The Hungry Tide

by Amitav Ghosh

  “Here,” said Piya, producing a handful of tissues. “Let me help you clean up.”

  “There’s nothing to be done,” he said testily. “These pages are ruined anyway.”

  She flinched as he crumpled up the papers he had been reading and tossed them out the window. “I hope they weren’t important,” she said in a small voice.

  “Nothing irreplaceable — just Xeroxes.”

  For a moment she considered pointing out that it was he who had jogged her hand. But all she could bring herself to say was “I’m very sorry. I hope you’ll excuse me.”

  “Do I really have a choice?” he said in a tone more challenging than ironic. “Does anyone have a choice when they’re dealing with Americans these days?”

  Piya had no wish to get into an argument so she let this pass. Instead she opened her eyes wide, feigning admiration, and said, “But how did you guess?”

  “About what?”

  “About my being American? You’re very observant.”

  This seemed to mollify him. His shoulders relaxed as he leaned back in his seat. “I didn’t guess,” he said. “I knew.”

  “And how did you know?” she said. “Was it my accent?”

  “Yes,” he said with a nod. “I’m very rarely wrong about accents. I’m a translator you see, and an interpreter as well, by profession. I like to think that my ears are tuned to the nuances of spoken language.”

  “Oh really?” She smiled so that her teeth shone brightly in the dark oval of her face. “And how many languages do you know?”

  “Six. Not including dialects.”

  “Wow!” Her admiration was unfeigned now. “I’m afraid English is my only language. And I wouldn’t claim to be much good at it either.”

  A frown of puzzlement appeared on his forehead. “And you’re on your way to Canning you said?”

  “Yes.”

  “But tell me this,” he said. “If you don’t know any Bengali or Hindi, how are you planning to find your way around over there?”

  “I’ll do what I usually do,” she said with a laugh. “I’ll try to wing it. Anyway, in my line of work there’s not much talk needed.”

  “And what is your line of work, if I may ask?”

  “I’m a cetologist,” she said. “That means —” She was beginning, almost apologetically, to expand on this when he interrupted her.

  “I know what it means,” he said sharply. “You don’t need to explain. It means you study marine mammals. Right?”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding. “You’re very well informed. Marine mammals are what I study — dolphins, whales, dugongs and so on. My work takes me out on the water for days sometimes, with no one to talk to — no one who speaks English, anyway.”

  “So is it your work that takes you to Canning?”

  “That’s right. I’m hoping to wangle a permit to do a survey of the marine mammals of the Sundarbans.”

  For once he was silenced, although only briefly. “I’m amazed,” he said presently. “I didn’t even know there were any such.”

  “Oh yes, there are,” she said. “Or there used to be, anyway. Very large numbers of them.”

  “Really? All we ever hear about is the tigers and the crocodiles.”

  “I know,” she said. “The cetacean population has kind of disappeared from view. No one knows whether it’s because they’re gone or because they haven’t been studied. There hasn’t ever been a comprehensive survey.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Maybe because it’s impossible to get permission?” she said. “There was a team here last year. They prepared for months, sent in their papers and everything. But they didn’t even make it out on the water. Their permits were withdrawn at the last minute.”

  “And why do you think you’ll fare any better?”

  “It’s easier to slip through the net if you’re on your own,” she said. There was a brief pause and then, with a tight-lipped smile, she added, “Besides, I have an uncle in Kolkata who’s a big wheel in the government. He’s spoken to someone in the Forest Department’s office in Canning. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”

  “I see.” He seemed to be impressed as much by her candor as her canniness. “So you have relatives in Calcutta then?”

  “Yes. In fact I was born there myself, although my parents left when I was just a year old.” She turned a sharp glance on him, raising an eyebrow. “I see you still say ‘Calcutta.’ My father does that too.”

  Kanai acknowledged the correction with a nod. “You’re right — I should be more careful, but the renaming was so recent that I do get confused sometimes. I try to reserve ‘Calcutta’ for the past and ‘Kolkata’ for the present, but occasionally I slip. Especially when I’m speaking English.” He smiled and put out a hand. “I should introduce myself; I’m Kanai Dutt.”

  “And I’m Piyali Roy — but everyone calls me Piya.”

  She could tell he was surprised by the unmistakably Bengali sound of her name: evidently her ignorance of the language had given him the impression that her family’s origins lay in some other part of India.

  “You have a Bengali name,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “And yet you know no Bangla?”

  “It’s not my fault really,” she said quickly, her voice growing defensive. “I grew up in Seattle. I was so little when I left India that I never had a chance to learn.”

  “By that token, having grown up in Calcutta, I should speak no English.”

  “Except that I just happen to be terrible at languages … ”She let the sentence trail away unfinished, and then changed the subject. “And what brings you to Canning, Mr. Dutt?”

  “Kanai — call me Kanai.”

  “Kan-ay.”

  He was quick to correct her when she stumbled over the pronunciation: “Say it to rhyme with Hawaii.”

  “Kanaii?”

  “Yes, that’s right. And to answer your question — I’m on my way to visit an aunt of mine.”

  “She lives in Canning?”

  “No,” he said. “She lives in a place called Lusibari. It’s quite a long way from Canning.”

  “Where exactly?” Piya unzipped a pocket in one of her backpacks and pulled out a map. “Show me. On this.”

  Kanai spread the map out and used a fingertip to trace a winding line through the tidal channels and waterways. “Canning is the railhead for the Sundarbans,” he said, “and Lusibari is the farthest of the inhabited islands. It’s a long way upriver — you have to go past Annpur, Jamespur and Emilybari. And there it is: Lusibari.”

  Piya knitted her eyebrows as she looked at the map. “Strange names.”

  “You’d be surprised how many places in the Sundarbans have names that come from English,” Kanai said. “Lusibari just means ‘Lucy’s House.’”

  “Lucy’s House?” Piya looked up in surprise. “As in the name Lucy?”

  “Yes.” A gleam came into his eyes and he said, “You should come and visit the place. I’ll tell you the story of how it got its name.”

  “Is that an invitation?” Piya said, smiling.

  “Absolutely,” Kanai responded. “Come. I’m inviting you. Your company will lighten the burden of my exile.”

  Piya laughed. She had thought at first that Kanai was much too full of himself, but now she was inclined to be slightly more generous in her assessment: she had caught sight of a glimmer of irony somewhere that made his self-centeredness appear a little more interesting than she had first imagined.

  “But how would I find you?” she said. “Where would I look?”

  “Just make your way to the hospital in Lusibari,” said Kanai, “and ask for Mashima. They’ll take you to my aunt and she’ll know where I am.”

  “Mashima?” said Piya. “But I have a Mashima too — doesn’t it just mean ‘aunt’? There must be more than one aunt there: yours can’t be the only one?”

  “If you go to the hospital and ask for Mashima,” said Kanai, “everyone will know who you mean. My aunt foun
ded it, you see, and she heads the organization that runs it, the Badabon Trust. She’s a real personage on the island — everyone calls her Mashima, even though her real name is Nilima Bose. They were quite a pair, she and her husband. People always called him Saar, just as they call her Mashima.”

  “Saar? And what does that mean?”

  Kanai laughed. “It’s just a Bangla way of saying Sir. He was the headmaster of the local school, you see, so all his pupils called him Sir. In time people forgot he had a real name — Nirmal Bose.”

  “I notice you’re speaking of him in the past tense.”

  “Yes. He’s been dead a long time.” No sooner had he spoken than Kanai pulled a face, as if to disclaim what he had just said. “But to tell you the truth, right now it doesn’t feel like he’s been gone a long time.”

  “How come?”

  “Because he’s risen from his ashes to summon me,” Kanai said with a smile. “You see, he’d left some papers for me at the time of his death. They’d been lost all these years, but now they’ve turned up again. That’s why I’m on my way there: my aunt wanted me to come and look at them.”

  Hearing a note of muted complaint in his voice, Piya said, “It sounds like you weren’t too eager to go.”

  “No, I wasn’t, to be honest,” he said. “I have a lot to attend to and this was a particularly busy time. It wasn’t easy to take a week off.”

  “Is this the first time you’ve come, then?” said Piya.

  “No, it’s not,” said Kanai. “I was sent down here once, years ago.”

  “Sent down? Why?”

  “It’s a story that involves the word ‘rusticate,’” said Kanai with a smile. “Are you familiar with it?”

  “No. Can’t say I am.”

  “It was a punishment, dealt out to schoolboys who misbehaved,” said Kanai. “They were sent off to suffer the company of rustics. As a boy I was of the opinion that I knew more about most things than my teachers did. There was an occasion once when I publicly humiliated a teacher who had the unfortunate habit of pronouncing the word ‘lion’ as if it overlapped, in meaning as in rhyme, with the word ‘groin.’ I was about ten at the time. One thing led to another and my tutors persuaded my parents I had to be rusticated. I was sent off to stay with my aunt and uncle in Lusibari.” He laughed at the memory. “That was a long time ago, in 1970.”

  The train had begun to slow down now and Kanai was interrupted by a sudden blast from the engine’s horn. Glancing through the window, he spotted a yellow signboard that said CANNING.

  “We’re here,” he said. He seemed suddenly regretful that their conversation had come to an end. Tearing off a piece of paper, he wrote a few words on it and pressed it into her hands. “Here — this’ll help you remember where to find me.”

  The train had ground to a halt now and people were surging toward the doors of the compartment. Rising to her feet, Piya slung her backpacks over her shoulders. “Maybe we’ll meet again.”

  “I hope so.” He raised a hand to wave. “Be careful with the maneaters.”

  “Take care yourself. Goodbye.”

  CANNING

  KANAI WATCHED Piya’s back with interest as she disappeared into the crowd on the platform. Although unmarried, he was, as he liked to say, rarely single: over the past many years, several women had drifted in and out of his life. More often than not, these relationships ended — or persisted — in a spirit of affectionate cordiality. The most recent however, which was with a well-known young Odissi dancer, had not ended well. Two weeks earlier she had stormed out of his house and forbidden him ever to call her again. He hadn’t taken this seriously until he tried to call her cell phone, only to find that she had given it to her driver. This had come as a considerable blow to his pride, and in the aftermath he had tried to plunge himself into a short affair of the kind that might serve to suture the wound suffered by his vanity: that is to say, he had sought, without success, a liaison where it would fall to him to decide both the beginning and the end. In coming to Lusibari, he had resigned himself to the idea of briefly interrupting this quest — but if life had taught him any lesson, it was that opportunities often arose unexpectedly. Piya appeared to be a case in point. It was not often such a perfectly crafted situation presented itself: with his departure foreordained in nine days, his escape was assured. If Piya decided to avail herself of his invitation, then there was no reason not to savor whatever pleasures might be on offer.

  Kanai waited till the crowd had thinned before stepping down to the platform. Then, with his suitcase resting between his feet, he paused to cast an unhurried glance around the station.

  It was late November and the weather was crisp and cool, with a gentle breeze and honeyed sunlight. Yet the station had a look of bleak, downtrodden fatigue, like one of those grassless city parks where the soil has been worn thin by the pressure of hurrying feet: the tracks glistened under slicks of shit, urine and refuse, and the platform looked as if it had been pounded into the earth by the sheer weight of the traffic that passed over it.

  More than thirty years had gone by since he first set foot in this station, but he still remembered vividly the astonishment with which he had said to his uncle and aunt, “But there are so many people here!”

  Nirmal had smiled in surprise. “What did you expect? A jungle?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s only in films, you know, that jungles are empty of people. Here there are places that are as crowded as any Kolkata bazaar. And on some of the rivers you’ll find more boats than there are trucks on the Grand Trunk Road.”

  Of all his faculties, Kanai most prided himself on his memory. When people praised him for his linguistic abilities, his response was usually to say that a good ear and a good memory were all it took to learn a language, and he was fortunate to possess both. It gave him a pleasurable feeling of satisfaction now to think that he could still recall the precise tone and timbre of Nirmal’s voice, despite the decades that had passed since he had last heard it.

  Kanai smiled to recall his last encounter with Nirmal, which dated back to the late 1970s when Kanai was a college student in Calcutta. He had been hurrying to get to a lecture, and while running past the displays of old books on the university’s footpaths he’d barreled into someone who was browsing at one of the stalls. A book had gone flying into the air and landed in a puddle. Kanai was about to swear at the man he had bumped into — Bokachoda! Why didn’t you get out of my way? — when he recognized his uncle’s wide, wondering eyes blinking behind a pair of thick-rimmed eyeglasses.

  “Kanai? Is that you?”

  “Aré tumi!” In bending down to touch his uncle’s feet, Kanai had also picked up the book Nirmal had dropped. His eyes had fallen on the now damaged spine, and he had noticed it was a translation of François Bernier’s Travels in the Mughal Empire.

  The bookseller, meanwhile, had begun to yell: “You have to pay — it’s expensive, that book, and it’s ruined now.” A glance at his uncle’s stricken face told Kanai that he didn’t have the money to buy the book. It so happened that Kanai had just been paid for an article he had sent to a newspaper. Reaching for his wallet, Kanai had paid the bookseller and thrust the book into Nirmal’s hands, all in one flowing motion. Then, to forestall an awkward expression of gratitude on his uncle’s part, he had mumbled, “I’m late, have to run,” and fled, leaping over a puddle.

  In the years since he had always imagined that when he next ran into Nirmal it would be in a similar fashion — Nirmal would be in a bookshop fondling some volume he could not afford and he, Kanai, would reach discreetly into his own pocket to buy him the book. But it hadn’t happened that way: two years after that accidental encounter, Nirmal had died in Lusibari after a long illness. Nilima had told Kanai then that his uncle had remembered him on his deathbed: he had said something about some writings that he wanted to send to him. But Nirmal had been incoherent for many months and Nilima had not known what to make of this declaration. After his death, s
he had looked everywhere, just in case there was something to it. Nothing had turned up, so she had assumed Nirmal’s mind had been wandering, as it often did.

  Then suddenly one morning, two months before, Nilima had called Kanai at his flat in New Delhi’s Chittaranjan Park; she was in Gosaba, a town near Lusibari, calling from a telephone booth. Kanai was sitting at his dining table, waiting for his cook to bring him his breakfast, when the telephone rang.

  “Kanai-ré?”

  They were exchanging the usual greetings and polite inquiries when he detected a note of constraint in her voice. He said, “Is something the matter? Are you calling for some special reason?”

  “Actually, yes,” she said, a little awkwardly.

  “What is it? Tell me.”

  “I was thinking it would be good if you could come to Lusibari soon, Kanai,” she said. “Do you think you could?”

  Kanai was taken aback. It so happened that Nilima was childless and he was her closest relative, yet he could not remember any occasion when she had made such a demand. She had always been very much her own person and it was out of character for her to ask a favor. “Why do you want me to come to Lusibari?” Kanai said in surprise.

  The phone went quiet for a moment and then she said, “Do you remember, Kanai, I told you years ago that Nirmal had left some writings for you?”

  “Yes,” said Kanai. “Of course I remember. But they were never found, were they?”

  “That’s the thing,” said Nilima. “I think I’ve found them: a packet addressed to you has turned up.”

  “Where?” said Kanai.

  “In Nirmal’s study. It’s on the roof of the place where I live, on top of the Trust’s Guest House. All these years, after he died, it’s been locked just as it was. But now it’s going to be torn down, because we need to build another floor. I was clearing it out the other day and that was when I found it.”

  “And what was inside?”

  “It must be all the essays and poems he wrote over the years. But the truth is, I don’t know. I didn’t open it because I knew he’d have wanted you to look at them first. He never trusted my literary judgment — and it’s true I’m not much good at that kind of thing. That’s why I was hoping you could come. Perhaps you could even arrange to have them published. You know some publishers, don’t you?”