by Amitav Ghosh
She took a sip and sat staring into the glass. Then, without any prompting from me, she began to talk about the phone call she had received, earlier in the day, from the Italian ambassador in New Delhi. He was relaying a request – a summons, in all but name – from the judge who had been appointed to enquire into the accident that had killed her husband and daughter.
A new piece of evidence, a police report, had turned up and he wanted to question Cinta about it.
‘Do you have any idea,’ I asked, ‘of what’s going on?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, I do.’ After a moment’s pause she added: ‘It is about something that happened that day in Salzburg, just before the accident, when I was in a hotel, waiting for my daughter and husband to join me. They were coming by car from Milan. Giacomo loved to drive you see…’
* * *
That night, in her hotel in Salzburg, Cinta had woken up in the small hours with a nagging sense of unease. This wasn’t exactly new; she had been on edge ever since her husband, Giacomo, started receiving threats from unknown sources. But that morning the sense of foreboding was unusually strong, so much so that she threw up a couple of times.
She waited until dawn and then put a call through to Giacomo, in Milan, and begged him to call off the trip.
He was incredulous: ‘Why?’
She didn’t know what to say except ‘it’s just a feeling, a presagio – after all, you’ve been getting these threats’.
Giacomo had brushed her words impatiently aside. A confident, headstrong man, he was accustomed to dealing with threats: he told her not to worry, he was not going to let himself be intimidated by low-life malavitosi. Their daughter Lucia had been looking forward to this holiday, he said, and would be bitterly disappointed if it were cancelled.
And then he sprang a surprise. He told her that his paper had just given him a satellite phone and that she would be able to call him at any time during the drive from Milan to Salzburg: he read out the number and made her take it down.
This mention of advanced technology had made Cinta doubt her intuitions; she had stopped pressing him, partly because she knew he wouldn’t listen anyway, and partly because she didn’t want to sound like a credulous fool. Besides, Giacomo’s confidence and certainty had reassured her, dispelling some of her anxiety. By the end of the call Cinta was almost back to her usual self. She told Giacomo and Lucia that she missed them and couldn’t wait for them to get to Salzburg.
But later that morning, at the conference, her apprehensions returned and she was unable to keep her mind on the proceedings. She went to a payphone and called the number Giacomo had given her. He answered after a couple of rings. He was laughing: ‘Ecco! See the satellite phone works! Here we are on the autostrada and I am speaking to you!’
‘Where are you?’
‘Somewhere between Bressanone and Innsbruck. We’ll be in Salzburg in a couple of hours.’
He handed the phone to Lucia.
‘Mamma!’ cried Lucia. ‘It’s so beautiful here. I wish you were with us.’
‘I wish so too, tesoro!’
They chatted on for a little bit and then Cinta said goodbye. But somehow, even though everything seemed all right, she wasn’t reassured. Instead of going back to the conference she made her way to the hotel and went up to the suite that she had taken. She was sitting in a chair, staring blankly at a window, when she heard Lucia’s voice saying: ‘Mamma! Mamma! Ti voglio bene … I love you!’
The words were so clear that she whipped around, thinking that Giacomo and Lucia had arrived early and somehow let themselves into the room. Not seeing anyone there she wondered whether Lucia was playing a practical joke. She went through the whole suite, looking inside closets and under the beds. When it became clear that there was no one else in the suite, she picked up the phone, dialled an outside line and keyed in the number of Giacomo’s satellite phone.
All she got was the sound of static so she tried again, struggling to hold her fingers steady. Again there was no answer so she called the hotel’s telephone operator, thinking that she might have made a mistake with the country codes, or some other detail. She gave the number to the operator and sat down to wait, staring at the phone. There followed a delay of several minutes during which she grew increasingly frantic. When the wait became unbearable she called the reception desk and demanded that the clerk talk to the phone operator. She thought she would hear back in a minute or two and when that didn’t happen she left the suite and ran down the stairs to the reception desk.
The receptionist and the telephone operator were huddled together in an office. Cinta went straight in and demanded to know what was going on. They told her that they had tried the number of the satellite phone several times and there had been no response.
The receptionist asked her when she had last heard from her husband and where he was at the time. ‘Between Bressanone and Innsbruck,’ she told him. After noting down her answers he begged her to calm herself and go back to her suite: he would find out who was responsible for patrolling that stretch of the highway and contact them.
Cinta went slowly back to her suite and shortly afterwards the phone began to ring. She snatched it up: at the other end was some kind of poliziotto, an Italian patrolman. She gave him the number of Giacomo’s car and told him that she was worried that something had gone wrong because he wasn’t answering his satellite phone. The patrolman told her not to worry, some stretches of the road were outside satellite coverage – but he would put out an alert anyway, just in case.
Cinta’s phone rang an hour later. It was the patrolman; he had called back to tell her that a helicopter had spotted Giacomo’s car, at the bottom of a steep gorge; there were no survivors.
* * *
‘So you see,’ said Cinta, ‘I knew that somewhere there was a record of my call and the time when it was made. I knew that if anyone ever examined the reports carefully they would see that I had called the police more than an hour before the accident was reported. They would wonder how I could have known that something had gone wrong before the police did. I think that is what has happened.’
‘And what will you tell them?’
‘It’s simple: I will say that I just happened to call Giacomo’s satellite phone and grew worried when there was no answer.’
‘And the rest? Your daughter’s voice?’
She cast me a scornful glance. ‘Of course I will say nothing about that. You know very well that it cannot be said. They would think me a pazza…’
All through this Cinta had held herself upright, with a steely calm. But now her shoulders began to shake and she covered her face with both hands.
It was painful to listen to her dry, gasping sobs. After a while I went to the divan and put an arm around her. She leaned into my shoulder and began to weep, with a silent desolation such as I had never heard before. Such raw pain would have been hard to behold in anyone but was especially so in her because she was usually so contained. Without her saying so I knew that she had never before spoken of her experience in that Salzburg hotel.
I am not sure how long we sat there like that but I remember saying after a while that she was in no state to go back to the guest-house: I would make up the bed in my bedroom for her, and I’d sleep in the living room, on the divan.
She nodded and when my bedroom was ready she went off there while I stretched myself out on the divan.
I slept fitfully and woke at dawn to find Cinta on the other side of the living room, standing at a window, smoking, and watching the stirrings of the street below.
When she saw that I was awake she came to sit beside me. Putting an arm around my shoulder she gave me a peck on the cheek.
‘Grazie, grazie!’
‘It’s nothing, Cinta – you don’t need to thank me.’
‘But I do! You listened to me so sympathetically. Even though you are such a big rationalist! I am grateful to you for that.’
‘It’s really not necessary.’
She smi
led, holding me at arm’s length. ‘And now you know so much about me. But I know almost nothing about you.’
‘There’s nothing much to tell,’ I said. ‘Don’t you know what they say? Indian men have no inner lives. The only thing they really care about is their digestion.’
‘Can that be true?’ She seemed to ponder this in all seriousness. ‘No, I think not, Dino. I seem to remember you telling me something quite interesting – about why you left for America…’
‘Oh that. You really want to know?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, tell me.’
I got up to put a kettle on the stove.
‘I told you, didn’t I, that I was a Maoist fellow-traveller back in my student days? Those groups were very strong here back then. All the brightest and most idealistic students were drawn to them.’
She nodded. ‘Yes, it was the same in Italy when I was a student.’
‘Were you…?’
She shook her head. ‘No. Those ideas always seemed too simple to me. But maybe you felt differently?’
‘I don’t know that ideas had much to do with it.’
‘A woman then?’
‘Yes. She was named after Durga, the warrior goddess, and that was what she was for me. I was a bookish young fellow with my head in the clouds; I dreamed of travelling and seeing the places I had read about. And then Durga burst into my life – she was a legend already, known for her reckless courage. She would take incredible risks, carrying messages to armed insurgents in the countryside. I was in awe of her – she made me feel worthless and selfish and petit bourgeois.’
‘So you fell in love with her?’
‘Yes.’
‘And she? Did she love you?’
‘I think so: I was as much of a mystery to her, I suppose, as she was to me. We had an affair anyway, which was a risky thing for her because I wasn’t one of her Maoist comrades, just a kind of hanger-on. They were like a cult, her party and her comrades – everyone who wasn’t “inside” was an object of suspicion. And this must have been especially so in my case because they knew that I had an uncle who was high up in the police. Perhaps they thought that I was trying to get secrets out of Durga or something, I don’t know. Anyway, one day Durga went out of town without telling me anything about where she was going. This was not unusual of course, except that this time she didn’t come back. A few days later I found out that she’d been shot by the police in an “encounter”.’
‘Who told you?’
‘My policeman uncle: he said that she was betrayed by her own comrades.’
‘Why?’
‘Probably because of her relationship with me. Or possibly because her comrades wanted to stir up trouble for my uncle. In any case someone had planted my name and address on her.’
‘Incredibile!’
‘Yes. My uncle said he would hush it up but I had to leave the city at once. So I was packed off to stay with relatives in New Delhi. That was when I started applying to American universities – and I got lucky, I suppose…’
Cinta rose to her feet and came to stand beside me. ‘It wasn’t your fault you know. You mustn’t blame yourself.’
It had been a long time since I had thought of those events, and now I could feel my composure beginning to dissolve. I didn’t want to run the risk of breaking down, not just then, so I glanced at my watch.
‘Cinta, we really must go. I don’t want you to miss your flight to New Delhi.’
* * *
In the taxi, on the way to the airport, Cinta asked whether I was happy in the Midwest, working at that library. I told her I didn’t much care for my job but couldn’t see any way out.
‘Well, we must do something,’ she said. ‘We must find you something more suitable.’
Sure enough, six months later, when I was back in the Midwest, I received a letter from a New York company that dealt in rare books and antiquities: they were looking to recruit someone for their Asian division and had written to me because I had been very highly recommended by Professoressa Giacinta Schiavon, who was a close friend of one of their directors.
The offer was tempting but I hesitated: moving to New York was a daunting, even frightening prospect. Everyone I knew said that I would be overwhelmed by the city.
I was still dithering when Cinta called, out of the blue, and told me not to surrender to my apprehensions. It’s always a mistake, she said, to do the easy thing, just out of habit.
The call tipped the balance: I took the job and it proved to be exactly what I needed. I did well enough that within fifteen years I was able to set up on my own, in Brooklyn.
Those years happened to coincide with Cinta’s rise to scholarly stardom. She began to travel more and more and when she passed through New York we often met, usually for a leisurely meal. Sometimes our paths would cross also at conferences, meetings and auctions. So, in one way or another, even though we lived on different continents, we saw each other several times a year. She often sent clients my way, many of whom were Italian, so over the years I even acquired a working knowledge of the language.
What Cinta saw in me was, I must admit, something of a mystery to me, and it made me all the more grateful for her friendship: I could never forget that if not for her I might well have remained forever entombed in that sepulchral library in the Midwest. Such was the part she had played in my life that I could not take a call from her lightly, even when it appeared, as on that day in Kolkata, to have been made unmindfully. It was almost as though she had wanted to tell me, once again, not to do the easy thing, just out of habit.
* * *
Looking at my watch I saw that it was not too late to call Piya. I dialled her number and she answered after a couple of rings.
‘Hello, Piya,’ I said. ‘Look, I’ve decided to go to that temple after all.’
‘Good!’
‘Could it still be arranged for tomorrow? Or did I call too late?’
‘Tomorrow’s fine. Moyna is taking one of the trust’s minibuses early in the morning – she’ll accompany you to Basonti, which is the major river port for the Sundarbans. You’ll be met there by a man called Horen Naskar; he’ll take you to the shrine in a boat and get you back to Basonti before nightfall. We’ll arrange a taxi to bring you to Kolkata from there. With a bit of luck you’ll be home by dinner-time.’
‘Sounds good.’
‘Could you be at the Gol Park roundabout at 5 a.m.? The bus will pick you up from there.’
‘Sure. No problem.’
‘One more thing,’ said Piya. ‘It’ll be windy and a bit chilly on the boat at that time of the morning, so be prepared. And you might want to bring along a change of clothes.’
‘Why?’
She laughed. ‘Let’s just say there’s a lot of mud in the Sundarbans. And a lot of water too.’
‘I get it. And what about you? When do you leave for Bhubaneswar?’
‘Tomorrow morning. I don’t suppose you’ll be here when I get back?’
‘No, but maybe,’ I said hopefully, ‘we’ll run into each other again next year?’
‘Yeah, sure. Goodbye till then. Take care.’
‘And you too. Take care.’
Tipu
The next day I went to the Gol Park roundabout a little before five, wrapped up in a light sweater and windbreaker. Slung over my shoulder was a canvas backpack: I had taken Piya’s warning to heart and had brought along not one but two changes of clothes, as well as a camera, voice recorder and e-reader.
The sky was dark and the roundabout was shrouded in the usual foul-smelling winter smog, with the streetlights glowing eerily in the gloom. A few minutes after five I heard a faint echo of angry voices in the distance. The voices grew steadily louder and then the dull glow of a pair of headlights appeared within the mist. Shortly afterwards a yellow minivan, emblazoned with the logo of the Badabon Trust, came to a halt in front of me: pouring out of its door and windows were the sounds of a heated altercation.
The quarrel quietened as
I climbed in. Moyna was seated at the front of the bus and had kept a place for me, beside her.
The silence lasted only until I was seated. As soon as the bus began to move, the altercation flared up again.
Looking over my shoulder I saw that I was the only adult male in the bus; the other passengers were all women and children. The front rows were filled with employees of the trust, all dressed in prim, starched, cotton saris, like Moyna. The women at the rear were a motley lot, clothed in bright, tinselly synthetics; some were accompanied by children and a few were breast-feeding their babies, under cover of their saris.
As the quarrel raged on Moyna began to whisper into my ear, explaining that the women at the back were ‘sex workers’ (she used the English phrase) and had been rounded up by the police from various red-light districts in Kolkata and elsewhere. They were all originally from the Sundarbans, she said, so the police had called on the trust to help rehabilitate them, through its workshops and employment generation schemes.
But the trust could not offer much by way of money and this was what the dispute was about. The women at the back were protesting that they would not be able to support themselves on the wages they had been promised; the trust’s staffers were angrily refuting this claim.
Unfortunately, Moyna told me, this was a losing battle. The trust’s experience showed that many, if not most, of the rescued women would soon go back to the lives they had been living before.
‘How can you be so sure?’ I asked.
Moyna gave a weary sigh.
‘We’ve been dealing with these problems for many years,’ she said. ‘Ever since Aila.’
* * *
This was how I made the acquaintance of Cyclone Aila, which hit the Sundarbans in 2009.
The way this disaster had unfolded, Moyna told me, was quite different from the cyclones of the past. Starting in the late 1990s warning systems for storms had been put in place across the region so there was plenty of time to prepare. Mass evacuations had been planned in advance and millions of people were moved to safety, in India and in Bangladesh. As a result the casualty count was surprisingly low, at least in relation to the cyclone of 1970.