by Amitav Ghosh
Sir Daniel Hamilton had died in 1939 and the estate had since passed into the possession of his nephew, James Hamilton. The new owner lived on the isle of Arran in Scotland and had never been to India before coming into his inheritance. After Sir Daniel’s death he had paid a brief visit to Gosaba, but for all practical purposes the estate was now entirely in the hands of its management: if Nilima’s father put in a word, Nirmal was sure to get the job.
Nirmal was at first horrified at the thought of being associated with an enterprise founded by a leading capitalist, but after much pleading from Nilima he eventually agreed to go to Gosaba for an exploratory visit. They traveled down to the estate together and their stay happened to coincide with the annual celebration of the founder’s birthday. They discovered, to their astonishment, that this occasion was observed with many of the ceremonial trappings of a puja. Statues of Sir Daniel, of which there were many scattered around the estate, were garlanded, smeared with vermilion and accorded many other marks of reverence. It was clear that in the eyes of the local people the visionary Scotsman was, if not quite a deity, then certainly a venerated ancestral spirit. In listening to the settlers’ remembrances of the estate’s idealistic founder, Nirmal and Nilima were forced to revise their initial skepticism. It shamed them to think that this man — a foreigner, a burra sahib, a rich capitalist — had taken it upon himself to address the issue of rural poverty when they themselves, despite all their radical talk, had scarcely any knowledge of life outside the city.
It took them just a couple of days to make up their minds: without so much as setting foot in Lusibari they decided that they would spend a couple of years on the island. They went back to Calcutta, packed their few belongings and left immediately after the monsoons.
For their first few months on the island they were in a state akin to shock. Nothing was familiar; everything was new. What little they knew of rural life was derived from the villages of the plains: the realities of the tide country were of a strangeness beyond reckoning. How was it possible that these islands were a mere sixty miles from home and yet so little was known about them? How was it possible that people spoke so much about the immemorial traditions of village India and yet no one knew about this other world, where it was impossible to tell who was who, and what the inhabitants’ castes and religions and beliefs were? And where was the shared wealth of the Republic of Cooperative Credit? What had become of its currency and banks? Where was the gold that was to have been distilled from the tide country’s mud?
The destitution of the tide country was such as to remind them of the terrible famine that had devastated Bengal in 1942 — except that in Lusibari hunger and catastrophe were a way of life. They learned that after decades of settlement, the land had still not been wholly leached of its salt. The soil bore poor crops and could not be farmed all year round. Most families subsisted on a single daily meal. Despite all the labor that had been invested in the embankments, there were still periodic breaches because of floods and storms: each such inundation rendered the land infertile for several years at a time. The settlers were mainly of farming stock who had been drawn to Lusibari by the promise of free farmland. Hunger drove them to hunting and fishing, and the results were often disastrous. Many died of drowning, and many more were picked off by crocodiles and estuarine sharks. Nor did the mangroves offer much of immediate value to human beings — yet thousands risked death in order to collect meager quantities of honey, wax, firewood and the sour fruit of the kewra tree. No day seemed to pass without news of someone being killed by a tiger, a snake or a crocodile.
As for the school, it had little to offer other than its roof and walls. The estate was almost bankrupt. Although funds were said to have been earmarked for clinics, education and public works, very little evidence was ever seen of these. The rumor was that this money went to the estate’s managers, and the overseers’ henchmen savagely beat settlers who protested or attempted to resist. The methods were those of a penal colony and the atmosphere that of a prison camp.
They had not expected a utopia, but neither had they expected such destitution. Faced with this situation they saw what it really meant to ask a question such as “What is to be done?”
Nirmal, overwhelmed, read and reread Lenin’s pamphlet without being able to find any definite answers. Nilima, ever practical, began to talk to the women who gathered at the wells and the ponds.
Within a few weeks of her arrival in Lusibari, Nilima noticed that a startlingly large proportion of the island’s women were dressed as widows. These women were easily identified because of their borderless white saris and their lack of adornment: no bangles or vermilion. At the wells and by the ghats there often seemed to be no one who was not a widow. Making inquiries, she learned that in the tide country girls were brought up on the assumption that if they married, they would be widowed in their twenties — their thirties if they were lucky. This assumption was woven, like a skein of dark wool, into the fabric of their lives: when the menfolk went fishing it was the custom for their wives to change into the garments of widowhood. They would put away their marital reds and dress in white saris; they would take off their bangles and wash the vermilion from their heads. It was as though they were trying to hold misfortune at bay by living through it over and over again. Or was it merely a way of preparing themselves for that which they knew to be inevitable?
There was an enormity in these acts that appalled Nilima. She knew that for her mother, her sisters, her friends, the deliberate shedding of these symbols of marriage would have been unthinkable, equivalent to wishing death upon their husbands. Even she, who believed herself to be a revolutionary, could no more have broken her marital bangles than she could have driven a stake through her husband’s heart. But for these women the imagining of early widowhood was not a wasted effort: the hazards of life in the tide country were so great; so many people perished in their youth, men especially, that almost without exception the fate they had prepared themselves for did indeed befall them. It was true that here, on the margins of the Hindu world, widows were not condemned to lifelong bereavement: they were free to remarry if they could. But in a place where men of marriageable age were few, this meant little. Here, Nilima learned, even more than on the mainland, widowhood often meant a lifetime of dependence and years of abuse and exploitation.
What to make of these women and their plight? Searching for a collective noun for them, Nilima was tempted to settle on sreni, class. But Nirmal would not hear of it. Workers were a class, he said, but to speak of workers’ widows as a class was to introduce a false and unsustainable division.
But if they were not a class, what were they?
It was thus, when reality ran afoul of her vocabulary, that Nilima had her epiphany. It did not matter what they were; what mattered was that they should not remain what they were. She knew a widow who lived near the school, a young woman of twenty-five. One day she asked her if she would be willing to go to Gosaba to buy soap, matches and provisions. The prices charged by Lusibari’s shopkeepers were exorbitant; even after the fare for the ferry, the woman would save a considerable amount. Half of this she could keep for herself. This tiny seedling of an idea was to lead to the foundation of the island’s Mohila Sangothon — the Women’s Union — and ultimately to the Badabon Trust.
Within a few years of Nirmal and Nilima’s arrival in Lusibari, zamindaris were abolished and large landholdings were broken up by law. What remained of the Hamilton Estate was soon crippled by lawsuits. The Union Nilima had founded, on the other hand, continued to grow, drawing in more and more members and offering an ever-increasing number of services — medical, paralegal, agricultural. At a certain point the movement grew so large that it had to be reorganized, and that was when the Badabon Development Trust was formed.
Nirmal was by no means wholly supportive of Nilima’s efforts — for him they bore the ineradicable stigma of “social service,” shomaj sheba — but it was he who gave the Trust its name, which came fro
m the Bengali word for “mangrove.”
Badabon was a word Nirmal loved. He liked to point out that like the English “Bedouin,” badabon derived from the Arabic badiya, which means “desert.” “But ‘Bedouin’ is merely an anglicizing of Arabic,” he said to Nilima, “while our Bangla word joins Arabic to Sanskrit — bada to bon, or ‘forest.’ It is as though the word itself were an island, born of the meeting of two great rivers of language — just as the tide country is begotten of the Ganga’s union with the Brahmaputra. What better name could there be for your Trust?” And so was the Trust’s name decided upon.
One of the Badabon Trust’s first acts was to acquire a tract of land in the interior of the island. There, in the late 1970s, its hospital, workshops, offices and Guest House were to be built. But in 1970, the year of Kanai’s first visit, these developments were still a decade in the offing. At that time, the meetings of the Women’s Union were still held in the courtyard of Nirmal’s bungalow. It was there that Kanai met Kusum.
AT ANCHOR
IN THE FAILING LIGHT the boat approached a bend that led into a wide channel. The far shore, a few miles away, had already been obscured, but in midstream something lay anchored that seemed to suggest a floating stockade. Fetching her binoculars, Piya saw that this object was actually a cluster of six fishing boats, similar in size and design to the one she was in. The boats were tied tightly together side by side, and they were tethered against the current by a battery of ropes. Although they were more than half a mile away, her binoculars provided a clear view of the crewmen as they went about their business. Some were sitting alone, smoking bidis; others were drinking tea or playing cards; a few were washing clothes and utensils, drawing water from the river in steel buckets. A boat in the center of the cluster was sending up puffs of smoke and she guessed that this was where the communal dinner was being cooked. The sight was both familiar and puzzling. She was reminded of riverside hamlets on the Mekong and the Irrawaddy: there too, at the approach of nightfall, time had seemed to both accelerate and stand still, with lazy spirals of smoke rising into the twilight while bathers came hurrying down the banks to wash off the day’s dust. But the difference here was that this village had taken leave of the shore and tethered itself in midstream. Why?
Catching sight of the boats, Tutul gave a shout and launched into an animated conversation with his father. She could tell that they had recognized the boats in the little flotilla. Perhaps they belonged to friends or relatives? She had spent enough time on rivers to know that the people who lived on their shores were rarely strangers to each other. It was almost a certainty that Fokir and his son knew the people in that floating hamlet and that they would be welcome there. It was easy to imagine how, for them, this might well be the best possible conclusion to the day — an opportunity to mull over the day’s events and to show off the stranger who had landed in their midst. Maybe this had been the plan all along — to anchor here with their friends?
As the boat rounded the bend, she became convinced of this and found herself thinking of the hours that lay ahead. She had long experience of such encounters, having been on many river surveys where the days ended in unforeseen meetings of this kind. She knew what would follow, the surprise that would be occasioned by her presence, the questions, the explanations, the words of welcome she didn’t understand but would have to respond to with forced good humor. The prospect dismayed her, not because of any concern for her own safety — she knew she had nothing to fear from these fishermen — but because for the moment all she wanted was to be in this boat, in this small island of silence, afloat on the muteness of the river. It was all she could do to restrain herself from appealing to Fokir to keep on going, to hug the shore and keep their boat well hidden.
Of course, none of this could have been said, not even if she had had the words, and it was precisely because nothing was said that she was taken by surprise when she saw the boat’s bow turning in the direction she had hoped for. Fokir was steering them away from the floating hamlet, slipping by along the shadows of the shore. She did not betray her relief by any outward alteration of her stance and nor did her practiced hands fail to keep her binoculars fixed to her eyes — but inside, it was as though there were a child leaping up to celebrate an unexpected treat.
Shortly after the last flicker of daylight had faded Fokir pulled the boat over and dropped anchor in a channel that the ebb tide had turned into a sheltered creek. It was clear that they could not have gone much farther that night, and yet there was something about his manner that told Piya that he was disappointed — that he had decided on another spot in which to anchor and was annoyed with himself for not having reached it.
But now that they were at anchor, with the surprises of the day behind them, a sense of unhurried lassitude descended on the boat. Fokir put a match to an oil-blackened lamp and lit a biri from the flame. After he had smoked it down to a stub, he went aft and showed Piya, by indication and gesture, how the square platform at the stern end of the boat could be screened off for use as a lavatory and bathroom. By way of example, he drew a bucket of water and proceeded to bathe Tutul, using the brackish water of the river to soap him, and dipping sparsely into a fresh-water canister to wash off the suds.
With the setting of the sun, the night had turned chilly and the boy’s teeth chattered as he stood dripping on deck. Producing a checkered cloth, Fokir rubbed him down before bundling him into his clothes. This towel was made of reddish cotton and was one of several similar pieces Piya had seen around the boat; they had stirred a faint sense of recognition but she could not recall where from.
Once Tutul was done with dressing, it was his turn to bathe his father. After Fokir had stripped down to his breechcloth, Tutul upended streams of cold water over his head, to the accompaniment of much laughter and many loud yells. Piya could see the bones of Fokir’s chest pushing against his skin, like the ribs of a tin can that had been stripped of its label. The water made patterns around him, sluicing off the contours of his body as though it were tumbling down the tiers of a fountain.
When both father and son were finished it was Piya’s turn. A bucket of water was pulled up and the shelter was screened off with the sari. In the confines of the boat it was no easy matter to change places; it was impossible for all three of them to be on their feet at the same time, so they had to lie prone and squirm through the hooped hood, in a jumble of elbows, hips and bellies, with Fokir holding down his lungi to prevent it from riding up. As they were wriggling past each other Piya caught his eye and they both laughed.
Piya emerged at the far end to find the river glowing like quicksilver. All but the brightest of the stars had been obscured by the moon, and apart from their one lamp, no other light was to be seen, either on land or on the water. Nor was there any sound other than the lapping of the water, for the shore was so distant that even the insects of the forest were inaudible. Except at sea, she had never known the human trace to be so faint, so close to undetectable. Yet on looking around her tiny bathroom, she discovered, by the yellow light of the lamp, that amenities far beyond her expectations had been provided. There was a half canister of fresh water and next to it a bucket filled with the brackish water of the river; there was a cake of soap on a ledge, and beside it a tiny but astonishing object — a plastic sachet of shampoo. She had seen strings of these dangling in the teashops in Canning and yet, when she picked it up to examine it, its presence seemed oddly intrusive. She would have liked to throw it away, except she knew that here, on the island that was this boat, the sachet was a treasure of a kind (bought at the expense of how many crabs?) and that it had been put there in her honor. To throw it away would be to abuse this offering; so even though she had never felt less inclined to use shampoo, she put a little bit of it in her hair and washed it into the water, hoping they would see, from the bubbles flowing past the bow, that she had accepted the gift and put it to use.
Only when it was too late and she was shivering against the chill, squatti
ng on the wet boards and hugging her knees, did she remember that she had no towel or anything else with which to dry herself. But a further search revealed that even this had been provided for: one of those rectangles of checkered cloth had been left draped on the bamboo awning for her use. It was already dry, which suggested it had been there for some time. When she touched it, to pick it up, she had an intuition that this was what Fokir had been wearing when he had dived in after her. These lengths of cloth served many purposes, she knew, and when she put it to her nose she had the impression that she could smell, along with the tartness of the sun and the metallic muddiness of the river, the salty scent of his sweat.
Now she recalled where it was that she had seen a towel like this before: it was tied to the doorknob of her father’s wardrobe, in the eleventh-floor apartment of her childhood. Through the years of her adolescence, the fabric had grown old and tattered and she would have thrown it away but for her father’s protests. He was, in general, the least sentimental of men, especially when it concerned “home.” Where others sought to preserve their memories of the old country, he had always tried to expunge them. His feet were in the present, he had liked to say, by which he meant they were planted firmly on the rungs of his company’s career ladder. But when she had asked whether she could throw away that rotting bit of old cloth, he had responded almost with shock. It had been with him for many years, he said; it was almost a part of his body, like his hair or his nail clippings; his luck was woven into it; he could not think of parting with it, of throwing away this — what was it he had called it? She had known the word once, but time had erased it from her memory.