The Hungry Tide

by Amitav Ghosh

  Piya smiled. “I’ll be fine — I know how to look after myself.” But she was glad the invitation had come from Mashima: somehow it made it easier to accept. “Thank you,” she said. “I’d really appreciate a good night’s rest. Are you sure I won’t be in your way if I stay a couple of days?”

  “Stay as long as you like,” said Nilima. “Kanai will show you around.”

  “Come on,” said Kanai, reaching for one of her backpacks. “It’s this way.” He led her upstairs and, after pointing out the kitchen and bathroom, unlatched a door and switched on a fluorescent light. The bedroom was no different from his own: there were two narrow beds in it, each equipped with its own mosquito net. The replastered cement walls were blotchy with damp spots and cracks, left behind by the last monsoon. On the far side was a barred window that looked out over the rice fields that adjoined the Trust’s compound.

  “Will this do?” said Kanai, depositing her backpack on one of the beds.

  Piya stepped in and looked around. Although bare in appearance, the room was comfortable enough: the sheets were clean and there was even a towel lying neatly folded at the foot of the bed. By the window stood a desk and a straight-backed chair. The door, she was glad to note, had a sturdy latch that could be attached from the inside.

  “This is more than I expected,” Piya said. “Thanks so much.”

  Kanai shook his head. “You don’t have to thank me,” he said. “It’ll be nice to have you here. I was getting a bit lonely on my own.”

  She didn’t know what to make of this, so she gave him a neutral smile.

  “Anyway, I’ll leave you to settle in,” said Kanai. “I’ll be upstairs in my uncle’s study. Knock if you need anything.”

  A FEAST

  Any excuse to return to Morichjhãpi would have sufficed, but none could have been better than that which Horen presented me. I had, in the meanwhile, arranged for his son’s admission, so it happened that I often ran into him in the school’s vicinity.

  “Saar,” Horen said one day, “I have news from Morichjhãpi. There’s to be a big feast there. Kusum said you should come.”

  I was astonished. “A feast? What kind of feast?”

  “They’ve invited many people from Kolkata — writers, intellectuals, journalists. They want to tell them about the island and all they have achieved.”

  This explained everything: once again I was impressed by the acumen of the settlers’ leadership. Clearly they had decided their best defense was to enlist the support of public opinion and this was to be a step in that direction. Of course I had to go. Horen said we would leave in the morning and I told him I would be ready.

  When I got back home, Nilima took one look at me and said, “What’s the matter? Why’ve you got that look on your face?”

  Why was it I’d never spoken to Nilima about Morichjhãpi before? Perhaps in my heart I knew she would not share my enthusiasm; perhaps I knew she would see my excitement about their project as a betrayal of her own efforts in Lusibari. In any event, these fears were soon confirmed. I described as best I could the drama of the settlers’ arrival; I told her about the quest that had brought them from their banishment in central India to the edge of the tide country; I explained their plans, their program for building a new future for themselves, their determination to create a new land in which to live.

  To my surprise, I found she already knew about the settlers and their arrival: she had heard about it in Kolkata from bureaucrats and politicians. The government, she said, saw these people as squatters and land grabbers; there was going to be trouble; they would not be allowed to remain.

  “Nirmal,” she said, “I don’t want you going there. It’s not that I have anything against the settlers. I just don’t want you to be in harm’s way.”

  I realized at that moment, with a great sense of sadness, that from now on my relationship with Morichjhãpi would have to be conducted in secret. I had intended to tell her about the feast of the next day but now said nothing. Knowing Nilima as I did, I was sure she would find a way to prevent me from going.

  Yet I would not have lied had she not pressed me. She saw me packing my jhola and asked if I was planning to go somewhere.

  “Yes, I have to leave tomorrow morning.” I made up a story about visiting a school in Mollakhali. I knew she didn’t believe me, for she looked at me closely and said, “And who are you going with?”

  “Horen,” I said.

  “Oh?” she said. “Horen?” And the inflection of her voice as she said this was enough to make me fear for the safety of my secret.

  Thus was sown the seed of our mistrust.

  But to the feast I went — and it proved to be one of the strangest days of my existence. It was as if, on the eve of my retirement, I had been presented with a glimpse of the life I might have led if I had stayed in Kolkata. The guests who had been brought in from the city were exactly the people I would have known: journalists, photographers, well-known authors; there was the novelist Sunil Gangopadhyay and the journalist Jyotirmoy Datta. Some of them I even recognized for I had known them back in the university. One of them — we used to call him Khokon in those days — had once been a friend as well as a comrade. I observed him from a distance, marveling at how well he looked, at the bright effulgence of his face and the raven-black hue of his hair. Would this have been me had I stayed on, living the literary life?

  I became aware as never before of all my unacknowledged regrets.

  I hung back, following at a distance, as the settlers’ leaders led the guests on a tour of the island. There was much to show — even in the short while I had been away, there had been many additions, many improvements. Salt pans had been created, tube wells had been planted, water had been dammed for the farming of fish, a bakery had started up, boat builders had set up workshops, a pottery had been founded as well as an ironsmith’s shop; there were people making boats while others were fashioning nets and crab lines; little marketplaces, where all kinds of goods were being sold, had sprung up. All this in the space of a few months! It was an astonishing spectacle — as though an entire civilization had sprouted suddenly in the mud.

  After all this came the feast, done in the old style and artfully arranged, with banana leaves set out on the earth and the guests seated in the shade of murmuring trees. Among those who were serving I spotted Kusum, who showed me the massive dekchis in which the food had been cooked. There were gigantic prawns, both golda and bagda, and a fantastic variety of fish: tangra, ilish, parshey, puti, bhetki, rui, chitol.

  I was amazed: knowing that many of the settlers went hungry, I couldn’t understand how this show of plenty had been arranged.

  “Where did all this come from?” I said to Kusum.

  “Everyone contributed what they could,” she said. “But there was not much to buy — only the rice. The rest came from the rivers. Since yesterday we’ve all been out with nets and lines, even the children.” She pointed proudly to the parshey: “Fokir caught six of those this morning.”

  My admiration was boundless. What better way to win the hearts of these city people than by feeding them freshly caught fish? How well these settlers understood their guests!

  Kusum urged me to sit down and start eating. But I could not bring myself to sit with the guests: I was not of their number. “No, Kusum,” I said. “It’s better you feed those who can spread the word. This is precious food — it would be wasted on me.” I hung back in the shade of the trees, and from time to time Fokir or Kusum would bring me a few morsels wrapped in a banana leaf.

  It was soon evident that the occasion had served its purpose: the guests were undeniably impressed. Speeches were made extolling the achievements of the settlers. It was universally agreed that the significance of Morichjhãpi extended far beyond the island itself. Was it possible that in Morichjhãpi had been planted the seeds of what might become, if not a Dalit nation, then at least a safe haven, a place of true freedom for the country’s most oppressed?

  When
the day was almost at an end, I went up to Khokon, the writer I had once known, and stood silently in his line of sight. He glanced at me without recognition and went on with his conversation. In a while I tapped his elbow: “Eijé. Here, Khokon?”

  He was annoyed at being addressed so familiarly by a stranger. “And who, moshai, might you be?” he said.

  When I told him who I was, his mouth fell open and his tongue began to flop around inside it like a netted fish. “You?” he said at last. “You?”

  I said, “Yes. It’s me.”

  “You haven’t been heard from in so long, everybody thought —”

  “That I was dead? As you see, I’m not.”

  On the brink of saying “It would have been better so,” he cut himself short. “But what have you been doing all these years? Where have you been?”

  I felt then as if I had been called upon to justify the entirety of my existence, to account for the years I had spent in Lusibari.

  But what I had to say in answer was very modest: “I’ve been doing schoolmasteri in a place not far from here.”

  “And your writing?”

  I shrugged. What was there to say? “It’s a good thing I stopped,” I said. “My work would have been put to shame by yours.”

  Writers! How they love flattery. He put his arm around my shoulders and led me off, indulgently lowering his voice, as an elder brother might with a younger. “So, Nirmal, tell me, how did you get mixed up with these settlers?”

  “I know a couple of them,” I said. “Now that I’m almost retired, I’m thinking of doing some teaching here.”

  “Here?” he said dubiously. “But the problem is, they may not be allowed to stay.”

  “They’re here already,” I said. “How could they be evicted now? There would be bloodshed.”

  He laughed. “My friend, have you forgotten what we used to say in the old days?”

  “What?”

  “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

  He laughed in the cynical way of those who, having never believed in the ideals they once professed, imagine that no one else had done so either. I was tempted to tell him what I thought of him, but it struck me with great force that I had no business to be self-righteous about these matters. Nilima — she had achieved a great deal. What had I done? What was the work of my life? I tried to find an answer but none would come to mind.

  It is afternoon now and Horen and Kusum have gone to see if they can find some fish. Fokir is sitting here with a crab line, what is called a don in the tide country, and as I watch him play with it, my heart spills over. There is so much to say, so much in my head, so much that will remain unsaid. Oh, those wasted years, that wasted time. I think of Rilke going for years without writing a word and then, in a matter of weeks, producing the Duino Elegies in a castle besieged by the sea. Even silence is preparation. As the minutes pass, it seems to me I can see every object in the tide country with a blinding brightness and clarity. I want to say to Fokir, “Do you know that every don has one thousand morsels of bait, tied at gaps of three arms’ lengths each? That each line is thus equal to the length of three thousand arms?”

  How better can we praise the world but by doing what the Poet would have us do: by speaking of potters and rope makers, by telling of

  some simple thing shaped for generation after generation until it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it’s ours.

  CATCHING UP

  AFTER HER SHOWER, Piya sank into the chair by her window and found she could not get up again. After days of squatting and sitting cross-legged it was strange to have a support behind your back and to be able to swing your legs freely without worrying about tipping over. She could still feel the rocking motion of the boat in her limbs, and the sighing of the wind blowing through the mangroves was still in her ears.

  The feeling of being back on the boat suddenly brought back the terror she had felt that morning. It had happened so recently that the sensations seemed still to be present, unprocessed, in her mind — they had not yet been absorbed as memory. She saw once again the wrenching, twisting motion of the reptile’s head as its jaws closed over the spot where her wrist had been: it was as if it had been so certain of its aim, so sure of seizing her arm, that it had already launched into the movement that would drag her out of the boat and into the water. She imagined the tug that would have pulled her below the surface and the momentary release before the jaws closed again, around her midsection, pulling her into those swift, eerily glowing depths where the sunlight had no orientation and there was neither up nor down. She remembered her panic in falling from the launch, and it made her think of the numbing horror that would accompany the awareness that you were imprisoned in a grasp from which there was no escape. The overlapping of these images created a montage of such vividness that her hands began to tremble. And now, with Fokir absent, the experience seemed even more frightening than it had been at the time.

  She forced herself to sit up and look out the window. The moon was not up yet and it was dark outside. She could not see much except the outlines of a few coconut palms, and beyond that a striated emptiness that suggested a closely shorn field. Then she caught the sound of a conversation in Bengali, drifting in from the front of the house: a woman’s voice in counterpoint to Kanai’s deep baritone.

  She made herself get up and go downstairs. Kanai was standing by the door with a lantern in his hands, talking to a woman in a red sari. The woman was facing away from her, but at Piya’s approach she looked over her shoulder so that one side of her face was suddenly brightened by the glow of Kanai’s lantern. Piya saw that she was about her own age, with a full figure, a wide mouth and large, luminous eyes. Between her eyebrows was a big red bindi, and a streak of vermilion shindur ran like a wound through the part in her shiny black hair.

  “Ah, there you are, Piya!” cried Kanai, in English, and from the overly spirited sound of his voice Piya guessed they had been talking about her. The woman’s eyes were steady and clear as they looked her over, and Piya had the distinct impression that she had somehow been recognized and was being assessed. Then, with an abruptness no less unsettling than the frankness of her scrutiny, the woman looked away. Handing Kanai a set of stainless-steel containers, she headed down the steps and vanished into the night-shrouded compound.

  “Who was that?” said Piya to Kanai.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” said Kanai. “That was Moyna, Fokir’s wife.”

  “Oh?”

  Moyna was so unlike the wife she had envisaged for Fokir that it took Piya a moment to absorb this. Presently she added, “I should have guessed.”

  “Guessed what?”

  “That she was his wife. Her son has her eyes.”

  “Does he?”

  “Yes,” said Piya. “And what was she doing here?”

  “She was delivering this tiffin carrier.” Kanai held up the steel containers. “Our dinner’s inside. Moyna’s brought it for us from the hospital’s kitchen.”

  Piya’s attention drifted away from Kanai to the woman who was Fokir’s wife. She felt a twinge of envy at the thought of her going back to Fokir and Tutul while she returned to the absence upstairs. This embarrassed her and to cover up she smiled at Kanai and said briskly, “She isn’t at all like I expected.”

  “No?”

  “No.” Now again Piya found herself fumbling for the right words. “I mean, she’s very attractive, isn’t she?”

  “You think so?”

  Piya knew she should drop the matter, but instead she went on, as if she were picking at a scab. “Yes,” she said. “I think she’s quite beautiful, in a way.”

  “You’re right,” said Kanai smoothly, recovering himself. “She’s very striking. But she’s more than that: in her own way, she’s an unusual and remarkable woman.”

  “Really? How?”

  “Just think of the life she’s led,” said Kanai. “She’s struggled to educate herself against heavy odds. Now she’s well on her way
to becoming a nurse. She knows what she wants — for herself and her family — and nothing is going to keep her from pursuing it. She’s ambitious, she’s tough, and she’s going to go a long way.”

  There was an edge to his voice that implied a comparison of some kind and Piya could not help wondering how she herself would fare by these lights — she who’d never had much ambition and had never had to battle her circumstances in order to get her education. In Kanai’s eyes, she knew, she must appear hopelessly soft and spoiled, a kind of stereotype. And she could not blame him for seeing her in this way — any more than she could blame herself for seeing him as an example of a certain kind of Indian male, overbearing, vain, self-centered — yet, for all that, not unlikable.

  Piya switched to a more neutral subject. “And are Moyna and Fokir from around here? From Lusibari?”

  “No,” said Kanai. “Both she and Fokir are from another island, quite a long way off. It’s called Satjelia.”

  “Then how come they live here?”

  “Partly because she’s training to be a nurse and partly because she’s trying to give her son an education. That’s why she was so upset that Fokir had taken him away on this fishing trip of his.”

  “Does she know I was on the boat with them these last couple of days?”

  “Yes,” said Kanai. “She knows all about it — about the guard taking the money, about your fall and about Fokir diving in after you. She knows about the crocodile — the little boy told her everything.”

  Piya noted the mention of the boy: did this mean Fokir hadn’t said much about the trip, or that he had given Moyna a different account? She wondered if Kanai knew the answer to either of these questions, but she could not bring herself to ask. Instead, she said, “Moyna must be curious about what I’m doing here.”

  “She certainly is,” said Kanai. “She asked me about it and I explained you’re a scientist. She was very impressed.”

  “Why?”

  “As you can imagine,” said Kanai, “she has a great respect for education.”