by Amitav Ghosh
“Horen,” I said, “we have to try to bring Kusum and Fokir to safety. No one knows those waters better than you do. Is there any way you can get us there?”
He thought about this for a minute. “There’s no moon tonight,” he said. “It might be possible. We can try.”
We set off as night was approaching and took along a fair quantity of food and fresh water. Soon it was dark and I could see nothing, but somehow Horen kept our boat moving. We went slowly, staying close to the banks, and spoke in low voices.
“Where are we now, Horen?” I said.
He knew our position exactly. “We’ve left the Gãral and we’re slipping into the Jhilla. We’re not far now; soon you’ll see the police boats.” And within a few minutes we saw them, roaring by, sweeping the river with their searchlights: first one, then another, then another. For a while we hid close to the riverbank, and Horen gauged the intervals between the passage of the patrol boats. Then we cast off again, and sure enough, by starting and stopping between the patrols we were able to slip through the cordon.
“We’re there,” said Horen as the boat thrust its nose into the mud. “This is Morichjhãpi.” Between the two of us, we dragged the boat deep into the mangroves, where it couldn’t be seen from the water. The police had already sunk all the settlers’ boats, Horen told me. We took care to hide ours well and then, picking up the food and water we had brought, made our way quietly along the shore until we came to Kusum’s dwelling.
We were amazed to find her still in good spirits. We spent the rest of the night trying to persuade her to leave, but she paid no heed.
“Where will I go?” she said simply. “There’s no other place I want to be.”
We told her about the rumors, the men gathering in the surrounding villages, preparing for the impending assault. Horen had seen them; they had come by the busload. “What will they do?” she said. “There are still more than ten thousand of us here. It’s just a question of keeping faith.”
“But what about Fokir?” I said. “Suppose something happens? What will become of him?”
“Yes.” Horen added his voice to mine. “If you won’t leave, let me take him away for a few days. After things settle down, I’ll bring him back.”
It was clear she had already thought about this. “All right,” she said. “That’s how we’ll do it, then: Take Fokir back with you. Keep him with you in Satjelia for a few days. When this wind passes, bring him back.”
By this time day had broken and it was too late to leave. “We’ll have to wait till tonight,” Horen said, “so that we can slip past the police boats in the dark.”
It was time now for me to spring my surprise. “Horen,” I said. “I am staying . . .”
They were amazed and disbelieving: they kept asking me why I wished to remain, but I evaded their questions. There was so much I could have told them: about the medicines that awaited me in Lusibari, about Nilima’s conversation with the doctor, about the emptiness of the days I had spent in my study. But none of that seemed of the least importance. The truth was that my reason for staying was very simple. I took out this notebook and said, “I have to stay because there’s something I must write.”
I am out of time. The candle is spluttering; my pencil is worn to a stub. I can hear their footsteps approaching; they seem, strangely, to be laughing as they come. Horen will want to leave immediately, I know, for daybreak is not far now. I hadn’t thought I’d be able to fill this whole notebook, but that is what I have done. It serves no purpose for me to keep it here: I will hand it to Horen in the hope it finds its way to you, Kanai. I feel certain you will have a greater claim to the world’s ear than I ever had. Maybe you will know what to do with it. I have always trusted the young. Your generation will, I know, be richer in ideals, less cynical, less selfish than mine.
They have come in now and I see their faces in the candlelight. In their smiles I see the Poet’s lines:
Look, I’m alive. On what? Neither childhood nor the future grows less . . . More being than I’ll ever need springs up in my heart.
KANAI FOUND THAT his hands were shaking as he put down the notebook. The lamp had filled the cabin with kerosene fumes; he felt he was stifling. Picking a blanket off the bunk, he wrapped it around his shoulders and stepped out into the gangway. The sharp smell of a bidi came to his nose and he looked to his left, toward the bow.
Horen was seated there in one of the two armchairs. He was smoking with his feet up on the gunwale. He looked around as Kanai closed the door of his cabin.
“Still up?”
“Yes,” said Kanai. “I just finished reading my uncle’s notebook.”
Horen acknowledged this with an indifferent grunt.
Kanai seated himself in the adjoining chair. “It ends with you taking Fokir away in your boat.”
Horen angled his gaze downward, into the water, as if he were looking into the past. “We should have left a little earlier,” he said matter-of-factly. “We would have had the currents behind us.”
“And what happened in Morichjhãpi after that? Do you know?”
Horen sucked on the end of his bidi. “I know no more than anyone else knows. It was all just rumor.”
“And what were the rumors?”
A wisp of smoke curled out of Horen’s nose. “What we heard,” he said, “was that the assault began the next day. The gangsters who’d been assembling around the island were carried over in boats and dinghies and bhotbhotis. They burnt the settlers’ huts, they sank their boats, they laid waste to their fields.” He grunted in his laconic way. “Whatever you can imagine them doing, they did.”
“And Kusum and my uncle? What happened to them?”
“No one knows for sure, but what I’ve heard is that a group of women were taken away by force, Kusum among them. People say they were used and then thrown into the rivers, so they would be washed away by the tides. Dozens of settlers were killed that day. The sea claimed them all.”
“And my uncle?”
“He was put on a bus with the other refugees. They were to be sent back to the place they had come from — in Madhya Pradesh or wherever it was. But at some point they must have let him off because he found his way back to Canning.”
Here Horen broke off and proceeded to search his pockets with much fumbling and many muttered curses. By the time he’d found and lit another bidi it had become clear to Kanai that he was trying to create a diversion so as to lead the conversation away from Nirmal and Kusum. Kanai was not surprised when he said, in a comfortably affable tone, “What time do you want to leave tomorrow morning?”
Kanai decided he would not let him change the subject. “Tell me something, Horen-da,” he said, “about my uncle. You were the one who took him to Morichjhãpi. Why do you think he got so involved with that place?”
“Same as anyone else,” Horen said with a shrug.
“But after all, Kusum and Fokir were your relatives,” Kanai said. “So it’s understandable that you were concerned about them. But what about Saar? Why did it mean so much to him?”
Horen pulled on his bidi. “Your uncle was a very unusual man,” he said at last. “People say he was mad. As we say, you can’t explain what a madman will do, any more than you can account for what a goat will eat.”
“But tell me this, Horen-da,” Kanai persisted. “Do you think it possible he was in love with Kusum?”
Horen rose to his feet and snorted in such a way as to indicate that he had been goaded beyond toleration. “Kanai-babu,” he said in a sharp, irritated voice, “I’m an unlettered man. You’re talking about things city people think about. I don’t have time for such things.”
He flicked his bidi away and they heard it hiss as it hit the water. “You’d better go to sleep now,” Horen said. “We’ll make an early start tomorrow.”
A POST OFFICE ON SUNDAY
PIYA HAD GONE to bed too early and around midnight found herself wide awake, sitting up in her bunk. She spent a few minutes trying
to drift off again and then gave up. Wrapping a blanket around her shoulders, she stepped out on deck. The light of the waxing moon was so bright that she stood still for a moment, blinking. Then she saw, to her surprise, that Kanai was outside too. He was reading by the light of a small kerosene lantern. Piya went forward and slipped into the other chair. “You’re up late,” she said. “Is that your uncle’s notebook you’re reading?”
“Yes. I finished it, actually. I was just looking it over again.”
“Can I have a look?”
“Certainly.”
Kanai closed the book and held it out to her. She took the notebook gingerly and allowed it to fall open.
“The writing’s very small,” she said.
“Yes,” said Kanai. “It’s not easy to read.”
“And is it all in Bengali?”
“Yes.”
She closed the book carefully and handed it back to Kanai. “So what’s it about?”
Kanai scratched his head as he wondered how best to describe the notebook. “It’s about all kinds of things: places, people —”
“Anyone you know?”
“Yes. Actually, Fokir’s mother figures in it a lot. Fokir too — though Nirmal only knew him when he was very small.”
Piya’s eyes widened. “Fokir and his mother? How come they’re in it?”
“I told you, didn’t I, that Kusum, Fokir’s mother, was involved in an effort to resettle one of these islands?”
“Yes, you did.”
Kanai smiled. “I think, without knowing it, he may have been half in love with Kusum.”
“Does he say so in the book?”
“No,” said Kanai. “But then he wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Being what he was,” Kanai said, “a man of his time and place, with his convictions — he’d have thought it frivolous.”
Piya ran her fingers through her short, curly hair. “I don’t get it,” she said. “What were his convictions?”
Kanai leaned back in his chair as he thought this over. “He was a radical at one time,” he said. “In fact, if you were to ask my aunt Nilima, she would tell you that the reason he got mixed up with the settlers in Morichjhãpi was because he couldn’t let go of the idea of revolution.”
“I take it you don’t agree with her?”
“No,” said Kanai. “I think she’s wrong. As I see it, Nirmal was possessed more by words than by politics. There are people who live through poetry, and he was one of them. For Nilima, a person like that is very hard to understand — but that’s the kind of man Nirmal was. He loved the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, a great German poet, whose work has been translated into Bangla by some of our own best-known poets. Rilke said ‘life is lived in transformation,’ and I think Nirmal soaked this idea into himself in the way cloth absorbs ink. To him, what Kusum stood for was the embodiment of Rilke’s idea of transformation.”
“Marxism and poetry?” Piya said drily, raising her eyebrows. “It seems like an odd combination.”
“It was,” Kanai agreed. “But those contradictions were typical of his generation. Nirmal was perhaps the least materialistic person I’ve ever known. But it was very important for him to believe that he was a historical materialist.”
“And what exactly does that mean?”
“For him it meant that everything which existed was interconnected: the trees, the sky, the weather, people, poetry, science, nature. He hunted down facts in the way a magpie collects shiny things. Yet when he strung them all together, somehow they did become stories — of a kind.”
Piya rested her chin on her fist. “Can you give me an example?”
Kanai thought about this for a minute. “I remember one of his stories — it has always stuck in my mind.”
“What’s it about?”
“Do you remember Canning, the town where we got off the train?”
“Sure I remember Canning,” Piya said. “That’s where I got my permit. It’s not what I’d call a memorable place.”
“Exactly,” said Kanai. “The first time I went there was in 1970, when Nirmal and Nilima brought me to Lusibari. I was disgusted by the place — I thought it was a horrible, muddy little town. I happened to say something to that effect and Nirmal was outraged. He shouted at me, ‘A place is what you make of it.’ And then he told a story so unlikely I thought he’d made it up. But after I went back home, I took the trouble to look into it and discovered it was true.”
“What was the story?” Piya said. “Do you remember? I’d love to hear it.”
“All right,” said Kanai. “I’ll try to tell it to you as he would have. But don’t forget: I’ll be translating in my head — he would have told it in Bangla.”
“Sure. Go on.”
Kanai held up a finger and pointed to the heavens. “All right then, comrades, listen: I’ll tell you about the Matla River and a stormstruck matal and the matlami of a lord who was called Canning. Shono, kaan pete shono. Put out your ears so you can listen properly.”
LIKE SO MANY other places in the tide country, Canning was named by an Ingrej. And in this case it was no ordinary Englishman who gave it his name — not only was he a lord, he was a laat, nothing less than a viceroy, Lord Canning. This laat and his ledi were as generous in sprinkling their names around the country as a later generation of politicians would be in scattering their ashes: you came across them in the most unexpected places — a road here, a jail there, an occasional asylum. No matter that Ledi Canning was tall, thin and peppery — a Calcutta sweets maker took it into his head to name a new confection after her. This sweet was black, round and sugary — in other words, it was everything its namesake was not, which was lucky for the sweets maker, because it meant his creation quickly became a success. People gobbled up the new sweets at such a rate that they could not take the time to say “Lady Canning.” The name was soon shortened to ledigeni.
Now surely there must exist a law of speech which says that if “Lady Canning” is to become ledigeni, then “Port Canning” should become Potugeni or possibly Podgeni. But look: the port’s name has survived undamaged and nobody ever calls it by anything but the lord’s name, “Canning.”
But why? Why would a laat leave the comfort of his throne in order to plant his name in the mud of the Matla?
Well, remember Mohammad bin Tughlaq, the mad sultan who moved his capital from Delhi to a village in the middle of nowhere? It was a bee from the same hive that stung the British. They got it into their heads that they needed a new port, a new capital for Bengal — Calcutta’s Hooghly River was silting up and its docks, they said, would soon be choked with mud. Jothariti, teams of planners and surveyors, went out and wandered the land, striding about in wigs and breeches, mapping and measuring. And at last on the banks of the Matla they came on a place that caught their fancy, a little fishing village that overlooked a river so broad that it looked like a highway to the sea.
Now, it’s no secret that the word matla means “mad” in Bangla — and everyone who knows the river knows also that this name has not been lightly earned. But those Ingrej town planners were busy men who had little time for words and names. They went back to the laat and told him about the wonderful location they had found. They described the wide, mighty river, the flat plain and deep channel that led straight to the sea; they showed him their plans and maps and listed all the amenities they would build — hotels, promenades, parks, palaces, banks, streets. Oh, it was to be a grand place, this new capital on the banks of the mad Matla — it would lack for nothing.
The contracts were given out and the work began: thousands of mistris and mahajans and overseers moved to the shores of the Matla and began to dig. They drank the Matla’s water and worked in the way that matals and madmen work: nothing could stop them, not even the Uprising of 1857. If you were here then, on the banks of the Matla, you would never have known that in northern India chapatis were passing from village to village; that Mangal Pandey had turned his gun on his officers;
that women and children were being massacred and rebels were being tied to the mouths of cannons. Here on the banks of the smiling river the work continued: an embankment arose, foundations were dug, a strand was laid out, a railway line built.
And all the while the Matla lay still and waited.
But not even a river can hide all its secrets, and it so happened that at that time, in Kolkata, there lived a man of a mentality not unlike the Matla’s. This was a lowly shipping inspector, an Ingrej shaheb by the name of Henry Piddington. Before coming to India, Piddingtonshaheb had lived in the Caribbean, and somewhere in those islands he had fallen in love — not with a woman nor even with a dog, as is often the case with lonely Englishmen living in faraway places. No, Mr. Piddington fell in love with storms. Out there, of course, they call them hurricanes, and Piddington-shaheb’s love for them knew no limits. He loved them not in the way you might love the mountains or the stars: for him they were like books or music, and he felt for them the same affection a devotee might feel for his favorite authors or musicians. He read them, listened to them, studied them and tried to understand them. He loved them so much that he invented a new word to describe them: “cyclone.”
Now, our Kolkata may not be as romantic a place as the West Indies, but for the cultivation of Piddington-shaheb’s love affair it was just as good. In the violence of its storms the Bay of Bengal, let it be said, is second to none — not to the Caribbean, not to the South China Sea. Wasn’t it our tufaan, after all, that gave birth to the word “typhoon”?
When Mr. Piddington learned of the viceroy’s new port, he understood at once the madness the river had in mind. Standing on its banks, he spoke his mind. “Maybe you could trick those surveyors,” he said, “but you can’t make a fool of me. I’ve seen through your little game and I’m going to make sure that they know too.”
And the Matla laughed its mental laugh and said, “Go on, do it. Do it now, tell them. It’s you they’ll call Matla — a man who thinks he can look into the hearts of rivers and storms.”