Gun Island

by Amitav Ghosh

  ‘Where are we going?’ I said as I panted after him.

  ‘They told me to take you to Lubna-khala. So we’re going to her office.’

  ‘And who is Lubna-khala?’

  Rafi looked back, over his shoulder. ‘She’s a Bangladeshi lady; she’s been here twenty years. She speaks Italian and everything.’

  ‘Why do you call her khala? Is she your aunt?’

  ‘No. We just call her that – because she helps us with things. She tells us about our rights under the law and things like that, so whenever there’s a problem we go to her.’

  He came to a stop at what seemed to be a small travel agency: taped to the window was a sign in Bangla, announcing cheap flights to Dhaka. Opening the door, Rafi let me into a cluttered little room, furnished with a desk, a monitor and a couple of chairs.

  The woman who was seated at the desk rose to her feet when she saw us: she was dressed in a dark tunic and a long skirt; her head was covered by a flowered scarf. She was maybe in her early forties, with a hazel complexion, a rounded, dimpled face and large brown eyes.

  Her gaze sharpened now as she looked from Rafi’s face to mine and back again. ‘Ki hoyechhé?’ she said in Bangla. ‘What’s going on?’

  It was only now, I think, that Rafi properly understood that he, no less than I, had had a near miraculous escape; that if the block of plaster had hit me he would have been in a lot of trouble. His voice became unsteady and he choked several times as he described the accident.

  Lubna heard him out and then gave him a stern berating: ‘Get back to work now – and no more mistakes! You won’t get off so lightly the next time. Buzla? Understand?’

  Rafi nodded and let himself out, head lowered.

  I would have left too had Lubna not asked me to sit for a few minutes. I took the chair she had pointed to and she seated herself across the desk, facing me.

  ‘I feel terrible about this incident,’ she said in her lilting Bangla.

  For some reason her voice evoked a sense of warmth and familiarity like I had never before experienced in an encounter with a stranger: under its spell the sense of foreboding that had gripped me just a short while ago started to recede. When Lubna began to apologize for what had happened it was I who rushed to reassure her.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, not at all.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘but I feel responsible for these boys. They’ve no one else to turn to, you see. Some of them have only just arrived.’

  ‘From Bangladesh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And is that where you’re from?’ I asked.

  She nodded: ‘And you?’

  ‘I was born in India,’ I said. ‘But my family was originally from Bangladesh. They were among the Hindus who left at Partition.’

  ‘And which part of Bangladesh were they from?’

  ‘My mother’s family was from Dhaka. My father’s people were from Madaripur district.’

  ‘Madaripur!’ She gave a cry of delight. ‘But that’s where I’m from!’

  That was when I recognized what it was in her voice that was so evocative for me.

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘you sound very much like my grandmother. She spoke the dialect of Madaripur all her life – as a child, I used to try to copy her…’

  And even as I was speaking I could feel the intonations of that dialect seeping back into my own speech. That my memory had preserved those sounds through all those years, was so astonishing to me – and so disorienting – that I had to glance over my shoulder, at the lane beyond the window, to remind myself of where I was. I could scarcely believe that it was in Venice, after half a century, that I was speaking this tongue, the dialect of a place that I had never seen, and which I had only ever spoken with my grandparents.

  ‘Have you ever been to Madaripur?’ Lubna said.

  ‘No. But when I was little my grandmother used to talk about Madaripur all the time. She grew up in a house near the Arialkhan river.’

  Lubna’s face lit up: ‘Is that true? Really?’

  ‘Yes. She often spoke of it.’

  Reaching down, she pulled open a drawer.

  ‘I want to show you something.’

  After rummaging around for a minute, she withdrew a large Manila envelope and took out an old photograph.

  ‘Dekhun – look!’ she said. ‘That’s my father’s house, where I grew up. Our village was right next to the Arialkhan river!’

  The colours of the photograph had faded into a monochrome shade of violet: the picture was of a large family group, standing in front of a single-storey brick house with a roof of corrugated iron.

  ‘Ours was the first pukka house in the village,’ Lubna said. ‘We had just moved in when this picture was taken. My father owned a shop as well as land, and he put all of us through school. I was the oldest –’ she tapped her finger on the face of a smiling teenager – ‘and when this picture was taken I had just gotten engaged to be married.’

  She tapped the picture again: ‘See, that’s my husband, Munir, over there – at that time he was living in Dhaka. His family were neighbours of ours in the village – they were farmers, very simple people, but Munir was a brilliant student and he got a scholarship to study in Dhaka.’

  Her finger descended on another face: ‘That’s Munir’s father, and those little boys are his brothers. They lived over there.’ She pointed to a thatched hut in the background.

  Until this point she had been speaking in the cheerfully nostalgic tone in which people usually reminisce about the past. But now a shadow fell over her face and a note of bitterness entered her voice.

  ‘Shob gasé!’ she said. ‘Everything’s gone now; the house, the people – the water’s taken it all.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘A few months after this picture was taken there came a cyclone, a really fearsome tufaan. The winds were so strong that they carried off the roof of our house. Then the water began to rise. It kept rising till it was halfway up the walls. We had no choice but to take shelter in a tree. Somehow my brothers managed to get all of us into the branches. But then we discovered that the tree was full of snakes; they had climbed up to get away from the water, just as we had. My brothers drove some of them off, with sticks, but one of them was bitten. He fell into the floodwaters and we never saw him again. One of my nieces was bitten too – she died later that night.’

  She grimaced. ‘Can you imagine what it was like? Being in that tree, with the wind howling and the flood raging below, not knowing whether you would be killed by the storm or a snake?’

  The photograph was still in my hands; the scene became almost unbearably real as I looked at it: I could see the faces of her family; the water below and the snakes on the branches.

  ‘It was Munir’s father who saved us,’ Lubna continued. ‘He came in a boat and got us out. But after that we knew we couldn’t live in that village any more. We sold our land and moved to Khulna. Munir and I got married later that year and he decided that instead of wasting three years chasing a degree in Dhaka he would go overseas. It was easier in those days – he went first to Russia and then came to Italy, through Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. After receiving his papers he sent for me – that was almost twenty years ago.’

  ‘And what does your husband do now?’

  Turning away from me, she put the picture back in the envelope. Then, lowering her voice, she said: ‘He died last year.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. May I ask what happened?’

  ‘He was in Sicily … it was very sudden. We’re still not sure what happened.’

  I murmured a word of sympathy, but she brushed it away.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, pursing her lips. ‘Munir’s younger brother is here now, so I don’t feel as alone as I used to. He is working in the same construction crew as Rafi. You probably saw him there.’

  She looked me in the face again and said, with a tight-lipped smile: ‘These boys are very young and they’ve been t
hrough a lot, back home and over here. I know that you had a bad ex- perience today, but I hope you won’t hold it against them.’

  ‘Of course I won’t,’ I said, with a smile. ‘Luckily no harm came of it – to the contrary. I got to meet you, which was the best thing that could have happened.’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh? Why?’

  ‘I should explain,’ I said, ‘that the reason I am in Venice is to help a friend – an Italian friend – who is making a documentary on migrants. Perhaps you could help us find some people to interview?’

  A veil seemed to descend on Lubna’s face. ‘I’ll have to think about that,’ she said, hesitantly. ‘It’s not easy to arrange these things you know. In the first place, it’s hard for these boys even to find the time – most of them work all day long, doing several different jobs. They barely get any sleep. On top of that, some of them haven’t yet had their incontro – that’s the meeting with the committee that decides on their status. And I’m sad to say there have been problems in the past for those who spoke with journalists – anything they say to the media can be used against them. You understand? And there are other problems as well. Sometimes right-wing troublemakers see things on television and get all worked up – you know how things are nowadays. We’ve all had to become more careful. Before, I would always help media people. But now I have become more cautious. I only help journalists if I know them really well…’

  Her voice trailed away and she fell into a silent reverie, steepling her fingertips and staring at her desk.

  ‘On the other hand,’ she said, as though she were conducting an argument with herself, ‘we have nothing to hide, and it might be good if people knew more about our lives. Perhaps they would learn to see us as ordinary human beings, with the same needs and desires as anyone else.’

  Her lips curled into a smile as she came to a decision. ‘Thik achhé,’ she said. ‘All right then, I’ll talk to some people to see if they’re willing to be interviewed. In the meantime maybe you could ask around as well? Perhaps you could even start with Rafi? After all, he does owe you for not making more of a fuss about what happened today.’

  She scribbled a number on a piece of paper and handed it to me. ‘Rafi gets off work at four. You can call him after that. But please be careful.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. I don’t want to get them into trouble any more than you do.’

  ‘Good. And if there’s anything else I can do please let me know.’

  ‘I will,’ I said. As I was getting up I added, in a rush: ‘I can’t tell you what a pleasure it was to speak to you – I haven’t heard the Madaripur dialect since I was a boy!’

  She smiled. ‘You are going to enjoy yourself in Venice then – it’s full of us Madaripuris.’

  ‘No! Really?’

  She tapped my elbow. ‘Come, let me show you something.’

  We walked to the far end of the lane, where it joined the Rio Terà San Leonardo, a busy street, thronged with tourists and vendors.

  ‘Look there – and there – and there,’ she said, pointing first to a waiter in a café, and then a man who was selling chestnuts and another who was wheeling an ice-cream cart. ‘You see,’ she said, with a note of pride in her voice, ‘they are all Bengalis, and many of them are from Madaripur.’

  I began to listen carefully now and soon I was hearing echoes of familiar words and sounds all around me. I wandered down the street, starting conversations in Bangla almost at random: the idea that it might be possible to do this in Venice was, for me, something so novel as to be astounding. For even though Bangla is spoken by a great number of people – more than twice as many as speak German or Italian, for instance – I was not accustomed to thinking of my mother tongue as a ‘global language’. Crossing paths with Bangla speakers in faraway places had always been for me a matter of pleasurable surprise, precisely because such encounters were very rare. Generally speaking you took it for granted that Bangla was a language of intimacy, to be spoken only with people you were already acquainted with – and I could tell from the expressions that passed over the faces of the Bengalis I spoke to that it was the same for them. First they would look disbelieving, as though they could not believe that someone who looked like a tourist was addressing them in Bangla. Then slowly their faces would light up and we would soon begin to exchange that immemorial question: ‘Desh koi – where’s home?’

  Of all the gifts that Bangla had given me, this was by far the most unexpected: that it would help me find a context for myself in this unlikeliest of cities – Banadig, Bundook, Venice.

  Rafi

  Cinta’s apartment was a ten-minute walk from the Ghetto: they were both in the same sestiere – Cannaregio. Cinta loved this district: she had grown up in it as had many generations of her family before her. She claimed that her father’s ancestors had made their home in Cannaregio since the fifteenth century, ever since they were first brought to the city as slaves, from the far eastern reaches of the Venetian Empire. She liked to boast that only in Cannaregio was it possible any more to think of Venice as a proper city, where ordinary people lived: this was the one district that still had a substantial number of residents as opposed to tourists and transients.

  Cinta’s apartment had been acquired by her mother, with her Kentucky money, a few years before Cinta was born. It was on the third floor of a palazzo that was modest in everything but its location: it had the distinction of overlooking the Grand Canal. The entrance lobby even had a recessed dock, with steps and mooring posts, so that the residents could get into their gondolas without leaving the building.

  When I had last stayed in Cinta’s apartment, twelve years before, the palazzo’s ornate gateway, overlooking the Grand Canal, had still served as the building’s principal entrance. But this was no longer the case: the lobby’s marble floor was now underwater much of the time. When the tide began to rise the building’s portinaio, Marco, would lay down a wooden gangway – a passerella – so that the residents could cross the lobby without getting their shoes wet – but at high tide, when the water was sometimes knee deep, even the passerella was often swamped. Of late the floods had become so frequent that the residents had more or less stopped using the front entrance: they now went in and out through a walled garden at the back, where there was a small door that had once only been used by tradespeople.

  Cinta’s apartment faced away from the Grand Canal and looked out instead on the palazzo’s backyard where wisteria and climbing roses had run wild. Beyond lay a view of winding lanes and jumbled red-tiled roofs. On clear days the peaks and ridges of the snow-covered Dolomites could be seen in the distance. Although the Grand Canal was not visible from the apartment, vaporettos could be heard from the kitchen window, as they pulled in and out of the nearby water-bus stop of San Marcuola.

  The apartment was unchanged since my last visit. It had made a powerful impression on me then and it did so once again; it was the only space I had ever been in that was literally, palpably alive. This was partly due to what lay underneath the palazzo, which was not earth or rock but rather the soft mud of the Venetian lagoon, a substance that tended to shift over time, subtly changing the alignments of the buildings above. This meant that the terrazzo floors of Cinta’s apartment had ripples running through them while some of the door frames were so crooked that it was impossible to shut the doors. So alive was the apartment that it even possessed its own language: at all hours creaks, groans and sighs would emanate from its corners as if to express changes of mood.

  The animation of the apartment’s outward shell was perfectly matched by the life that Cinta had breathed into it, a spirit that was entirely her own. Chaises longues, draped in Turkish kilims and knitted rugs, stood positioned to take advantage of the breezes and views offered by the tall windows; stuffed chairs sat invitingly in niches and corners, with intricately inlaid tables beside them, waiting for a cup of tea or a glass of wine. And everywhere the eye could go there were books, crammed into towering
bookshelves, piled on tables and roll-top desks, heaped in corners and stacked against the walls.

  On one of those shelves I had spotted a copy of James’s Aspern Papers, and had been quickly drawn into it. I had intended to finish it on returning from the Ghetto, but when I opened it now I found it hard to go on. It wasn’t just that the novella was about another time; it depicted a Venice in which it was impossible to imagine evocations of Madaripur, or a reunion with someone from the Sundarbans. It struck me that the Venice I had encountered today harked back to a time before that of The Aspern Papers – it was closer in spirit to the city that the Gun Merchant would have seen in the seventeenth century, another era when unaccustomed forces were churning the earth. Except that now it was unimaginably more so; it was as if the very rotation of the planet had accelerated, moving all living things at unstoppable velocities, so that the outward appearance of a place might stay the same while its core was whisked away to some other time and location.

  As I closed The Aspern Papers my eye was drawn instead to another book that was lying on the table. It looked like an old children’s book and was evidently set somewhere in India: the cover showed a tiger stalking some men in turbans. The title was I misteri della giungla nera – The Mystery of the Black Jungle – and on looking at the flap copy I discovered, to my surprise, that the book was set in the Sundarbans.

  I guessed that this was the book that Cinta had mentioned to me: this copy had probably belonged to her daughter. My guess was proved correct when I opened the book. The name ‘Lucia’ was written on the first page, in ink.

  Closing the book I glanced at the shelves around me and quickly discovered where it belonged: there was an empty space on a shelf with a set of books with similar covers. I got up and was just about to reshelve the book when my phone rang.

  It was Cinta. ‘Ciao, caro! Are you nicely settled in?’

  ‘Yes, Cinta, thanks. I’m very comfortable here.’

  ‘Good. What are you doing now?’