by Amitav Ghosh
‘And go where?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Wherever people go. Bombay, Delhi – I don’t know.’
‘So you’re thinking of leaving?’
‘Maybe. I couldn’t leave while my mother was alive. But now…’
Without finishing the sentence he turned on his heel and headed back to the main cabin.
* * *
Glancing at my phone again I saw that the signal bars had bounced back. I dialled Piya’s number and was answered by a taped message that told me, in Hindi, that the user was on another call. I called back a few minutes later and got the same message again. It went on like this for a frustratingly long time and I was getting close to giving up when at last I heard Piya’s phone ring.
She picked up after several rings, sounding flustered and impatient.
‘Is that you, Deen?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t talk now. I’ll have to call you back later.’
‘It’s urgent. I’m calling about Tipu.’
‘Oh? What about him?’
‘He was on the boat with me today – apparently Nilima had asked him to go to the shrine?’
‘Yes, yes, go on.’
‘I’m afraid there’s been a mishap.’
‘What do you mean by mishap?’
‘Tipu was bitten. By a snake. He’s delirious but we’re on our way to the hospital now.’
She paused to take a breath. ‘Did anyone get a look at the snake? Do you have any idea of the species?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was a very large cobra. I’m almost certain it was a king cobra.’
She gasped. ‘Oh, hell! A king cobra’s bite can kill an elephant.’
I began to stutter. ‘But surely … surely … the hospital will be able to…?’
‘No! They won’t have the right antivenin. It’s rare and very expensive—’ Suddenly she broke off. ‘Wait!’
Her voice faded away but I was able to hear some ambient noise at her end. I got the impression that she had run into a crowded room and was talking to someone in an urgent whisper. A few minutes later she was back on the phone, with good news: she had spoken to a herpetologist friend who was at the same conference. He was about to go into the jungle, for a field trip, so he had brought along supplies of antivenins, including one for a king cobra. He had agreed to donate some to Piya.
‘But how will you get it to us?’ I asked. ‘We need to have it as soon as possible, right?’
‘I’ll bring it myself,’ she said. ‘I’m flying back to Kolkata in a couple of hours. I should be able to get to the Lusibari hospital before midnight.’
‘But what about your conference? Didn’t you just arrive in Bhubaneswar today?’
‘Yes, but there’s been an emergency and I’ve had to change all my plans. In fact I was on the phone with the travel agent just before you called. He managed to get me on a flight that leaves very soon.’
I could tell that she was getting impatient. I was just about to ring off when Rafi suddenly appeared beside me. He whispered in my ear: ‘Have you told her about Rani?’
Turning to one side, I said: ‘Piya, listen, there’s something else I need to tell you.’
‘Go on – but quickly please.’
‘You remember I said that Tipu was in a delirium?’
‘Yes, go on, quickly please.’
‘While he was in this delirium he said we should call and warn you.’
‘About what?’
‘About someone called Rani.’
I heard a sharp intake of breath. When she spoke again there was a quiver in her voice. ‘How long ago did he say this?’
‘About forty-five minutes, I’d say.’
‘That’s impossible!’ she shot back. ‘Are you sure about the time?’
‘No, not exactly. But it was around forty-five minutes ago. Why?’
‘Because that’s when my alert went off.’
‘What alert?’
‘About Rani.’
‘And who’s Rani?’
‘Rani is…’
She changed her mind. ‘It would take too long to explain – I’ll tell you when I see you.’
‘All right.’
‘But wait,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll see you, will I?’
‘Why not?’
‘You’re going back to the city, aren’t you? Haven’t you got a plane to catch?’
‘Oh that!’ I had completely forgotten about my flight. ‘We’ll see about that later. I can’t leave Tipu in this condition – after all, the reason this happened to him was that he was trying to protect me.’
Rani
On arriving at the hospital in Lusibari, Tipu, now more or less comatose, was immediately rolled off to the intensive care unit on a stretcher.
A good half-hour passed before we were at last able to speak to a doctor. He confirmed that Piya was right: the hospital didn’t stock the right kind of antivenin because it was expensive and difficult to obtain. But there was still reason for hope: fortunately Tipu had received only a small dose of venom having been struck by only one of the snake’s fangs (Piya would explain to me later that a strike of this kind was uncharacteristic of the king cobra, Ophiophagus hannah, which rarely attacked humans but was reputed to be very persistent when it did).
Now everything depended on the antivenin, said the doctor, and how soon it was administered. In the meantime, there was nothing for us to do but wait.
As the hours crept by the wait became harder and harder. At a certain point, when a nurse came to tell us that Tipu’s breathing was become increasingly uneven, I had the impression that we were being prepared for bad news.
But Piya arrived earlier than expected, almost an hour before midnight. She was clearly under great strain: there was a haunted look in her eyes and her face was so weighted with anxiety that she looked skeletally thin. Yet she was neither breathless nor flustered, and her manner, as she handed over the container that she was carrying, was completely composed. She remained calm even when Moyna fell upon her and burst into tears.
An hour or so later a doctor appeared and announced, to our great relief, that the serum had begun to take effect and that Tipu’s condition was improving. There was no need for us to remain at the hospital, he said; we would be well advised to get some sleep.
It was too late for me to go back to the city now and since there were no hotels in Lusibari, Piya arranged for me to stay the night in the Badabon Trust’s guest-house. This proved to be the second floor of Nilima’s Lusibari residence. It was a pleasant place with clean, comfortable rooms and all the facilities that one could wish for, including high-speed Internet. I was not surprised to learn that Piya made her home in the guest-house when she was in the Sundarbans, and that it was she who had refurbished the place and put in the Wi-Fi.
In the kitchen there were two large refrigerators. Like almost everything in the building they ran on solar power. One of the refrigerators was especially stocked for Piya, who, I soon discovered, subsisted on a very idiosyncratic diet, consisting mainly of energy bars and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Neither of us had eaten in a long time so when she offered to make me a sandwich I accepted with alacrity.
It was over this unexpectedly toothsome meal that I heard the story behind the name that Tipu had mentioned in his delirium: Rani. This, said Piya, was the name of an individual river dolphin, of the species that she had been studying for most of her professional life: the Irrawaddy dolphin, known to science as Orcaella brevirostris. Rani happened to be a member of a pod of Orcaella that had been especially important to Piya’s research. She had kept careful records for each individual in the pod and knew all of them intimately, especially the females, whom she had tracked through every breeding season. She had also mapped the pod’s movements over many years, following their diurnal, seasonal and annual migrations.
Piya’s language was carefully neutral – no doubt because she was loath to anthropomorphize the animals
that she studied – yet it was clear that her relationship with Rani was strong enough, and durable enough, to qualify as what humans might regard as an old friendship. Their connection stretched back for more than a generation because Piya had also known Rani’s mother: she was the first dolphin in that pod that Piya had learnt to identify as an individual, because she was the only one with a newborn calf. But that calf hadn’t survived; it was killed in a collision with a motorboat when it was just a few weeks old. Its death had shocked and grieved Piya so she was delighted to discover, on her return the following year, that the mother dolphin had calved again.
Tipu, who was then a little boy, had been with Piya at the time of the discovery – back then he would often insist on accompanying her when she went into the forest – and it was Tipu who had shortened the calf’s official name, RN1, to Rani. A year later Rani had gone missing one day. Piya had launched a frantic search, scouring the pod’s favoured routes, and sure enough, at one of their feeding grounds she had found Rani entangled in a length of nylon netting.
Piya wasted no time in cutting Rani loose and after that the dolphin had begun to make eye contact with her, in a manner quite different from other members of the pod – a manner that suggested something more than mere recognition (the word ‘gratitude’ suggested itself all the more strongly because Piya was so careful to avoid using it).
That was many years ago and Rani was now the oldest living member of the pod and a true matriarch, having raised a dozen calves. More than any other member of the pod it was she who had helped Piya track the family’s migrations.
During the early years of Piya’s research these patterns of movement had been regular and predictable. But then the tracks had begun to vary, becoming increasingly erratic; this was due, Piya believed, to changes in the composition of the waters of the Sundarbans. As sea levels rose, and the flow of fresh water diminished, salt water had begun to intrude deeper upstream, making certain stretches too saline for the dolphins. They had started to avoid some of the waterways they had frequented before; they had also, slowly, begun to venture further and further upriver, into populated, heavily fished areas. Inevitably some had been ensnared by fishermen’s nets and some had been hit by motorboats and steamers. Over the last few years the pod had lost so many members that its numbers were now down to Rani and just two others.
To Piya it had begun to seem increasingly likely that the pod would not survive as a group, so she had done something that she generally avoided doing: she had fitted Rani with a GPS-enabled tracker that provided real-time information on her whereabouts and general condition. This device was programmed to send alerts to her cellphone in certain situations.
‘And that’s what happened yesterday,’ said Piya. ‘I got an alert while I was at the conference.’
‘What kind of alert?’
Piya grimaced. ‘Let’s just say – it was the worst possible kind of alert; one that would be sent only if the dolphin was no longer in the water.’
I suddenly recalled television images of beached whales.
‘You mean Rani may have been stranded or beached?’
‘I don’t know. But it was that kind of alert.’
‘And am I right to think that the alert was sent out at around the time that Tipu began to talk about Rani?’
‘That depends,’ said Piya, with a shrug, ‘on whether you got the time right.’
‘But even if my estimate was off by half an hour or more,’ I said, ‘it would still be very odd, wouldn’t it? After all, Tipu was in a delirium – how could he possibly have known where Rani was?’
‘Let’s not jump our guns,’ said Piya. ‘We don’t actually know that anything has happened to Rani. That’s still TBD. These devices have been known to malfunction. I’m not going to come to any conclusions until I’ve checked out the situation on the ground.’
‘And how are you going to do that?’
Piya got up and began to clear away our plates. ‘I have the GPS co-ordinates of the place where the tracker ended up. The location is an island called Garjontola. I’ll be going there as soon as I can, maybe even tomorrow if Tipu is okay.’
As she was reaching for my empty plate she stopped to cast a glance at me. ‘Would you like to come?’
‘Would you have room for me?’ I said, trying not to sound too eager.
‘I think so. I’m hoping to hire one of Horen’s faster boats. It can carry ten passengers and I’m taking only a couple of my local assistants. There should be plenty of room. You’re welcome to come along, if you like.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Yes, I’d like to come along.’
‘Good, let’s hope it works out.’
Later that night I regretted the impulse that had made me accept Piya’s invitation. When I woke up next morning I was half hoping that the trip would be called off. But while we were eating breakfast Moyna arrived: she said that Tipu’s condition had improved markedly and that he would probably be discharged from the hospital the next day.
That left us free for the day, so Piya went ahead with her plans. A little after 10 a.m. we set off for Garjontola accompanied by a couple of local fishermen whom she had trained to help with her research.
To my relief, the boat was a big improvement on that of the day before; although not quite a speedboat, it was certainly much faster than that ungainly steamer.
* * *
‘Do you see how many shades of colour there are in the water?’ said Piya, squinting at me from under the bill of the baseball cap she had placed on her close-cropped hair.
Narrowing my eyes against the spray, I focused my gaze on the river below. Slowly, as I followed Piya’s finger, what had seemed at first to be an unvarying mud-brown colour revealed itself to be a composite of many different hues. Nor was there any uniformity to the pattern of the river’s flow: once my eyes had grown accustomed to scrutinizing the water I was able to spot pools, whirlpools, braids, striations and many sorts of ripples.
These were signs, said Piya, of the innumerable streams that were contained within the course of this one river. Each of these streams differed from the others in small ways, and each was freighted with its own mixture of micro-nutrients. In effect, each was a small ecological niche, held in suspension by the flow, like a balloon carried along by a wind. The result was an astonishing proliferation of life, in myriad forms.
‘Each of these rivers,’ said Piya, ‘is like a moving forest, populated by an incredible variety of life forms.’
‘That’s a beautiful image,’ I said. ‘A forest that’s been moving for millions of years.’
‘But the fact that a river flows,’ said Piya, ‘means that it carries traces of everything that happens upriver. And that’s the part that really worries me.’
‘Why?’
She scratched her cheek doubtfully, as though she were wondering what level of explanation I might be able to follow.
‘Have you heard of oceanic dead zones? No? Well they’re these vast stretches of water that have a very low oxygen content – too low for fish to survive. Those zones have been growing at a phenomenal pace, mostly because of residues from chemical fertilizers. When they’re washed into the sea they set off a chain reaction that leads to all the oxygen being sucked out of the water. Only a few, highly specialized organisms can survive in those conditions – everything else dies, which is why those patches of water are known as “dead zones”. And those zones have now spread over tens of thousands of square miles of ocean – some of them are as large as middle-sized countries.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. And they’re not just out in mid-ocean any more,’ said Piya. ‘They’ve started appearing in rivers too, especially where they meet the sea, as in the estuaries of the Mississippi and Pearl Rivers. Which figures, of course, because it’s through rivers that agricultural effluents reach the oceans.’
‘I see what you’re saying,’ I said. ‘You’re suggesting the same thing may be happening here?’
‘Something like that,’ said Piya, ‘except that I don’t think it’s just agricultural effluents in this case. I have a feeling that something else is to blame.’
‘And what’s that?’
She pointed upriver. ‘I have a feeling that the culprit here is a refinery that started up a couple of years ago – it’s not far from here as the crow flies. We’d been fighting it for years – I mean the trust and an alliance of environmental groups – but we were up against some very powerful people, a giant conglomerate that’s got politicians in its pocket on both sides of the border. They organized a campaign against us, called us “foreign agents”, tried to cut off our funding, had protesters arrested, attacked our demonstrations, not just with the police but also with paid goons – every kind of dirty trick you can think of and then some. And the online stuff! You wouldn’t believe what comes at me through social media: death threats, hate mail, constant trolling.’
‘Doesn’t it scare you?’
‘It does, to be honest. But the trust is so well known in the Sundarbans that I feel safe when I’m here. And anyway, someone has to do the work – we can’t just let them get away with poisoning the Sundarbans.’
‘What exactly have they been doing?’
‘I can’t say for sure because they’ve been pretty careful to hide whatever it is that they’re up to. That’s because we did manage to get the courts to impose a pretty tough regulatory regime on the refinery. As a result they’ve had to put systems in place to make sure that their discharges of effluents are kept to so-called “safe levels”. But I’m beginning to suspect that they’ve been dumping effluents into the rivers when they think they can get away with it. We’ve been seeing things we’d never seen in these waters before – massive fish kills, for example.’
‘What’s a fish kill?’
‘It’s when you find thousands of dead fish floating on the surface or washed up ashore. It’s happening all round the world with more and more chemicals flowing into rivers. But here I’m pretty sure that it’s the refinery that’s responsible.’