by Amitav Ghosh
KUSUM
FROM THE FAR SIDE of the Guest House roof Kanai could see all the way across the island to Hamilton High School and even beyond, to the spot where Nirmal’s house had once stood. It was gone now but the image of it that flickered in his memory was no less real to him than the newly constructed student hostel that had taken its place. Although the house had always been referred to as a bungalow, its size, design and proportions were those of a cabin. Its walls and floors were made of wood, and nowhere was a brick or a single smudge of cement to be seen. The structure, held up by a set of stumpy little stilts, stood a foot or so off the ground. As a result, the floors were uneven and their tilt tended to vary with the seasons, dipping during the rains when the ground turned soggy and firming up in the dry winter months.
The bungalow had only two proper rooms, of which one was a bedroom while the other was a kind of study, used by both Nirmal and Nilima. A cot was rigged up in the study for Kanai, and like the big bed it was enclosed in a permanent canopy of heavy netting. Mosquitoes were the least of the creatures this net was intended to exclude; its absence, at any time, night or day, would have been an invitation for snakes and scorpions to make their way between the sheets. In a hut by the pond a woman was even said to have found a large dead fish in her bed. This was a koimachh, or tree perch, a species known to be able to manipulate its spiny fins in such a way as to drag itself overland for short distances. It had found its way into the bed only to suffocate on the mattress.
To preclude nighttime collapses of the mosquito netting, the bindings were checked and retied every evening. The tide country being what it was, there were twists even to this commonplace household chore. Once, soon after she first came to Lusibari, Nilima had made the mistake of trying to put up the net in near darkness. The only light was from a candle, placed on a windowsill at the other end of the room. Being short as well as very shortsighted, she could not see exactly what her fingers were doing as they knotted the net to the bed’s bamboo poles: even when she stood on tiptoe the strings were far above her head. Suddenly one of the strings had come alive; to the accompaniment of a sharp hiss, it had snapped a whip-like tail across the palm of her hand. She had snatched her arm back just in time to see a long, thin shape dropping from the pole. She had caught a glimpse of it before it wriggled under the door. It was an extremely venomous arboreal snake that inhabited the upper branches of some of the more slender mangroves: in the poles of the mosquito net it had evidently found a perch much to its liking.
At night, lying on his cot, Kanai would imagine that the roof had come alive; the thatch would rustle and shake and there would be frantic little outbursts of squeals and hisses. From time to time there would be loud plops as creatures of various kinds fell to the floor; usually they would go shooting off again and slip away under the door, but every once in a while Kanai would wake up in the morning and find a dead snake or a clutch of birds’ eggs lying on the ground, providing a feast for an army of beetles and ants. At times these creatures would fall right into the bed’s netting, weighing it down in the middle and shaking the posts. When this happened you had to take your pillow, shut your eyes and give the net a whack from below. Often the creature, whatever it was, would go shooting off into the air and that was the last you’d see of it. But sometimes it would go straight up and land right back in the net, and then you’d have to start all over again.
At the back of the bungalow was an open courtyard where the meetings of the Lusibari Women’s Union were held. At the time of Kanai’s banishment to Lusibari, in 1970, the Union was a small, improvised affair. Several times a week the Union’s members would gather in the courtyard to work on “income-generating projects” — knitting, sewing, dyeing yarn and so on. But the members also used these occasions to talk and give vent to their anger and grief.
These outbursts were strangely disquieting, and in the beginning Kanai went to great lengths to stay away from the bungalow when the Union was in session there. But that too was not without its pitfalls, for he had no friends in Lusibari and nowhere in particular to go. When he encountered children of his age they seemed simpleminded, silent or inexplicably hostile. Knowing that his suspension from school would be over in a few weeks, he felt no compulsion to unbend toward these rustics. After twice being attacked with stones, thrown by unseen hands, Kanai decided that he might be better off inside the bungalow than outside. And soon enough, from the safety of the study, he was eavesdropping avidly on the exchanges in the courtyard.
It was at one of those meetings that Kanai first saw Kusum. She had a chipped front tooth and her hair was cut short, making her something of an oddity among the girls of the island. Her head had been shaved the year before, after an attack of typhoid. She had only narrowly survived and was still treated as an invalid. It was for this reason that she was allowed to while away her time at the Union’s meetings; it was possibly for this reason also that she was still, in her mid-teens, dressed in the frilly “frock” of a child instead of a woman’s sari — or perhaps it was simply in order to wring a few more months’ wear out of a set of still usable clothes.
During that meeting in the courtyard, a woman began to recount a story in exceptionally vivid detail. One night when her husband was away on a boat, her father-in-law had come home drunk and forced his way into the room where she was sleeping with her children. In front of her children, he had held the sharpened edge of a dá to her throat and tried to pull off her sari. When she attempted to fight him off, he had gashed her arm with the machete, almost severing the thumb of her left hand. She had flung a kerosene lamp at him and his lungi had caught fire, giving him severe burns. For this she had been turned out of her marital home, although her only offense was that she had tried to protect herself and her children.
Here, as if to corroborate her story, her voice rose and she cried out, “And this is where he cut me, here and here.”
At this point Kanai, unable to restrain his curiosity, thrust his head through the doorway to steal a glance. The woman who had told the story was hidden from his view, and since everyone in the courtyard was looking in her direction, no one noticed Kanai — no one, that is, but Kusum, who had averted her eyes from the storyteller. Kanai and Kusum held each other’s gaze, and for the duration of that moment it was as though they were staring across the most primeval divide in creation, each assessing the dangers that lay on the other side; it seemed scarcely imaginable that here, in the gap that separated them, lay the potential for these extremes of emotion, this violence. But the mystery of it was that the result of this assessment was nothing so simple as fear or revulsion — what he saw in her eyes was rather an awakened curiosity he knew to be a reflection of his own.
So far as Kanai could remember, it was Kusum who spoke to him first, not on that day but some other morning. He was sitting on the floor, wearing nothing but a pair of khaki shorts. He had his back against a wall with a book on his belly, its spine propped against his knees. He looked up from the page to see her peering through the doorway, a strangely self-possessed figure despite her close-cropped hair and tattered red frock. Scowling at him, she said, in a tone of querulous accusation, “What are you doing here?”
“Reading.”
“I saw — you were listening.”
“So?” He shrugged.
“I’ll tell.”
“So go and tell.” Despite the show of bravado he was rattled by the threat. As if to keep her from carrying it out, he moved up to make room for her to sit. She sank down and sat beside him with her back to the wall and her knees drawn up to her chin. Although he didn’t dare look at her too closely, he became aware that their bodies were grazing each other at the shoulders, the elbows, the hips and the knees. Presently he saw that there was a mole on the swell of her left breast: it was very small, but he could not tear his eyes from it.
“Show me your book,” she said.
Kanai was reading an English mystery story and he dismissed her request with a shrug. “Why
do you want to look at this book? It won’t make any sense to you.”
“Why not?”
“Do you know English?” Kanai demanded.
“No.”
“Then? Why are you asking?”
She watched him for a moment, unabashed, and then, sticking her fist under his nose, unfurled her fingers. “Do you know what this is?”
Kanai saw that she had a grasshopper in her hand and his lip curled in contempt. “Those are everywhere. Who’s not seen one of those?”
“Look.” Lifting her hand, Kusum put the insect in her mouth and closed her lips.
This caught Kanai’s attention and he finally deigned to lower his book. “Did you swallow it?”
Suddenly her lips sprang apart and the grasshopper jumped straight into Kanai’s face. He let out a shout and fell over backward while she watched, laughing.
“It’s just an insect,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”
WORDS
AFTER PIYA HAD DRESSED and changed, she crawled back to the front of the boat with the checkered towel in her hands. She tried to ask Fokir the name of the fabric, but her gestures of inquiry elicited only a raised eyebrow and a puzzled frown. This was to be expected, for he had so far shown little interest in pointing to things and telling her their Bengali names. She had been somewhat in rigued by this, for in her experience people almost automatically went through a ritual of naming when they were with a stranger of another language. Fokir was an exception in that he had made no such attempts — so it was scarcely surprising that he should be puzzled by her interest in the word for this towel.
But she persisted, making signs and gestures until finally he understood. “Gamchha,” he said laconically, and of course that was it, she had known it all along: Gamchha, gamchha.
How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a chest, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?
There was a time once when the Bengali language was an angry flood trying to break down her door. She would crawl into a closet and lock herself in, stuffing her ears to shut out those sounds. But a door was no defense against her parents’ voices: it was in that language that they fought, and the sounds of their quarrels would always find ways of trickling in under the door and through the cracks, the level rising until she thought she would drown in the flood. Their voices had a way of finding her, no matter how well she hid. The accumulated resentments of their life were always phrased in that language, so that for her its sound had come to represent the music of unhappiness. As she lay curled in the closet, she would dream of washing her head of those sounds; she wanted words with the heft of stainless steel, sounds that had been boiled clean, like a surgeon’s instruments, tools with nothing attached except meanings that could be looked up in a dictionary — empty of pain and memory and inwardness.
In the bedroom of Piya’s early childhood there was one window that afforded a glimpse of Puget Sound. The apartment was small — two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen — and the sliver of a view through the one westward-facing window in the master bedroom was its only noteworthy attraction.
There was never any question that she, two-year-old Piya, would be allotted that room. Piya was the altarpiece around which their lives were arranged; the apartment was a temple to her, and her room was its shrine. Her parents took the other bedroom, so small that they had to get into bed by climbing over the foot of the bedstead. This enclosed space became the echo chamber for the airing of their mutual grievances. They would while away hours bickering over trivia, only occasionally generating enough energy to launch into full-throated quarrels.
Piya had the larger room to herself for some five years before her mother abruptly ousted her from it. She could no longer bear the circumstances of her confinement with Piya’s father and wanted nothing more than to shut out the entire family.
Shortly afterward she would be diagnosed with cervical cancer. But in between was a period when she would allow Piya to sit beside her on her bed. Piya was the only person allowed into her presence, permitted to touch and see her. Everyone else was excluded — her father most of all. Her mother’s voice would greet her as soon as she let herself into the flat, on coming home from school: “Come, Piya, come and sit.” It was strange that she could not remember the sound of those words (were they in English or Bengali?) but she could perfectly recall the meaning, the intent, the voice. She would go in and find her mother curled up in bed, dressed in an old sari: she would have spent the whole morning in the bath, trying to cleanse herself of some imaginary defilement, and her skin would be dimpled from its long immersion.
It was only then, sitting beside her, looking toward Puget Sound, that she learned that her mother had spent a part of her girlhood staring at a view of a river — the Brahmaputra, which had bordered the Assam tea estate where her father had been manager. Resting her eyes on the sound, she would tell stories of another, happier life, of playing in sunlit gardens, of cruises on the river.
Later, when Piya was in graduate school, people had sometimes asked if her interest in river dolphins had anything to do with her family history. The suggestion never failed to annoy her, not just because she resented the implication that her interests had been determined by her parentage, but also because it bore no relation to the truth. And this was that neither her father nor her mother had ever thought to tell her about any aspect of her Indian “heritage” that would have held her interest — all they ever spoke of was history, family, duty, language.
They had said much about Calcutta, for instance, yet had never thought to mention that the first known specimen of Orcaella brevirostris was found there, that strange cousin of the majestic killer whales of Puget Sound.
SOON IT BECAME clear that Fokir was making preparations for a meal. From the bilges below deck, he pulled out a couple of large and lively crabs. These he imprisoned in a soot-blackened pot before reaching into the hold again for a knife and a few utensils — including a large cylindrical object that appeared to be an earthenware vessel. But there was a hole in the side of this vessel, and when he began to stuff bits of firewood into it, she realized it was a portable stove made of clay. He took the stove to the stern, and when it was well out of the way of the shelter’s inflammable roof, he lit a match and blew the firewood into flame. Then he washed some rice, drained it into a battered tin utensil, poured in some water and put it on the stove. While the rice was coming to the boil, he dismembered the crabs, cracking their claws with his knife. When the rice was done, he took the pot off the fire and replaced it with yet another blackened aluminium pot. Next he opened a battered tin container and took out some half-dozen twists of paper, which he unrolled and laid out in a semicircle around the stove. There were spices inside and their colors — red, yellow, bronze — were bright in the light of the hissing flame. After he had splashed some oil into the pot, his hands began to fly over the slips of paper, peppering the spitting oil with pinches of turmeric and chili, coriander and cumin.
The smells were harsh on Piya’s nose. It was a long time now since she had eaten food of this kind: while in the field she rarely ate anything not from a can, a jar or a package. Three years before, when working on Malampaya Sound in the Philippines, she had been incautious in her eating and had suffered to the point where she had had to be medevaced by helicopter to Manila. On every survey since, she had equipped herself with a cache of mineral water and portable food — principally high-protein nutrition bars. On occasion, she also carried a jar or two of Ovaltine, or some other kind of powder for making malted milk. When there was milk to be had, fresh or condensed, she treated herself to a glass of Ovaltine; otherwise, she managed to get by on very little — a couple of protein bars a day was all she needed. This diet had the added advantage of limiting the use of unfamiliar, and sometimes unspeakable, toilets.
Now, as she sat watching Fokir at the stove, she knew he would offer her some of his food and she knew also she wou
ld refuse it. And yet, even as she recoiled from the smell, she could not tear her eyes from his flying fingers: it was as though she were a child again, standing on tiptoe to look at a clutch of stainless-steel containers lying arrayed on the counter beside the stove; it was her mother’s hands she was watching as they flew between those colors and the flames. They were almost lost to her, those images of the past, and nowhere had she less expected to see them than on this boat.
There was a time when those were the smells of home; she would sniff them on her mother, on the way back from school; they would fill the elevator on its journey up to their floor. When she stepped inside they had greeted her like domesticated animals, creatures with lives of their own, sustaining themselves on the close, hot air of the apartment. She had imagined the kitchen as a cage from which they never ventured out, which was why it came doubly as a shock when she discovered, from pointed jokes and chance playground comments, that the odors followed her everywhere, like unseen pets. Her response was to fight back, with a quietly ferocious tenacity, against them and against her mother, shutting them away with closed doors, sealing them into the kitchen.