by Amitav Ghosh
Yet Aila’s long-term consequences were even more devastating than those of earlier cyclones. Hundreds of miles of embankment had been swept away and the sea had invaded places where it had never entered before; vast tracts of once fertile land had been swamped by salt water, rendering them uncultivable for a generation, if not forever.
The evacuations too had produced effects that no one could have foretold. Having once been uprooted from their villages many evacuees had decided not to return, knowing that their lives, always hard, would be even more precarious now. Communities had been destroyed and families dispersed; the young had drifted to cities, swelling already-swollen slums; among the elderly many had given up trying to eke out a living and had taken to begging on the streets.
The Sundarbans had always attracted traffickers, because of its poverty, but never in such numbers as after Aila; they had descended in swarms, spiriting women off to distant brothels and transporting able-bodied men to work sites in faraway cities or even abroad. Many of those who left were never heard from again.
Sometimes, said Moyna, it seemed as though both land and water were turning against those who lived in the Sundarbans. When people tried to dig wells, an arsenic-laced brew gushed out of the soil; when they tried to shore up embankments the tides rose higher and pulled them down again. Even fishermen could barely get by; where once their boats would come back loaded with catch, now they counted themselves lucky if they netted a handful of fry.
What were young people to do?
Making a life in the Sundarbans had become so hard that the exodus of the young was accelerating every year: boys and girls were borrowing and stealing to pay agents to find them work elsewhere. Some were slipping over the border into Bangladesh, to join labour gangs headed for the Gulf. And if that failed they would pay traffickers to smuggle them to Malaysia or Indonesia, on boats.
The only way to avoid this fate was for the young to get an education. But how could boys and girls who had been brought up in mangrove country, studying by candlelight and sharing old textbooks, compete with city folk with their tuition centres and easy access to the Internet?
* * *
Moyna’s voice had become unsteady now and she was dabbing her eyes with the hem of her sari.
It wasn’t long before another torrent of words came pouring out of her.
When her son was born, she said, she had had many dreams for him – that he would be the first in the family to finish college, that he would study medicine or engineering. But nothing had ever turned out well for him; he had been dogged by misfortune since he was little, starting with the death of his father, who had been killed while working for Piya.
Of course, said Moyna, everyone had been very kind – Nilima, the trust, her neighbours, and Piya most of all. They had never had to ask Piya for anything: the burden of the accident weighed so heavily on her that she had given them more than they would ever have thought to expect. She had bought a small house in Lusibari for Moyna and her son, and had opened bank accounts for them, one for their everyday needs, and one for the boy’s education. She had spent countless hours tutoring the boy in English; when she was away in America she would give him lessons over the phone and the Net. She had gifted him laptops, tablets, the latest phones, games consoles, music systems – and when the boy complained that he was often unable to use his gadgets because of power cuts, Piya had paid to have their house solarized.
‘Can you imagine,’ said Moyna, ‘what it was like for him to have all this, in the Sundarbans, where no one has seen such things…?’
I understood that the list of gifts that Moyna had recited was a metaphor for the peculiar predicament that Piya’s generosity had created for her and her son, enclosing them both in a bubble of affluence within the increasingly impoverished terrain that they actually inhabited.
All of this was well meant of course, said Moyna, but the upshot was that her son had found it increasingly hard to fit in. While still quite young the boy had begun to say that he wanted to go to the United States. When he reached thirteen, and was old enough for high school, Piya had taken him with her to the small university town in Oregon where she lived and worked. But the experiment had ended badly, as it was bound to: Piya lived alone, in a small apartment, eating food out of boxes and travelling frequently for work; it was not as if she had a family, or knew anything about bringing up children. Being often left to fend for himself the boy had fallen in with the wrong crowd and had even had a couple of brushes with the police. After a couple of years Piya had brought him back to India, fearing that he might end up in the American juvenile detention system.
Moyna had been astonished by how much her son had changed in the interim. His clothes, his manner, his hair – nothing was the same. Even his name was different: he had told her that his real name, Tutul, was difficult for Americans so he had changed it to Tipu. He had insisted that everyone get used to his new name and wouldn’t answer to any other.
For Tipu to go to school in Lusibari was clearly impossible so Piya had admitted him into an expensive boarding school in Kolkata. But that too had turned out badly. The attitudes that Tipu had brought back from America had not sat well with his fellow students and teachers. Things had become worse still when his schoolmates discovered that he was a Dalit, from the Sundarbans. One day a classmate had said to him that only servants and whores came from the Sundarbans. Tipu had lost his temper and given the fellow the beating he deserved. But the other boy was from an influential family and they had ensured that Tipu was expelled.
After returning to the Sundarbans, Tipu had flatly refused to go on with his schooling, and neither Moyna nor Piya nor anyone else had been able to change his mind. If they tried to press him, he would say: ‘I can learn more on the Net than any of those teachers can teach me.’
And it was true that he was very good with computers; and since he spoke English like an American, he had plenty of resources to fall back on. At that time he was only in his mid teens yet people would come from all around to ask for his help. Soon he began to earn money and would sometimes disappear for a few days – where he went and where exactly his money came from Moyna didn’t know; if she asked he would say that he was doing some work for a call centre. He was of an age to go to college now, and had long since outgrown whatever sway she had ever had over him – he did what he liked and went where he pleased. He was like a stranger to her now.
Moyna dabbed her eyes again and fell silent, staring out of the window at the rice-fields and fish ponds that were flashing past us.
* * *
I did not imagine that it would fall to my lot to meet Tipu. But at Basonti, as we were walking along an embankment, Moyna suddenly cried out: ‘Why there he is! Tipu!’
‘Where?’
She pointed ahead, to a small, slight youth who was slouching towards us, with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his slack-waisted jeans.
‘I didn’t think he would be here,’ said Moyna. ‘Nilima-di must have told him you were coming. She’s the only one he listens to.’
Moyna’s description of her son had led me to expect an abject, morose young fellow. But it was evident at a glance that Tipu was a creature of an altogether different kind; he had the probing eyes and darting movements of a hungry barracuda. He even glinted, barracuda-like, because of a silver ear stud and glittering highlights in his hair, which was spiky on top and flat at the sides. As for his clothes – a Nets T-shirt and baggy jeans that kept slipping down to expose his bright red boxers – they would not have looked out of place in Brooklyn.
We soon learnt that it was indeed Nilima who had asked Tipu to meet us at Basonti. ‘She asked me to go along and get the GPS co-ordinates of this shrine,’ said Tipu. ‘She wants me to record the location.’
He had been speaking Bangla all this while, in an unenthusiastic murmur, but his voice rose as he turned to me and stuck out his hand.
‘Hey there,’ he said in English, sticking out his hand. ‘How you doin’?�
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Shaking his hand, I said: ‘Hi. I’m…’
‘I know who you are, Pops,’ said Tipu, grinning. ‘I know all about you.’
I was dumbfounded. ‘How?’
‘Looked you up on the Net.’
I don’t know what annoyed me more: the insolence of his tone or that he had decided to call me Pops, as though I were a character from a comic book. But being unable to think of a suitable rejoinder I decided that it would be best to ignore his sallies.
‘Where’s the boat?’ I said.
‘Over there.’ He pointed to the riverfront which was packed with vessels of all kinds.
‘Which one is ours?’
‘That one.’
I had imagined that I’d be carried to the shrine in a sleek, powerful motor launch that would skim swiftly over the water, propelled by a churning white wake. But the boat that awaited me was an ungainly tub, rigged out to appeal to day trippers from Kolkata, with hideous images of tigers and crocodiles painted on its sides. Neither the garish colours nor the banner that hung from the deck rails (SUNNY SUNDARBANS TOURS, PROP. HOREN NASKAR) could disguise the fact that this was just an old-fashioned, rather diminutive version of the kind of steamer that is known in Bangla as a bhotbhoti.
Moyna now began to show signs of lingering: she would, I think, have liked to join us on the trip, if only to spend a little time with her son. But Tipu would have none of it: dismissing his mother with a peremptory wave, he ushered me along the embankment to a waiting gangplank. ‘Come on Pops,’ he said briskly. ‘We can’t be shooting the breeze now. Skipper’s getting antsy – wants to catch the falling tide. You’d better get your ass on board.’
The gangplank was a little too narrow for my comfort but I managed to make it safely across. As I was stepping on to the steamer’s deck I heard a raucous laugh behind me.
‘Good going Pops!’ said Tipu as he scrambled nimbly across the plank. ‘You made it! Looked like you were going to take a tumble there for a bit.’
Pulling in the gangplank, he darted away to cast off the steamer’s moorings. Down in the bowels of the vessel an engine began to throb and a plume of thick black smoke appeared above us. A moment later we were under way, wallowing along to the rhythm of the engine’s steady bhot-bhot-bhot.
Suddenly Tipu materialized beside me again. ‘So are you staying over tonight Pops?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I have to get back to the city.’
‘Too bad. I could have arranged for you to have a good time.’ He winked and cupped his hands over his chest as though he were fondling a woman’s breasts. ‘You know what I mean?’ he said, pumping his hips and elbows. ‘I could’a found you some action; there’s lots of it around here if you know where to look.’
I stared at him speechlessly, unable to summon any words.
‘Or maybe you’d like some of this?’ he said, pulling out a joint. ‘I’ll let you have the first one free, seeing that you’re an old dude and all.’
I could tell that he was trying to get a rise out of me. Without another word I turned around and headed towards the wheelhouse.
* * *
Horen Naskar looked to be in his sixties: squat and stocky he had broad shoulders and a belly that strained against his white shirt and belted lungi. The upper part of his face was shielded by enormous steel-rimmed eyeshades; the part below had the weathered look of an old tyre, with deep wrinkles etched into the sun-scorched skin.
Seating myself beside him, on the helmsman’s bench, I pulled out a notebook: ‘So, about this shrine we’re going to: do you remember the time you went there with Nilima-di?’
‘Of course,’ said Horen. ‘It was in 1970, soon after the great storm. That was a terrible one, that storm, even worse than Aila…’
Storms, I soon discovered, were Horen’s measure of time. In the same way that the Chinese speak of the era of the Qianlong or Jiajing emperors, or Americans of the Kennedy or Reagan administrations, Horen spoke of the Bhola cyclone, and of Aila, as events that bookended extended spans of time.
Aila, in particular, had affected his life in very important ways. He had been in the fishing business before, with several vessels to his name. But the 2009 storm had capsized two of his trawlers and a couple of other boats as well. Afterwards he had decided to get out of fishing altogether: profits had been declining for years and it had become increasingly clear that things would only get worse. He had decided instead to use his insurance payments to go into the tourism industry – and he had made the switch at a good time, just as the Sundarbans was beginning to become popular with tourists.
The great cyclone of 1970, Horen remembered for a different reason – because he had come close to losing his life. He had been out at sea, with his uncle, when the storm struck. Their boat was swept ashore, but on the wrong side of the border. The boat had not survived the landing but they had managed to climb on to a tree. After two days they had spotted some fishermen from their own village, in India; they were in a boat that was miraculously intact, and they had offered to take Horen and the others back with them. On the way home they had witnessed scenes they could never have imagined: they had had to fight off stranded mobs; they had been forced to evade thieves and river bandits, who had descended like vultures, to take advantage of the chaos.
These events were less than a week in the past on the day when Horen steered Nilima’s boat to the Gun Merchant’s shrine. As a result his recollections of the legend were quite different from hers: the calamities that figure in it loomed much larger in his memory than they did in hers. He remembered vividly, for example, the disaster that had forced the Gun Merchant to flee his homeland: a drought so terrible that the streams, rivers and ponds had dried up and the stench of rotting fish and dead livestock had hung heavy in the air. Half the people had died of starvation; parents had sold their children and people had been reduced to eating carcasses and cadavers.
As I listened to Horen’s telling of the legend, I was struck by another difference between his version and Nilima’s. Her account of the story had presented the Merchant in the light of a victim. As Horen told it, on the other hand, the Gun Merchant’s misfortunes were due to his own arrogance, and his conviction that he was rich enough, and clever enough, to avoid paying deference to the forces represented by the goddess of snakes.
In Horen’s telling, the reason the Gun Merchant had fled downriver, with his fortune and his family, was that he had believed that he could escape the powers of the goddess. But a giant wave (to be exact, a baan, or tidal bore – a common phenomenon on Bengal’s rivers) had struck his boats and he had lost most of his riches. His family was spared however, and they had found refuge in a small riverside village. Here, with what little remained of his wealth, the Gun Merchant had lodged his family in a large and solid house, thinking that it would keep them safe. Then he had gone off to a city to acquire goods to trade – but on his return, he learnt that in his absence there had been a flood and the house had been invaded by swarms of snakes and scorpions. They had killed his wife and seven children.
But even then the Gun Merchant had persisted in his attempts to give Manasa Devi the slip: taking passage on a ship he had set sail for a distant land. But halfway there the ship had been attacked by sea bandits who had enslaved him and taken him to their stronghold. There the Gun Merchant had had the good fortune to be purchased by a kindly ship’s captain (the word that Horen used was nakhuda, a term that was in wide use in the old Indian Ocean trade: it had the dual meaning of ‘ship owner’ and ‘ship’s captain’).
Here Horen paused to scratch his head.
‘The nakhuda had a Muslim name,’ he said. ‘It began with “Il” … that’s all I remember.’
‘Was it perhaps “Ilyas”?’ I prompted him.
Horen gave the wheel a thump: ‘Yes!’ he said. ‘That’s it – his name was Nakhuda Ilyas! It was with him that the Merchant travelled to one land after another until he came at last to Gun Island.’
‘Do you remembe
r what those other lands were called?’ I asked.
Horen scratched his head again.
‘I seem to recall,’ he said, ‘that there was a land of sugar, where everything was sweet; and also a country made of cloth, and an island of chains.’
He shrugged apologetically.
‘Maaf korben,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry – it was a long story, and much of it made no sense to me.’
‘And what became of the Muslim boatman who told you the story? He had a family, didn’t he?’
‘They stayed on in the dhaam until the old man died. All that’s left of the family now is a boy, his grandson. His mother died recently I believe.’
‘Do you know the boy?’
Horen nodded. ‘A little; I see him around on the water sometimes. His name’s Rafi; he’s young, only seventeen or eighteen.’
‘What does he do?’
‘He’s a fisherman, mainly. He scrapes by as best he can.’
‘Do you think it might be possible for me to meet this Rafi fellow?’ I said. ‘I’m sure he knows a thing or two about the shrine.’
Horen pursed his lips. ‘It would have been easy to arrange a meeting if you were staying longer,’ he said. ‘But you’re here only for the day, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Too bad!’
My disappointment must have been evident for Horen added: ‘For all you know, you might run into Rafi today, at the shrine. I believe he often goes by there when he’s out fishing.’
* * *
The steamer now made a sharp turn, leaving behind a wide river and entering a creek; it was so narrow that we seemed to be passing through a tunnel inside the forest. The falling tide had lowered the steamer and raised the mangroves above us, so that the channel was now overlooked on both sides by impenetrable battlements of mud and tangled foliage. There was scarcely a creature to be seen but every element of the landscape – forest, water, earth – seemed to be seething with life.