way. Kanai went to the stern and held his hand out to her. Neither of them said a word, but her face crumpled as she stepped onto the Megha. It seemed that she was going to fall, so Kanai opened his arms and she stumbled against him, resting her head on his chest. Kanai said softly, “Fokir?”

  Her voice was almost inaudible: “He didn’t make it.”

  It had happened in the last hour of the storm, she said. He’d been hit by something very big and very heavy, an uprooted stump; it had hit him so hard that she too had been crushed against the trunk of the tree they were sitting on. The sari had kept them attached to the trunk even as he was dying. His mouth was close enough to her ear so that she’d been able to hear him. He’d said Moyna’s name and Tutul’s before the breath faded on his lips. She’d left his body on the tree, tied to the trunk with Moyna’s sari, to keep it safe from animals. They would have to go back to Garjontola to cut it down.

  THEY BROUGHT THE body to Lusibari on the Megha, and the cremation was held the same evening.

  There had been very few casualties on the island: the early warning had allowed those who would have been most at risk to take shelter in the hospital. As a result, the news of Fokir’s death spread quickly and a great number attended the cremation.

  Through that night and the following days, Piya stayed by Moyna’s side, in her room, where many mourners had gathered. One of the women fetched water so she could clean up and another lent her a sari and helped her put it on. Mats had been set out on the floor for the mourners, and when Piya seated herself on one, Tutul appeared beside her. He placed a couple of bananas on her lap and sat with her, holding her hand, patient and unmoving. She put her arm around him and held him close, so close that she could feel his heart beating against her ribs. She remembered then the impact of the hurtling stump that had crashed into Fokir’s unprotected back; she remembered the weight of his chin as it pressed into her shoulder; she remembered how close his lips had been to her ear, so close that it was from their movement, rather than from the sounds he uttered, that she had understood he was saying the names of his wife and his son.

  She recalled the promises she had made to him in the silence of her heart, and how, in those last moments, with the wind and the rain still raging around them, she had been unable to do anything for him other than to hold a bottle of water to his lips. She remembered how she had tried to find the words to remind him of how richly he was loved — and once again, as so often before, he had seemed to understand her, even without words.

  HOME: AN EPILOGUE

  NILIMA WAS SITTING at her desk, a month after the cyclone, when a nurse came running over from the hospital to tell her that she’d seen “Piya-didi” stepping off the Basonti ferry: she was now heading toward the Trust’s compound.

  Nilima was unable to disguise her astonishment. “Piya? The scientist?” she said. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Yes, Mashima, it’s her. No doubt about it.”

  Nilima sank back in her chair as she tried to absorb this.

  A fortnight had passed since she’d said goodbye to Piya, and the truth was that she had not expected ever to see her again. The girl had stayed in Lusibari for a while after the cyclone, and during that time she’d become a strangely unnervi
ng presence in the Guest House, a kind of human wraith, inward, uncommunicative, leadenfaced. On her own, Nilima would not have known how to deal with her, but fortunately Piya had formed a friendship with Moyna during that time. Nilima had encountered them several times in and around the Guest House, sitting silently next to each other. On occasion, Nilima had even mistaken the one for the other. Having lost her own clothes, Piya had perforce taken to wearing saris — colorful reds, yellows and greens — for Moyna had given her those of her own clothes that she herself would no longer wear. What was more, Moyna had also cut off her hair, in keeping with the custom, so it was now as short as Piya’s. But this was where the resemblance ended: as far as demeanor and expression were concerned, the contrast between the two women could not have been greater. Moyna’s grief was all too plainly visible in the redness of her eyes, while Piya’s face was stonily expressionless, as if to suggest that she had retreated deep within herself.

  “Piya’s in shock,” Kanai had said to Nilima one day shortly before his own departure. “It’s hardly surprising. Can you imagine what it was like for her to sit through the last hours of the storm, sheltered by Fokir’s lifeless body? Leave aside the horror of the memory — imagine the guilt, the responsibility.”

  “I understand all that, Kanai,” Nilima had said. “But that’s why I think it would be easier for her to recover if she was in some familiar place. Don’t you think it’s time for her to go back to America now? Or else couldn’t she go to her relatives in Kolkata?”

  “I suggested that to her,” Kanai had replied. “I even offered to arrange for a ticket to the U.S. But I don’t think she heard me, really. What’s uppermost in her mind right now, I suspect, is the question of her obligation to Moyna and Tutul. She needs to be left alone for a bit, to think things through.”