The Hungry Tide

by Amitav Ghosh

Kanai stepped out of his cabin to find that the wind had died down, leaving the river’s becalmed surface as still as a sheet of polished metal. Having reached full flood, the tide was now at that point of perfect balance when the water appears motionless. From the deck the island of Garjontola looked like a jeweled inlay on the rim of a gigantic silver shield. The spectacle was at once elemental and intimate, immense in its scale and yet, in this moment of tranquillity, oddly gentle.

  He heard footsteps on the deck and turned to see Piya coming toward him. She was armed with a clipboard and data sheets and her voice was all business: “Kanai, can I ask you a favor? For this morning?”

  “Certainly. Tell me: what can I do for you?”

  “I need you to do some spotting for me,” Piya replied.

  The timing of the tides had created a small problem for her, Piya said. Her original plan had been to follow the dolphins when they left the pool at high tide. But right now the flood seemed to be setting in early in the morning and late in the evening; this meant the animals would be migrating in the dark. Tracking them would be hard enough during the day; without good light it would be impossible. What she had decided to do instead was to make a log of the routes they followed when they came back to the pool. Her plan was to post watches at the two approaches to the pool, one upstream and one downstream. She would take the upstream watch on the Megha: the river was wide there and it would be difficult to cover it without binoculars. Fokir could take the other watch, in his boat: if Kanai could join him, so much the better — to have two pairs of eyes on the boat would compensate for the lack of binoculars.

  “It means you’ll have to spend a few hours in the boat with Fokir,” said Piya. “But that’s not a problem, is it?”

  Kanai was affronted to think she had the impression that he was somehow in competition with Fokir. “No,” he said quickly. “Not at all. I’ll be glad to have a chance to talk to him.”

  “Good. That’s settled, then. We’ll get started after you’ve had something to eat. I’ll knock on your door in an hour.”

  By the time Piya came to get him, he had breakfasted and was ready to go. In preparation for a day under the sun, he had changed into light-colored trousers, a white shirt and sandals. He had also decided to take along a cap and sunglasses. These preparations met with Piya’s approval. “Better bring these as well,” she said, handing him two bottles of water. “It’s going to get very hot out there.”

  They went together to the Megha’s stern and found Fokir ready to leave, with his oars placed crosswise across the gunwales. After Kanai had gone over to the smaller boat, Piya showed Fokir exactly where he was to position himself. The spot was about a mile downstream of the Megha, at a point where Garjontola curved outward, jutting into the river so that the channel narrowed.

  “The river’s only half a mile wide over there,” said Piya. “I figure that if you anchor at midstream, you’ll have all the approaches covered between the two of you.”

  Then she turned to point upstream, where the river’s mouth opened into a vast mohona. “I’ll be over there,” said Piya. “As you can see, it’s very wide, but being on the Megha I’ll have some elevation. With my binoculars I’ll be able to keep it covered. We’ll be about two and a half miles apart. I’ll be able to see you, but you probably won’t be able to see me.”

  She waved as Fokir cast off the boat’s moorings. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she shouted, “If it gets to be too much for you, Kanai, just tell Fokir to bring you back.”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Kanai, waving back. “Don’t worry about me.”

  The boat had not gone very far when puffs of black smoke began to spurt from the Megha’s funnel. Slowly the bhotbhoti began to move and for several minutes Fokir and Kanai were shaken by the turbulence of its bow wave. Only when it had disappeared from view was the water calm again.

  Now, with the landscape emptied of other human beings, it was as if the distance between Kanai and Fokir had been reduced a hundredfold — yet if the boat had been a mile long they could not have been farther apart. Kanai was in the bow and Fokir was in the stern, behind the hood. Separated by the thatch, neither of them could see the other and for the first couple of hours on the water very little was said. Kanai made a couple of attempts to break the silence and was answered on each occasion with nothing more than a perfunctory grunt.

  Around noon, when the level of the water had begun to ebb, Fokir jumped to his feet in great excitement and pointed downriver: “Oi-jé! Over there!”

  Shading his eyes, Kanai spotted a sharply raked dorsal fin arcing through the water.

  “You’ll see better if you hold on to the hood and stand up.”

  “All right.” Kanai made his way to the boat’s midsection, pulled himself to his feet and steadied his balance by leaning on the hood.

  “Another one. Over there.”

  Guided by Fokir’s finger, Kanai spotted another fin slicing through the water. This was followed in quick succession by two more dolphins — all of them spotted by Fokir.

  This flurry of activity seemed to have created a small opening in the barrier of Fokir’s silence, so Kanai made another attempt to draw him into conversation. “Tell me something, Fokir,” he said, glancing down the length of the hood. “Do you remember Saar at all?”

  Fokir shot him a glance and looked away again. “No,” he said. “There was a time when he used to visit us, but I was very small then. After my mother died I hardly ever saw him. I hardly remember him at all.”

  “And your mother? Do you remember her?”

  “How could I forget her? Her face is everywhere.”

  He said this in such a plain, matter-of-fact way that Kanai was puzzled. “What are you saying, Fokir? Where do you see her face?”

  He smiled and began to point in every direction, to the ends of the compass as well as to his head and feet. “Here, here, here, here. Everywhere.”

  The phrasing of this was simple to the point of being childlike, and it seemed to Kanai that he had finally understood why Moyna felt so deeply tied to her husband, despite everything. There was something about him that was utterly unformed, and it was this very quality that drew her to him: she craved it in the same way that a potter’s hands might crave the resistance of unshaped clay.

  “So tell me, then, Fokir, do you ever feel like visiting a city?”

  It was only after he had spoken that he realized he had inadvertently addressed Fokir as tui, as though he were indeed a child. But Fokir seemed not to notice. “This is enough for me,” he said. “What’ll I do in a city?” He picked up his oars as if to mark the end of the conversation. “Now it’s time to go back to the bhotbhoti.”

  The boat began to rock as Fokir dipped his oars and Kanai retreated quickly to his place in the bow. After sitting down, he looked up to see that Fokir had moved to the boat’s midsection, seating himself so that he would be facing Kanai as he rowed.

  In the steaming midday heat a haze was rising from the river, giving the impression of mirages dancing on the water. The heat and haze induced a kind of torpor in Kanai, and as if in a dream he had a vision of Fokir traveling to Seattle with Piya. He saw the two of them walking onto the plane, she in her jeans and he in his lungi and worn T-shirt; he saw Fokir squirming in a seat that was unlike any he had ever seen before; he pictured him looking up and down the aisle with his mouth agape. And then he thought of him in some icy western city, wandering the streets in search of work, lost and unable to ask for directions.

  He shook his head to rid himself of this discomfiting vision.

  It seemed to Kanai that the boat was passing much closer to Garjontola than it had on the way out. But with the water at its lowest level, it was hard to know whether this was due to a deliberate change of course or to an optical illusion caused by the usual shrinkage of the river’s surface at ebb tide. As they were passing the island Fokir raised a flattened palm to his eyes and peered at the sloping sandbank to their left. Suddenly he stiffened,
rising slightly in his seat. As if by instinct, his right hand gathered in the hem of his unfurled lungi, tucking it between his legs, transforming the anklelength garment into a loincloth. With his hand on the gunwale, he rose to a half-crouch, setting the boat gently asway, his torso inclining forward in the stance of a runner taking his mark. He raised a hand to point. “Look over there.”

  “What’s the matter?” said Kanai. “What do you see?”

  “Look.”

  Kanai narrowed his eyes as he followed Fokir’s finger. He could see nothing of interest, so he said, “What should I look for?”

  “Signs, marks — like we saw yesterday. A whole trail of them, running from the trees to the water and back.”

  Kanai looked again and caught sight of a few depressions in the ground. But the bank at this point was colonized mainly by stands of garjon, a species of mangrove that breathed through spear-like “ventilators” connected by subterranean root systems. The surface of the bank was pierced by so many of these upthrust organs that it was impossible to distinguish between one mark and another. The depressions that had caught Fokir’s eye looked nothing like the sharply defined marks of the night before. They seemed to Kanai to be too shapeless to signify anything in particular; they could just as well have been crabs’ burrows or runnels formed by the retreating water.

  “See how they form a track?” Fokir said. “They go right to the edge of the water. That means they were made after the tide had ebbed — probably just as we were heading this way. The animal must have spotted us and come down to take a closer look.”

  The thought of this, a tiger coming down to the water’s edge in order to watch their progress across the mohona, was just far-fetched enough to make Kanai smile.

  “Why would it want to look at us?” said Kanai.

  “Maybe because it smelled you,” said Fokir. “It likes to keep an eye on strangers.”

  There was something about Fokir’s expression that convinced Kanai he was playing a game with him, perhaps unconsciously, and the thought of this amused him. Kanai understood all too well how the dynamics of their situation might induce Fokir to exaggerate the menace of their surroundings. He himself had often stood in Fokir’s place, serving as some hapless traveler’s window on an unfamiliar world. He remembered how, in those circumstances, he too had often been tempted to heighten the inscrutability of the surroundings through subtly slanted glosses. To do this required no particularly malicious intent; it was just a way of underscoring the insider’s indispensability: every new peril was proof of his importance, each new threat evidence of his worth. These temptations were all too readily available to every guide and translator — not to succumb was to make yourself dispensable; to give in was to destroy the value of your word, and thus your work. It was precisely because of his awareness of this dilemma that he knew too that there were times when a translator’s bluff had to be called.

  Kanai pointed to the shore and made a gesture of dismissal. “Those are just burrows,” he said, smiling. “I saw crabs digging into them. What makes you think they have anything to do with the big cat?”

  Fokir turned to flash him a bright, white smile. “Do you want to know how I know?”

  “Yes. Tell me.”

  Leaning over, Fokir took hold of Kanai’s hand and placed it on the back of his neck. The unexpected intimacy of this contact sent a shock through Kanai’s arm and he snatched his hand back — but not before he had felt the goosebumps bristling on the moist surface of Fokir’s skin.

  Fokir smiled at him again. “That’s how I know,” he said. “It’s the fear that tells me.” Rising to a crouch, Fokir directed a look of inquiry at Kanai. “And what about you?” he said. “Can you feel the fear?”

  These words triggered a response in Kanai that was just as reflexive as the goosebumps on Fokir’s neck. The surroundings — the mangrove forest, the water, the boat — were suddenly blotted from his consciousness; he forgot where he was. It was as though his mind had decided to revert to the functions for which it had been trained and equipped by years of practice. At that moment nothing existed for him but language, the pure structure of sound that had formed Fokir’s question. He gave this inquiry the fullest attention of which his mind was capable and knew the answer almost at once: it was in the negative; the truth was that he did not feel the fear that had raised bumps on Fokir’s skin. It was not that he was a man of unusual courage — far from it. But he knew also that fear was not — contrary to what was often said — an instinct. It was something learned, something that accumulated in the mind through knowledge, experience and upbringing. Nothing was harder to share than another person’s fear, and at that moment he certainly did not share Fokir’s.

  “Since you asked me,” Kanai said, “I’ll tell you the truth. The answer is no, I’m not afraid, at least not in the way you are.”

  Like a ring spreading across a pool, a ripple of awakened interest passed over Fokir’s face. “Then tell me,” he said, leaning closer, “if you’re not afraid, there’s nothing to prevent you from taking a closer look. Is there?”

  His gaze was steady and unblinking, and Kanai would not allow himself to drop his eyes: Fokir had just doubled the stakes, and it was up to him now to decide whether he would back down or call his bluff.

  “All right,” Kanai said, not without some reluctance. “Let’s go.”

  Fokir nodded and turned the boat using a single oar. When the bow pointed toward the shore he started to row. Kanai glanced across the water: the river was as calm as a floor of polished stone and the currents etched on its surface appeared almost stationary, like the veins in a slab of marble.

  “Fokir, tell me something,” said Kanai.

  “What?”

  “If you’re afraid, then why do you want to go there — to that island?”

  “My mother told me,” Fokir said, “that this was a place where you had to learn not to be afraid. And if you did, then you might find the answer to your troubles.”

  “Is that why you come here?”

  “Who’s to say?” He shrugged, smiling, and then he said, “Now, can I ask you something, Kanai-babu?”

  He was smiling broadly, leading Kanai to expect he would make some kind of joke. “What?”

  “Are you a clean man, Kanai-babu?”

  Kanai sat up, startled. “What do you mean?”

  Fokir shrugged. “You know — are you good at heart?”

  “I think so,” Kanai said. “My intentions are good, anyway. As for the rest, who knows?”

  “But don’t you ever want to know for sure?”

  “How can anyone ever know for sure?”

  “My mother used to say that here in Garjontola, Bon Bibi would show you whatever you wanted to know.”

  “How?”

  Fokir shrugged again. “That’s just what she used to say.”

  As they drew close to the island a flock of birds took wing, breaking away from the upper level of the canopy and swirling in a cloud before settling down again. The birds were parrots, of a color almost indistinguishable from the emerald tint of the mangroves; for a moment, when they rose in the air together, it was as though a green mane had risen from the treetops, like a wig lifted by a gust of wind.

  The boat picked up speed as it approached the bank and Fokir’s final stroke rammed the prow deep into the mud. Tucking his lungi between his legs, he dropped over the side of the boat and went running over the bank to examine the marks.

  “I was right,” cried Fokir triumphantly, dropping to his knees. “These marks are so fresh they must have been made within the hour.”

  To Kanai the depressions looked just as shapeless as they had before. “I don’t see anything,” he said.

  “How could you?” Fokir looked up at the boat and smiled. “You’re too far away. You’ll have to get off the boat. Come over here and look. You’ll see how they go all the way up.” He pointed up the slope to the barrier of mangrove looming above.

  “All right, I’m comi
ng.” Kanai was turning to jump when Fokir stopped him. “No. Wait. First roll up your pants and then take your slippers off, or else you’ll lose them in the mud. It’s better to be barefoot.”

  Kanai kicked off his sandals and rolled his trousers up to his knees. Then, swinging his feet over the gunwale, he dropped over the side and sank into the mud. His body lurched forward and he reached quickly for the boat, steadying himself against the gunwale: to fall in the mud now would be a humiliation too painful to contemplate. He pulled his right foot carefully out of the mud and planted it a little way ahead. In this fashion, by repeating these childlike steps, he was able to get across to Fokir’s side without mishap.

  “Look,” said Fokir, gesturing at the ground. “Here are the claws and there’s the pad.” He turned to point up the slope. “And see, that’s the way it went, past those trees. It might be watching you even now.”

  There was a mocking note in his voice that stung Kanai. He stood up straight and said, “What are you trying to do, Fokir? Are you trying to frighten me?”

  “Frighten you?” said Fokir, smiling. “But why would you be frightened? Didn’t I tell you what my mother said? No one who is good at heart has anything to fear in this place.”

  Then, turning on his heel, Fokir went back to the boat, across the mudbank, and reached under the hood. When he straightened up again, Kanai saw that he had drawn out his dá.

  As Fokir advanced toward him, blade in hand, Kanai recoiled reflexively. “What’s that for?” he said, raising his eyes from the instrument’s glistening edge.

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Fokir. “It’s for the jungle. Don’t you want to go and see if we can find the maker of these marks?”

  Even in that moment of distraction, Kanai noticed — so tenacious were the habits of his profession — that Fokir was using a different form of address with him now. From the respectful apni that he had been using before, he had switched to the same familiar tui Kanai had used in addressing him: it was as though in stepping onto the island, the authority of their positions had been reversed.