THE HUNGRY TIDE
AMITAV GHOSH

Dedication

For Lila

Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005

Copyright © Amitav Ghosh 2004

Cover photographs © Trygve Bolstad/Panos Pictures (people in boat); Photodisc Green/Getty Images (reeds); Shahidul Alam/Panos Pictures (ox carts); George McCarthy/Corbis (mangrove swamps)

Amitav Ghosh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

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Source ISBN: 9780007141784

Ebook Edition © JULY 2012 ISBN: 9780007368761

Version: 2016-04-07

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Copyright

PART ONE

The Ebb: Bhata

The Tide Country

An Invitation

Canning

The Launch

Lusibari

The Fall

S’Daniel

Snell’s Window

The Trust

Fokir

The Letter

The Boat

Nirmal and Nilima

At Anchor

Kusum

Words

The Glory of Bon Bibi

Stirrings

Morichjhãpi

An Epiphany

Moyna

Crabs

Travels

Garjontola

A Disturbance

Listening

Blown Ashore

A Hunt

Dreams

Pursued

PART TWO

The Flood: Jowar

Beginning Again

Landfall

A Feast

Catching Up

Storms

Negotiations

Habits

A Sunset

Transformation

A Pilgrimage

Destiny

The Megha

Memory

Intermediaries

Besieged

Words

Crimes

Leaving Lusibari

An Interruption

Alive

A Post Office on Sunday

A Killing

Interrogations

Mr Sloane

Kratie

Signs

Lights

A Search

Casualties

A Gift

Fresh Water and Salt

Horizons

Losses

Going Ashore

The Wave

The Day After

Home: An Epilogue

Keep Reading

About the Author

Author’s Note

Praise

About the Publisher

PART ONE The Ebb: Bhata

The Tide Country

Kanai spotted her the moment he stepped onto the crowded platform: he was deceived neither by her close-cropped black hair, nor by her clothes, which were those of a teenage boy – loose cotton pants and an oversized white shirt. Winding unerringly through the snack-vendors and tea-sellers who were hawking their wares on the station’s platform, his eyes settled on her slim, shapely figure. Her face was long and narrow, with an elegance of line markedly at odds with the severity of her haircut. There was no bindi on her forehead and her arms were free of bangles and bracelets, but on one of her ears was a silver stud, glinting brightly against the sun-deepened darkness of her skin.

Kanai liked to think that he had the true connoisseur’s ability to both praise and appraise women, and he was intrigued by the way she held herself, by the unaccustomed delineation of her stance. It occurred to him suddenly that perhaps, despite her silver ear-stud and the tint of her skin, she was not Indian, except by descent. And the moment the thought occurred to him, he was convinced of it: she was a foreigner; it was stamped in her posture, in the way she stood, balancing on her heels like a flyweight boxer, with her feet planted apart. Among a crowd of college girls on Kolkata’s Park Street she might not have looked entirely out of place, but here, against the sooty backdrop of the commuter station at Dhakuria, the neatly composed androgyny of her appearance seemed out of place, almost exotic.

Why would a foreigner, a young woman, be standing in a south Kolkata commuter station, waiting for the train to Canning? It was true of course that this line was the only rail connection to the Sundarbans. But so far as he knew it was never used by tourists – the few who travelled in that direction usually went by boat, hiring steamers or launches on Kolkata’s riverfront. The train was mainly used by people who did daily-passengeri, coming in from outlying villages to work in the city.

He saw her turning to ask something of a bystander and was seized by an urge to listen in. Language was both his livelihood and his addiction and he was often preyed upon by a near-irresistible compulsion to eavesdrop on conversations in public places. Pushing his way through the crowd he arrived within earshot just in time to hear her finish a sentence that ended with the words ‘train to Canning?’ One of the onlookers began to explain, gesticulating with an upraised arm. But the explanation was in Bengali and it was lost on her. She stopped the man with a raised hand and said, in apology, that she knew no Bengali: ami Bangla jani na. He could tell from the awkwardness of her pronunciation that this was literally true: like strangers everywhere, she had learnt just enough of the language to be able to provide due warning of her incomprehension.

Kanai was the one other ‘outsider’ on the platform and he quickly attracted his own share of attention. He was of medium height and at the age of forty-two his hair, which was still thick, had begun to show a few streaks of grey at the temples. In the tilt of his head, as in the width of his stance, there was a quiet certainty, an indication of a well-grounded belief in his ability to prevail, in most circumstances. Although his face was otherwise unlined, his eyes had fine wrinkles fanning out from their edges – but these grooves, by heightening the mobility of his face, emphasized more his youth than his age. Although he was once slight of build, his waist had thickened over the years but he still carried himself lightly, and with an alertness bred of the traveller’s instinct for inhabiting the moment.

It so happened that Kanai was carrying a wheeled airline bag with a telescoping handle. To the vendors and travelling salesmen who plied their wares on the Canning line, this piece of luggage was just one of the many details of Kanai’s appearance – along with his sunglasses, corduroy trousers and suede shoes – that suggested middle-aged prosperity and metropolitan affluence. As a result he was besieged by hawkers, urchins and bands of youths who were raising funds for a varied assortment of causes: it was only when the green-and-yellow electric train finally pulled in that he was able to shake off this importuning entourage.

While climbing in, he noticed that the foreign girl was not without some experience in travel: she hefted her two huge backpacks herself, brushing aside the half-dozen porters who were hovering around her. There was a strength in her limbs that belied her diminutive size and wispy build; she swung the backpacks into the compartment with practised ease and pushed her way through a crowd of milling passengers. Briefly he wondered whether he ought to tell her that there was a special compartment for women. But she was swept inside and he lost sight of her.

Then the whistle blew and Kanai breasted the crowd himself. On stepping in he glimpsed a seat and quickly lowered himself into it. He had been planning to do some reading on this trip and in trying to get his papers out of his suitcase it struck him that the seat he had found was not altogether satisfactory. There was not enough light to read by and to his right there was a woman with a wailing baby: he knew it would be hard to concentrate if he had to fend off a pair of tiny flying fists. It occurred to him, on reflection, that the seat on his left was preferable to his own, being right beside the window – the only problem was that it was occupied by a man immersed in a Bengali newspaper. Kanai took a moment to size up the newspaper reader and saw that he was an elderly and somewhat subdued-looking person, someone who might well be open to a bit of persuasion.

‘Aré moshai, can I just say a word?’ Kanai smiled as he bore down on his neighbour with the full force of his persuasiveness. ‘If it isn’t all that important to you, would you mind changing places with me? I have a lot of work to do and the light is better by the window.’

The newspaper reader goggled in astonishment and for a moment it seemed he might even protest or resist. But on taking in Kanai’s clothes and all the other details of his appearance, he underwent a change of mind: this was clearly someone with a long reach, someone who might be on familiar terms with policemen, politicians and others of importance. Why court trouble? He gave in gracefully and made way for Kanai to sit beside the window.

Kanai was pleased to have achieved his end without a fuss. Nodding his thanks to the newspaper reader, he resolved to buy him a cup of tea when a cha’ala next appeared at the window. Then he reached into the outer flap of his suitcase and pulled out a few sheets of paper covered in closely written Bengali script. He smoothed the pages over his knees and began to read.

‘In our legends it is said that the goddess Ganga’s descent from the heavens would have split the earth had Lord Shiva not tamed her torrent by tying it into his ash-smeared locks. To hear this story is to see the river in a certain way: as a heavenly braid, for instance, an immense rope of water, unfurling through a wide and thirsty plain. That there is a further twist to the tale becomes apparent only in the final stages of the river’s journey – and this part of the story always comes as a surprise, because it is never told and thus never imagined. It is this: there is a point at which the braid comes undone; where Lord Shiva’s matted hair is washed apart into a vast, knotted tangle. Once past that point the river throws off its bindings and separates into hundreds, maybe thousands, of tangled strands.

‘Until you behold it for yourself, it is almost impossible to believe that here, interposed between the sea and the plains of Bengal, lies an immense archipelago of islands. But that is what it is: an archipelago, stretching for almost three hundred kilometres, from the Hooghly River in West Bengal to the shores of the Meghna in Bangladesh.

‘The islands are the trailing threads of India’s fabric, the ragged fringe of her sari, the ãchol that follows her, half-wetted by the sea. They number in the thousands, these islands; some are immense and some no larger than sandbars; some have lasted through recorded history while others were washed into being just a year or two ago. These islands are the rivers’ restitution, the offerings through which they return to the earth what they have taken from it, but in such a form as to assert their permanent dominion over their gift. The rivers’ channels are spread across the land like a fine-mesh net, creating a terrain where the boundaries between land and water are always mutating, always unpredictable. Some of these channels are mighty waterways, so wide across that one shore is invisible from the other; others are no more than two or three kilometres long and only a few hundred metres across. Yet, each of these channels is a ‘river’ in its own right, each possessed of its own strangely evocative name. When these channels meet, it is often in clusters of four, five or even six: at these confluences, the water stretches to the far edges of the landscape and the forest dwindles into a distant rumour of land, echoing back from the horizon. In the language of the place, such a confluence is spoken of as a mohona – an oddly seductive word, wrapped in many layers of beguilement.

‘There are no borders here to divide fresh water from salt, river from sea. The tides reach as far as three hundred kilometres inland and every day thousands of acres of forest disappear underwater, only to re-emerge hours later. The currents are so powerful as to reshape the islands almost daily – some days the water tears away entire promontories and peninsulas; at other times it throws up new shelves and sandbanks where there were none before.

‘When the tides create new land, overnight mangroves begin to gestate, and if the conditions are right they can spread so fast as to cover a new island within a few short years. A mangrove forest is a universe unto itself, utterly unlike other woodlands or jungles. There are no towering, vine-looped trees, no ferns, no wildflowers, no chattering monkeys or cockatoos. Mangrove leaves are tough and leathery, the branches gnarled and the foliage often impassably dense. Visibility is short and the air still and fetid. At no moment can human beings have any doubt of the terrain’s hostility to their presence, of its cunning and resourcefulness, of its determination to destroy or expel them. Every year, dozens of people perish in the embrace of that dense foliage, killed by tigers, snakes and crocodiles.

‘There is no prettiness here to invite the stranger in: yet, to the world at large this archipelago is known as “the Sundarban”, which means, “the beautiful forest”. There are some who believe the word to be derived from the name of a common species of mangrove – the sundari tree, Heriteria minor. But the word’s origin is no easier to account for than is its present prevalence, for in the record books of the Mughal emperors this region is named not in reference to a tree but to a tide – bhati. And to the inhabitants of the islands this land is known as bhatir desh – the tide country – except that bhati is not just the “tide” but one tide in particular, the ebb-tide, the bhata. This is a land half-submerged at high tide: it is only in falling that the water gives birth to the forest. To look upon this strange parturition, midwived by the moon, is to know why the name “tide country” is not just right but necessary. For as with Rilke’s catkins hanging from the hazel and the spring rain upon the dark earth, when we behold the lowering tide

‘we, who have always thought of joy

as rising … feel the emotion

that almost amazes us

when a happy thing falls.’

An Invitation

The train was at a standstill, some twenty minutes outside Kolkata, when an unexpected stroke of luck presented Piya with an opportunity to avail herself of a seat beside a window. She had been sitting in the stuffiest part of the compartment, on the edge of a bench, with her backpacks arrayed around her: now, moving to the window, she saw that the train had stopped at a station called Champahati. A platform sloped down into a huddle of hutments before sinking into a pond filled with foaming grey sludge. She could tell, from the density of the crowds on the train, that this was how it would be all the way to Canning: strange to think that this was the threshold of the Sundarbans, this jungle of shacks and shanties, spanned by the tracks of a commuter train.

Looking over her shoulder, Piya spotted a tea-seller patrolling the platform. Reaching through the bars, she summoned him with a wave. She had never cared for the kind of chai sold in Seattle, her hometown, but somehow, in the ten days she had spent in India she had developed an unexpected affinity for milky, overboiled tea served in earthenware cups. There were no spices in it for one thing, and this was more to her taste than the chai at home.

She paid for her tea and was trying to manoeuvre the cup through the bars of the window when the man in the seat opposite her own suddenly flipped over a page, jolting her hand. She turned her wrist quickly enough to make sure that most of the tea spilled out of the window, but she could not prevent a small trickle from shooting over his papers.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ Piya was mortified: of everyone in the compartment, this was the last person she would have chosen to scald with her tea. She had noticed him while waiting on the platform in Kolkata and she had been struck by the self-satisfied tilt of his head and the unabashed way in which he stared at everyone around him, taking them in, sizing them up, sorting them all into their places. She had noticed the casual self-importance with which he had evicted the man who’d been sitting next to the window. She had been put in mind of some of her relatives in Kolkata: they too seemed to share the assumption that they had been granted some kind of entitlement (was it because of their class or their education?) that allowed them to expect that life’s little obstacles and annoyances would always be swept away to suit their convenience.

‘Here,’ said Piya, producing a handful of tissues. ‘Let me help you clean up.’

‘There’s nothing to be done,’ he said testily. ‘These pages are ruined anyway.’

She flinched as he crumpled up the papers he had been reading and tossed them out of the window. ‘I hope they weren’t important,’ she said in a small voice.

‘Nothing irreplaceable – just Xeroxes.’

For a moment she considered pointing out that it was he who had jogged her hand. But all she could bring herself to say was, ‘I’m very sorry. I hope you’ll excuse me.’

‘Do I really have a choice?’ he said in a tone more challenging than ironic. ‘Does anyone have a choice when they’re dealing with Americans these days?’

Piya had no wish to get into an argument so she let this pass. Instead she opened her eyes wide, feigning admiration, and said, ‘But how did you guess?’

‘About what?’

‘About my being American? You’re very observant.’

This seemed to mollify him. His shoulders relaxed as he leaned back in his seat. ‘I didn’t guess,’ he said. ‘I knew.’

‘And how did you know?’ she said. ‘Was it my accent?’

‘Yes,’ he said with a nod. ‘I’m very rarely wrong about accents. I’m a translator you see, and an interpreter as well, by profession. I like to think that my ears are tuned to the nuances of spoken language.’

‘Oh really?’ She smiled so that her teeth shone brightly in the dark oval of her face. ‘And how many languages do you know?’

‘Six. Not including dialects.’

‘Wow!’ Her admiration was unfeigned now. ‘I’m afraid English is my only language. And I wouldn’t claim to be much good at it either.’

A frown of puzzlement appeared on his forehead. ‘And you’re on your way to Canning you said?’

‘Yes.’

‘But tell me this,’ he said. ‘If you don’t know any Bengali or Hindi, how are you planning to find your way around over there?’

‘I’ll do what I usually do,’ she said with a laugh. ‘I’ll try to wing it. Anyway, in my line of work there’s not much talk needed.’

‘And what is your line of work, if I may ask?’

‘I’m a cetologist,’ she said. ‘That means—’ She was beginning, almost apologetically, to expand on this when he interrupted her.

‘I know what it means,’ he said sharply. ‘You don’t need to explain. It means you study marine mammals. Right?’

‘Yes,’ she said, nodding. ‘You’re very well informed. Marine mammals are what I study – dolphins, whales, dugongs and so on. My work takes me out on the water for days sometimes, with no one to talk to – no one who speaks English, anyway.’

‘So is it your work that takes you to Canning?’

‘That’s right. I’m hoping to wangle a permit to do a survey of the marine mammals of the Sundarbans.’

For once he was silenced, although only briefly. ‘I’m amazed,’ he said presently. ‘I didn’t even know there were any such.’

‘Oh yes, there are,’ she said. ‘Or there used to be, anyway. Very large numbers of them.’

‘Really? All we ever hear about is the tigers and the crocodiles.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘The cetacean population has kind of disappeared from view. No one knows whether it’s because they’re gone or because they haven’t been studied. There hasn’t ever been a proper survey.’

‘And why’s that?’

‘Maybe because it’s impossible to get permission?’ she said. ‘There was a team here last year. They prepared for months, sent in their papers and everything. But they didn’t even make it out on the water. Their permits were withdrawn at the last minute.’

‘And why do you think you’ll fare any better?’

‘It’s easier to slip through the net if you’re on your own,’ she said. There was a brief pause and then, with a tight-lipped smile, she added, ‘Besides, I have an uncle in Kolkata who’s a big wheel in the government. He’s spoken to someone in the Forest Department’s office in Canning. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.’

‘I see.’ He seemed to be impressed as much by her candour as her canniness. ‘So you have relatives in Calcutta then?’

‘Yes. In fact I was born there myself, although my parents left when I was just a year old.’ She turned a sharp glance on him, raising an eyebrow. ‘I see you still say “Calcutta”. My father does that too.’

Kanai acknowledged the correction with a nod. ‘You’re right – I should be more careful, but the re-naming was so recent that I do get confused sometimes. I try to reserve “Calcutta” for the past and “Kolkata” for the present but occasionally I slip. Especially when I’m speaking English.’ He smiled and put out a hand. ‘I should introduce myself; I’m Kanai Dutt.’

‘And I’m Piyali Roy – but everyone calls me Piya.’

She could tell he was surprised by the unmistakably Bengali sound of her name: evidently her ignorance of the language had given him the impression that her family’s origins lay in some other part of India.

‘You have a Bengali name,’ he said, raising an eyebrow. ‘And yet you know no Bangla?’

‘It’s not my fault really,’ she said quickly, her voice growing defensive. ‘I grew up in Seattle. I was so little when I left India that I never had a chance to learn.’

‘By that token, having grown up in Calcutta, I should speak no English.’

‘Except that I just happen to be terrible at languages …’ She let the sentence trail away, unfinished, and then changed the subject. ‘And what brings you to Canning, Mr Dutt?’

‘Kanai – call me Kanai.’

‘Kan-ay.’

He was quick to correct her when she stumbled over the pronunciation: ‘Say it to rhyme with Hawaii.’

‘Kanaii?’

‘Yes, that’s right. And to answer your question – I’m on my way to visit an aunt of mine.’

‘She lives in Canning?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘She lives in a place called Lusibari. It’s quite a long way from Canning.’

‘Where exactly?’ Piya unzipped a pocket in one of her backpacks and pulled out a map. ‘Show me. On this.’

Kanai spread the map out and used a fingertip to trace a winding line through the tidal channels and waterways. ‘Canning is the railhead for the Sundarbans,’ he said, ‘and Lusibari is the farthest of the inhabited islands. It’s a long way upriver – you have to go past Annpur, Jamespur and Emilybari. And there it is: Lusibari.’

Piya knitted her eyebrows as she looked at the map. ‘Strange names.’

‘You’d be surprised how many places in the Sundarbans have names that come from English,’ Kanai said. ‘Lusibari just means “Lucy’s House”.’

‘Lucy’s House?’ Piya looked up in surprise. ‘As in the name “Lucy”?’

‘Yes.’ A gleam came into his eyes and he said, ‘You should come and visit the place. I’ll tell you the story of how it got its name.’

‘Is that an invitation?’ Piya said, smiling.

‘Absolutely,’ Kanai responded. ‘Come. I’m inviting you. Your company will lighten the burden of my exile.’

Piya laughed. She had thought at first that Kanai was much too full of himself, but now she was inclined to be slightly more generous in her assessment: she had caught sight of a glimmer of irony somewhere that made his self-centredness appear a little more interesting than she had first imagined.

‘But how would I find you?’ she said. ‘Where would I look?’

‘Just make your way to the hospital in Lusibari,’ said Kanai, ‘and ask for “Mashima”. They’ll take you to my aunt and she’ll know where I am.’

‘Mashima?’ said Piya. ‘But I have a “Mashima” too – doesn’t it just mean “aunt”? There must be more than one aunt there: yours can’t be the only one?’

‘If you go to the hospital and ask for “Mashima”,’ said Kanai, ‘everyone will know who you mean. My aunt founded it, you see, and she heads the organization that runs it – the Badabon Trust. She’s a real personage on the island – everyone calls her “Mashima”, even though her real name is Nilima Bose. They were quite a pair, she and her husband. People always called him “Saar” just as they call her “Mashima”.’

‘Saar? And what does that mean?’

Kanai laughed. ‘It’s just a Bangla way of saying “Sir”. He was the headmaster of the local school, you see, so all his pupils called him “Sir”. In time people forgot he had a real name – Nirmal Bose.’

‘I notice you’re speaking of him in the past tense.’

‘Yes. He’s been dead a long time.’ No sooner had he spoken than Kanai pulled a face, as if to disclaim what he had just said. ‘But to tell you the truth, right now it doesn’t feel like he’s been gone a long time.’

‘How come?’

‘Because he’s risen from his ashes to summon me,’ Kanai said with a smile. ‘You see, he’d left some papers for me at the time of his death. They’d been lost all these years, but now they’ve turned up again. That’s why I’m on my way there: my aunt wanted me to come and look at them.’

Hearing a note of muted complaint in his voice, Piya said, ‘It sounds as if you weren’t too eager to go.’

‘No, I wasn’t, to be honest,’ he said. ‘I have a lot to attend to and this was a particularly busy time. It wasn’t easy to take a week off.’

‘Is this the first time you’ve come, then?’ said Piya.

‘No, it’s not,’ said Kanai. ‘I was sent down here once, years ago.’

‘Sent down? Why?’

‘It’s a story that involves the word “rusticate”,’ said Kanai with a smile. ‘Are you familiar with it?’

‘No. Can’t say I am.’

‘It was a punishment, dealt out to schoolboys who misbehaved,’ said Kanai. ‘They were sent off to suffer the company of rustics. As a boy I was of the opinion that I knew more about most things than my teachers did. There was an occasion once when I publicly humiliated a teacher who had the unfortunate habit of pronouncing the word “lion” as if it overlapped, in meaning as in rhyme, with the word “groin”. I was about ten at the time. One thing led to another and my tutors persuaded my parents I had to be rusticated. I was sent off to stay with my aunt and uncle, in Lusibari.’ He laughed at the memory. ‘That was a long time ago, in 1970.’

The train had begun to slow down now and Kanai was interrupted by a sudden blast from the engine’s horn. Glancing through the window, he spotted a yellow signboard that said, ‘Canning’.

‘We’re there,’ he said. He seemed suddenly regretful that their conversation had come to an end. Tearing off a piece of paper, he wrote a few words on it and pressed it into her hands. ‘Here – this’ll help you remember where to find me.’

The train had ground to a halt now and people were surging towards the doors of the compartment. Rising to her feet, Piya slung her backpacks over her shoulders. ‘Maybe we’ll meet again.’

‘I hope so.’ He raised a hand to wave. ‘Be careful with the man-eaters.’

‘Take care yourself. Goodbye.’

Canning

Kanai watched Piya’s back with interest as she disappeared into the crowd on the platform. Although unmarried, he was, as he liked to say, rarely single: over the last many years, several women had drifted in and out of his life. More often than not, these relationships ended – or persisted – in a spirit of affectionate cordiality. The most recent however, which was with a well-known young Odissi dancer, had not ended well. Two weeks earlier she had stormed out of his house and forbidden him ever to call her again. He hadn’t taken this seriously until he tried to call her cellphone only to find that she had given it to her driver. This had come as a considerable blow to his pride and in the aftermath he had tried to plunge himself into a short affair of the kind that might serve to suture the wound suffered by his vanity: that is to say, he had sought, without success, a liaison where it would fall to him to decide both the beginning and the end. In coming to Lusibari, he had resigned himself to the idea of briefly interrupting this quest – but if life had taught him any lesson, it was that opportunities often arose unexpectedly. Piya appeared to be a case in point. It was not often such a perfectly crafted situation presented itself: with his departure foreordained in nine days, his escape was assured. If Piya decided to avail herself of his invitation, then there was no reason not to savour whatever pleasures might be on offer.

Kanai waited till the crowd had thinned before stepping down to the platform. Then, with his suitcase resting between his feet, he paused to cast an unhurried glance around the station.

It was late November and the weather was crisp and cool, with a gentle breeze and honeyed sunlight. Yet the station had a look of bleak, downtrodden fatigue, like one of those grassless city parks, where the soil has been worn thin by the pressure of hurrying feet: the tracks glistened under slicks of shit, urine and refuse, and the platform looked as if it had been pounded into the earth by the sheer weight of the traffic that passed over it.

More than thirty years had gone by since he first set foot in this station but he still remembered vividly the astonishment with which he had said to his uncle and aunt, ‘But there are so many people here!’

Nirmal had smiled in surprise. ‘What did you expect? A jungle?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s only in films, you know, that jungles are empty of people. Here there are places that are as crowded as any Kolkata bazaar. And on some of the rivers you’ll find more boats than there are trucks on the Grand Trunk Road.’

Of all his faculties, Kanai most prided himself on his memory. When people praised him for his linguistic abilities, his response was usually to say that a good ear and a good memory were all it took to learn a language, and he was fortunate to possess both. It gave him a pleasurable feeling of satisfaction now to think that he could still recall the precise tone and timbre of Nirmal’s voice, despite the decades that had passed since he had last heard it.

Kanai smiled to recall his last encounter with Nirmal, which dated back to the late 1970s when Kanai was a college student in Calcutta. He had been hurrying to get to a lecture, and while running past the displays of old books on the university’s footpaths he’d barrelled into someone who was browsing at one of the stalls. A book had gone flying into the air and landed in a puddle. Kanai was about to swear at the man he had bumped into, Bokachoda! Why didn’t you get out of my way?, when he recognized his uncle’s wide, wondering eyes blinking behind a pair of thick-rimmed eyeglasses.

‘Kanai? Is that you?’

‘Aré tumi!’ In bending down to touch his uncle’s feet, Kanai had also picked up the book Nirmal had dropped. His eyes had fallen on the now-damaged spine, and he had noticed it was a translation of François Bernier’s Travels in the Mughal Empire.

The bookseller, meanwhile, had begun to yell, ‘You have to pay – it’s expensive that book, and it’s ruined now.’ A glance at his uncle’s stricken face told Kanai that he didn’t have the money to buy the book. It so happened that Kanai had just been paid for an article he had sent to a newspaper. Reaching for his wallet, Kanai had paid the bookseller and thrust the book into Nirmal’s hands, all in one flowing motion. Then, to forestall an awkward expression of gratitude on his uncle’s part, he had mumbled, ‘I’m late, have to run,’ and had then fled, leaping over a puddle.

In the years since he had always imagined that when he next ran into Nirmal it would be in a similar fashion – Nirmal would be in a bookshop fondling some volume he could not afford and he, Kanai, would reach discreetly into his own pocket to buy him the book. But it hadn’t happened that way: two years after that accidental encounter, Nirmal had died in Lusibari, after a long illness. Nilima had told Kanai then that his uncle had remembered him on his deathbed: he had said something about some writings that he wanted to send to him. But Nirmal had been incoherent for many months and Nilima had not known what to make of this declaration. After his death, she had looked everywhere, just in case there was something to it. Nothing had turned up, so she had assumed Nirmal’s mind had been wandering, as it often did.

Then suddenly one morning, two months before, Nilima had called Kanai at his flat in New Delhi’s Chittaranjan Park; she was in Gosaba, a town near Lusibari, calling from a telephone booth. Kanai was sitting at his dining table, waiting for his cook to bring him his breakfast, when the telephone rang.

‘Kanai-ré?’

They were exchanging the usual greetings and polite inquiries when he detected a note of constraint in her voice. He said, ‘Is something the matter? Are you calling for some special reason?’

‘Actually, yes,’ she said, a little awkwardly.

‘What is it? Tell me.’

‘I was thinking it would be good if you could come to Lusibari soon, Kanai,’ she said. ‘Do you think you could?’

Kanai was taken aback. It so happened that Nilima was childless and he was her closest relative, yet he could not remember any occasion when she had made such a demand. She had always been very much her own person and it was out of character for her to ask a favour. ‘Why do you want me to come to Lusibari?’ Kanai said, in surprise.

The phone went quiet for a moment and then she said, ‘Do you remember, Kanai, I told you years ago that Nirmal had left some writings for you?’

‘Yes,’ said Kanai. ‘Of course I remember. But they were never found, were they?’

‘That’s the thing,’ said Nilima. ‘I think I’ve found them: a packet addressed to you has turned up.’

‘Where?’ said Kanai.

‘In Nirmal’s study. It’s on the roof of the place where I live, on top of the Trust’s Guest House. All these years, after he died, it’s been locked just as it was. But now it’s going to be torn down, because we need to build another floor. I was clearing it out the other day and that was when I found it.’

‘And what was inside?’

‘It must be all the essays and poems he wrote over the years. But the truth is, I don’t know. I didn’t open it because I knew he’d have wanted you to look at them first. He never trusted my literary judgement – and it’s true I’m not much good at that kind of thing. That’s why I was hoping you could come. Perhaps you could even arrange to have them published. You know some publishers, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do,’ he said, flustered. ‘But going to Lusibari? It’s so far after all – from New Delhi it’ll take two days to get there. I mean, of course, I’d like to but—’

‘I’d be very grateful if you could, Kanai.’

This was said in the quiet but firm tone of voice Nilima used when she was determined to get her way. Kanai knew now that she was in earnest and would not be put off easily. In their family, Nilima was legendary for her persistence – her doggedness and tenacity had built the Badabon Trust into what it was, an organization widely cited as a model for NGOs working in rural India.

Kanai made one last attempt to give her the slip. ‘Couldn’t you just send this packet by post?’

‘I wouldn’t trust a thing like this to the post,’ she said, in a shocked voice. ‘Who knows what might happen to it?’

‘It’s just that this is a very busy time,’ said Kanai. ‘I have so much to do.’

‘But Kanai,’ she said, ‘with you it’s always a busy time.’

‘That’s true enough.’ Kanai was the founder and chief executive of a small but thriving business. He ran a bureau of translators and interpreters that specialized in serving the expatriate communities of New Delhi: foreign diplomats, aid workers, charitable organizations, multinational companies and the like. Being the only such organization in the city, the services of Kanai’s agency were hugely in demand. This meant its employees were all overworked – none more so than Kanai himself.

‘So will you come, then?’ she said. ‘Every year you say you’ll visit but you never come. And I’m not getting any younger.’

He caught the pleading note in her voice and decided to check his impulse to fob her off. He had always been fond of Nilima and his affection had deepened after the death of his own mother, whom she closely resembled, in appearance if not in temperament. His admiration for her was genuine too: in founding his own business he had gained a fresh appreciation of what it took to build up and maintain an organization like hers – especially considering that, unlike his own agency, the Trust was not run for profit. He remembered, from his first visit, the dire poverty of the tide country and he thought it both inexplicable and remarkable that she had chosen to dedicate her life to working for the betterment of the people who lived there. Not that her work had gone unrecognized – the year before the president had actually decorated her with one of the country’s highest honours. But still, it amazed him that someone from a background like hers had lasted in Lusibari as long as she had – he knew from his mother’s accounts that they belonged to a family that was notable for its attachment to the creature comforts. And in Lusibari, as he knew from experience, there was little to be had by way of comforts and amenities.

Kanai had always extolled Nilima to his friends as someone who had made great sacrifices in the public interest, as a figure who was a throwback to an earlier era when people of means and education were less narrow, less selfish than now. All this made it somehow impossible to turn down Nilima’s simple request.

‘If you want me to come,’ he said, reluctantly, ‘then there’s nothing more to it. I’ll try to come for maybe ten days. Do you want me to leave immediately?’

‘No, no,’ Nilima said quickly. ‘You don’t have to come right away.’

‘That makes it a lot easier for me,’ said Kanai, in relief. His stormy but absorbing involvement with the Odissi dancer was then still heading in an interesting direction. To interrupt the natural trajectory of that relationship would have been a considerable sacrifice and he was glad he was not going to be put to that test. ‘I’ll be there in a month or two. I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve made the arrangements.’

‘I’ll be waiting.’

And now there she was, Nilima, sitting on a bench in the shaded section of the platform, sipping tea while a couple of dozen people milled around her, some vying for attention and some being held at bay by her entourage. Kanai made his way quietly to the outer edge of the circle and stood listening. A few among the crowd were supplicants who wanted jobs and some were would-be politicians hoping to enlist her support. But for the most part, the people there were just well-wishers who wanted nothing more than to look at Nilima and to be warmed by her gaze.

At the age of seventy-six, Nilima Bose was almost circular in shape and her face had the dimpled roundness of a waxing moon. Her voice was soft and had the splintered quality of a note sounded on a length of cracked bamboo. She was small in height and her wispy hair, which she wore in a knot at the back of her head, was still more dark than grey. It was her practice to dress in saris woven and crafted in the workshops of the Badabon Trust, garments almost always of cotton, with spidery borders executed in batik. It was in one such, a plain white widow’s sari, thinly bordered in black, that she had come to the station to receive Kanai.

Nilima’s customary manner was one of abstracted indulgence. Yet when the occasion demanded she was also capable of commanding prompt and unquestioning obedience – few would willingly cross her, for it was well known that Mashima, like many another figure of maternal nurture, could be just as inventive in visiting retribution as she was in dispensing her benedictions. Now, on catching sight of Kanai, it took her no more than a snap of her fingers to silence the people around her. The crowd parted almost instantly to let Kanai through.

‘Kanai!’ Nilima cried. ‘Where were you?’ She ran a hand over his head as he bent down to touch her feet. ‘I was beginning to think you’d missed the train.’

‘I’m here now.’ She looked much more frail than Kanai remembered and he slipped an arm around her to help her to her feet. While members of her entourage took charge of his luggage, Kanai grasped her elbow and led her towards the station’s exit.

‘You shouldn’t have taken the trouble to come to the station,’ said Kanai. ‘I could have found my way to Lusibari.’ This was a polite lie for Kanai would have been at a loss to know how to proceed to Lusibari on his own. What was more, he would have been extremely annoyed if he had been left to fend for himself in Canning.

But Nilima took his words at face value. ‘I wanted to come,’ she said. ‘It’s nice to get away from Lusibari sometimes. But tell me, how was your ride on the train? I hope you weren’t bored.’

‘No,’ said Kanai. ‘I wasn’t. Actually I met an interesting young woman. An American.’

‘Oh?’ said Nilima. ‘What was she doing here?’

‘She’s doing research on dolphins and suchlike,’ Kanai said. ‘I asked her to visit us in Lusibari.’

‘Good. I hope she comes.’

‘Yes,’ said Kanai. ‘I hope so too.’

Suddenly Nilima came to a halt and snatched at Kanai’s elbow. ‘I sent you some pages that Nirmal had written,’ she said anxiously. ‘Did you get them?’

‘Yes,’ he said, nodding. ‘In fact, I was reading them on the train. Were they from the packet he left for me?’

‘No, no,’ said Nilima. ‘That was just something he wrote long ago. There was a time, you know, when he was so depressed I thought he needed something to keep him going. I asked him to write a little thing about the Sundarbans. I was hoping to be able to use it in one of our brochures, but it wasn’t really appropriate. Still, I thought it might interest you.’

‘O,’ said Kanai. ‘I somehow assumed it was a part of whatever he’d left for me.’

‘No,’ said Nilima. ‘I don’t know what’s in the packet: it’s sealed and I haven’t opened it. I know Nirmal wanted you to see it first. He told me that, just before his death.’

Kanai frowned. ‘Weren’t you curious, though?’

Nilima shook her head. ‘When you get to my age, Kanai,’ she said, ‘you’ll see it’s not easy to deal with reminders of loved ones who’ve moved on and left you behind. That’s why I wanted you to come.’

They stepped out of the station into a dusty street where paan-shops and snack-stands jostled for space with rows of tiny shops.

‘Kanai, I’m very glad you’re here at last,’ said Nilima. ‘But there’s one thing I don’t understand.’

‘What?’

‘Why did you insist on coming through Canning? It would have been so much easier if you had come through Basonti. No one comes this way nowadays.’

‘Really? Why not?’

‘Because of the river,’ she said. ‘It’s changed.’

‘How?’

She glanced up at him. ‘Wait. You’ll see soon enough.’

‘On the banks of every great river you’ll find a monument to excess.’

Kanai recalled the list of examples Nirmal had provided to prove this: the opera house of Manaus, the temple of Karnak, the ten thousand pagodas of Pagan. In the years since he had visited many of those places, and it made him laugh to think his uncle had insisted that Canning too had a place on that list: ‘The mighty Matla’s monument is Port Canning.’

The bazaars of Canning were much as he remembered, a jumble of narrow lanes, cramped shops and mildewed houses. There were a great many stalls selling patent medicines for neuralgia and dyspepsia – concoctions with names like ‘Hajmozyne’ and ‘Dardocytin’. The only buildings of any note were the cinema halls; immense in their ungainly solidity, they sat upon the town like sandbags, as though to prevent it from being washed away.

The bazaars ended in a causeway that led away from the town towards the Matla River. Although the causeway was a long one, it fell well short of the river: on reaching its end Kanai saw what Nilima had meant when she said the river had changed. He remembered the Matla as a vast waterway, one of the most formidable rivers he had ever seen. But it was low tide now and the river in the distance was no wider than a narrow ditch, flowing along the centre of a kilometre-wide bed. The freshly laid silt that bordered the water glistened in the sun like dunes of melted chocolate. From time to time, bubbles of air rose from the depths and burst through to the top, leaving rings on the burnished surface. The sounds they made seemed almost to form articulate patterns, as if to suggest they were giving voice to the depths of the earth itself.

‘Look over there,’ said Nilima, pointing downstream to a boat that had come sputtering down the remains of the river. Although the vessel could not have been more than nine metres in length, it was carrying at least a hundred passengers: it was so heavily loaded that the water was within fifteen centimetres of its gunwales. It came to a halt and the crew proceeded to extrude a long gangplank that led directly into the mudbank.

Kanai froze in disbelief. What would happen now? How would the boat’s passengers make their way across that vast expanse of billowing mud?

On the boat, preparations for the crossing were already in train. The women had hitched up their saris and the men were rolling up their lungis and trousers. On stepping off the plank, there was a long, drawn-out moment when each passenger sank slowly into the mud, like a spoon disappearing into a bowl of very thick daal; only when they were in up to their hips did their descent end and their forward movement begin. With their legs hidden from sight, all that was visible of their struggles was the twisting of their upper bodies.

Nilima frowned as she watched the men and women who were floundering through the mud. ‘Even to look at that hurts my knees,’ she said. ‘I could do it once, but I can’t any more – it’s too much for my legs. That’s the problem, you see: there isn’t as much water in the river nowadays and at low tide it gets very shallow. We brought the Trust’s launch to take you to Lusibari, but it’ll be at least two hours before it can make its way here to pick us up.’ She directed an accusatory glance at Kanai. ‘It really would have been so much easier if you had come through Basonti.’

‘I didn’t know,’ said Kanai ruefully. ‘I wish you’d told me. The only reason I wanted to come through Canning was that this was the route we took when you brought me to Lusibari in 1970.’

As he looked around, taking in the sights, Kanai had a vivid recollection of Nirmal’s silhouette, outlined against the sky. Nirmal had put him in mind of a long-legged waterbird – maybe a heron or a stork. The impression was heightened by his clothes and umbrella: his loose white drapes had flapped in the wind like a mantle of feathers, while the shape of his chhata was not unlike that of a long, pointed bill.

‘I still remember him, standing here, while we were waiting for a boat.’

‘Nirmal?’

‘Yes. He was dressed in his usual white dhuti-panjabi and he had his umbrella in his hands.’

Suddenly Nilima seized his elbow. ‘Stop, Kanai. Don’t talk about it. I can’t bear it.’

Kanai cut himself short. ‘Is it still upsetting for you? After all these years?’

Nilima shivered. ‘It’s just this place – this is where he was found, you know. Right here on the embankment in Canning. He only lived another couple of months after that. He must have been out in the rain, because he caught pneumonia.’

‘I didn’t know about that,’ Kanai said. ‘What brought him to Canning?’

‘I still don’t know for sure,’ Nilima said. ‘His behaviour had become very erratic, as it tended to when he was under stress. He had retired as headmaster some months before and was never the same again. He would disappear without leaving any word. It was around the time of the Morichjhãpi incident, so I was beside myself with worry.’

‘Oh?’ said Kanai. ‘What was that? I don’t recall it exactly.’

‘Some refugees had occupied one of the islands in the forest,’ Nilima said. ‘There was a confrontation with the authorities that resulted in a lot of violence. The government wanted to force the refugees to return to their resettlement camp in central India. They were being put into trucks and buses and taken away. In the meanwhile the whole district was filled with rumours. I was terrified of what might happen to Nirmal if he was found wandering around on his own: for all I knew he’d just been forced on to a bus and sent off.’

‘Is that what happened?’

‘That’s my suspicion,’ said Nilima. ‘But someone must have recognized him and let him off somewhere. He managed to make his way back to Canning – and this was where he was found, right here on this embankment.’

‘Didn’t you ask him where he’d been?’ Kanai said.

‘Of course I did, Kanai,’ Nilima said. ‘But by that time he was incapable of answering rationally; it was impossible to get any sense out of him. His only moment of clarity after that was when he mentioned this packet of writings he’d left for you. At the time I thought his mind was wandering again – but it turns out it wasn’t.’

Kanai put an arm around her shoulders. ‘It must have been very hard for you.’

Nilima raised a hand to wipe her eyes. ‘I still remember coming here to get him,’ she said. ‘He was standing here shouting, “The Matla will rise! The Matla will rise!” His clothes were all soiled and there was mud on his face. I’ll never get that image out of my head.’

A long-buried memory stirred in Kanai’s mind. ‘“The Matla will rise.” Is that what he was saying? He must have been thinking of that story he used to tell.’

‘What story?’ Nilima said sharply.

‘Don’t you remember? About the viceroy who built this port, and Mr Piddington, the man who invented the word “cyclone”, and how he predicted that the Matla would rise to drown Canning?’

‘Stop!’ Nilima clapped her hands over her ears. ‘Please don’t talk about it, Kanai. I can’t bear to remember all that. That’s why I wanted you to deal with this packet of his. I just don’t have the strength to revisit all of that.’

‘Of course,’ said Kanai, remorsefully. ‘I know it’s hard for you. I won’t mention it.’

Then too, Kanai remembered, there had been a long wait on the embankment. Not because of the tides or the mud, but because of a simple lack of boats heading in the right direction. He had sat with Nilima in a tea-stall while Nirmal was sent to stand atop the embankment to watch for boats.

Nirmal, Kanai remembered, had not been very effective at keeping watch. On his most recent visit to a bookshop, in Calcutta, he had bought a copy of a Bangla translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies – the translator, Buddhadeb Basu, was a poet he had once known. All the while he was meant to be watching for a boat, Nirmal’s attention had kept returning to his recent acquisition. For fear of Nilima he hadn’t dared to open the book. Instead, he had held it aslant across his chest, and stolen glances whenever he could.

Fortunately for them, they had not had to depend on Nirmal to find a boat. Someone had come to their rescue of his own accord. ‘Aré Mashima! You here?’ Before they could look around, a young man had come running up the embankment to touch Nilima’s feet.

‘Is it Horen?’ Nilima had said, squinting closely at his face. ‘Horen Naskor? Is it you?’

‘Yes, Mashima; it’s me.’ He was squat of build and heavily muscled, his face broad and flat, with eyes permanently narrowed against the sun. He was dressed in a threadbare lungi and a mud-stained vest.

‘And what are you doing in Canning, Horen?’ Nilima said.

‘Jongol korté geslam, I went to “do jungle” yesterday, Mashima,’ Horen replied, ‘and Bon Bibi granted me enough honey to fill two bottles. I came here to sell them.’

At this point Kanai had whispered into Nilima’s ear, ‘Who is Bon Bibi?’

‘The goddess of the forest,’ Nilima had whispered back. ‘In these parts, people believe she rules over all the animals of the jungle.’

‘O?’ Kanai had been astonished to think that a grown-up, a big strong man at that, could entertain such an idea. He had been unable to suppress the snort of laughter that rose to his lips.

‘Kanai!’ Nilima had been quick to scold. ‘Don’t act like you know everything. You’re not in Calcutta now.’

Kanai’s laugh had caught Horen’s attention too, and he had stooped to bring their faces level. ‘And who is this, Mashima?’

‘My nephew – my sister’s son,’ Nilima had explained. ‘He got into trouble in school so his parents sent him here – to teach him a lesson.’

‘You should send him over to me, Mashima,’ Horen had said with a smile. ‘I have three children of my own, and my oldest is not much smaller than him. I know what has to be done to teach a boy a lesson.’

‘Do you hear that, Kanai?’ Mashima had said. ‘That’s what I’ll do if there’s any nonsense from you – I’ll send you to live with Horen.’

This prospect had instantly sobered Kanai, removing the smile from his face. He had been greatly relieved when Horen had turned away from him to reach for Nilima’s luggage.

‘So, Mashima, are you waiting for a boat?’

‘Yes, Horen. We’ve been sitting here a long time.’

‘No more sitting, Mashima!’ Horen had said, hefting one of her bags on to his shoulders. ‘My own boat is here – I’ll take all of you home.’

Nilima had made a few unconvincing protests. ‘But it’s out of your way, Horen, isn’t it?’

‘Not far,’ Horen had said. ‘And you’ve done so much for Kusum. Why can’t I do this? You just wait here – I’ll bring the boat around.’

With that he had gone hurrying away, along the embankment. After he was out of earshot, Kanai had said to Nilima, ‘Who is that man? And what was he talking about? Who is Kusum?’

Horen was a fisherman, Nilima had explained, and he lived on an island called Satjelia, not far from Lusibari. He was younger than he looked, probably not yet twenty, but like many other tide country boys, he had been married off early – at the age of fourteen in his case. This was why he was already a father of three while still in his teens.

As for Kusum, she was a girl from his village, a fifteen-year-old, whom he had put into the care of the Women’s Union in Lusibari. Her father had died while foraging for firewood and her mother, without other means of support, had been forced to look for a job in the city. ‘It wasn’t safe for her on her own,’ Nilima had said. ‘All kinds of people tried to take advantage of her. Someone was even trying to sell her off. If Horen hadn’t rescued her who knows what might have happened?’

This had piqued Kanai’s interest. ‘Why?’ he had said. ‘What might have happened?’

Nilima’s eyes had grown sad, as they tended to do when she was reminded of those of the world’s ills she was powerless to remedy. ‘She might have been forced to lose her self-respect and honour; it happens often enough to poor girls who’re caught in that kind of situation.’

‘Oh?’ For all his precocity Kanai was unable to unravel the precise implications of Nilima’s euphemisms – yet he had understood enough of their meaning for his breath to quicken.

‘And where is this girl now?’ he had said.

‘In Lusibari,’ Nilima had replied. ‘You’ll meet her. Our Women’s Union is still looking after her.’

The conversation had ended, Kanai remembered, with his sprinting up the embankment to stand beside Nirmal. Kanai had scanned the river with eager eyes, looking for Horen’s boat. Till then the prospect of going to Lusibari had inspired nothing other than bored resentment, but the prospect of meeting this Kusum was something to look forward to.

The Launch

Deep in the interior of Canning’s bazaar Piya had come to a halt at the gates of the Forest Department’s offices. Because of the circumstances of her work she had, over the years, developed a reluctant familiarity with the officialdom of forests and fisheries. She had been expecting a grimy bureaucratic honeycomb and was taken aback to find herself looking at a small, brightly painted bungalow. Still, before stepping up to the entrance she steeled herself for what promised to be a very long day.

As it turned out, her experience was not quite as grim as she had anticipated. It did indeed take a full hour of waiting before she could even make her way past the first doorkeeper, but once she was inside her progress was unexpectedly swift. Thanks to her uncle’s influence, she was led almost immediately into the presence of a harried but obliging senior ranger. After a polite exchange she was handed over to a subordinate, who led her down a number of corridors, through cubicles of diminishing size. In between were long intervals of drinking tea, waiting, and staring at walls blotched with red paan-stains. But, apace or not, the paperwork did proceed and within a mere four hours of her entry into the building she was in possession of all the necessary documents.

It was only then, just as she was about to march out of the office, giddy with joy at her triumph, that she learnt that the procedures weren’t quite over yet – the last remaining requirement for her survey was that she be accompanied by a forest guard. Her face fell in dismay for she knew from previous experience that official escorts were always a hindrance and sometimes needed more attention than the survey itself; she would have far preferred to travel on her own, with only a boatman or pilot for company. But it was quickly made clear that this was not an option. In fact, a guard had already been assigned to her, a man who knew the route and would help with the hiring of a boat and all the other arrangements. She dropped the matter without further demur. It was good enough that she had got her papers so quickly – better not try her luck too far.

The guard, dressed in a starched khaki uniform, proved to be a small ferret-faced man. He greeted her with a deferential smile and his appearance provided no cause for misgiving – not until he produced a leather bandolier and a rifle. The sight of the weapons induced her to make her way back down the corridors to ask if the gun was really necessary. The answer was yes, it was; regulations required it because her route would take her through the tiger reserve. There was always the possibility of an attack.

There was nothing more to be said. Shouldering her backpacks, she followed the guard out of the bungalow.

They had not gone far before the guard’s demeanour began to change. Where he had been almost obsequious before, he now became quite officious, herding her ahead without any explanation of where they were going or why. In a short while she found herself at a teashop on the embankment, meeting with a man of vaguely thuggish appearance. The man’s name, so far as she could tell, was Mej-da: he was squat of build and there were many shiny chains and amulets hanging beneath his large, fleshy face. Neither he nor the guard spoke English but it was explained to her through intermediaries that Mej-da owned a launch that was available for hire: he was a seasoned guide who knew the area better than anyone else.

She asked to see the launch and was told that that would not be possible – it was anchored some distance away and they would have to take a boat to get to it. On inquiring about the price she was quoted a clearly excessive figure. She knew now that this was a set-up and she was being cheated. She made a desultory effort to find other boat-owners, but the sight of Mej-da and the guard scared them off. No one would approach her.

At this point she knew she was faced with a choice. She could either go back to lodge a complaint at the Forest Department’s office or agree to the proposed arrangement and get started on her survey. After having spent most of the day in that office, she could not bear to think of returning. She gave in and agreed to hire Mej-da’s launch.

On the way to the launch, remorse set in. Perhaps she was judging these men too harshly? Perhaps they really did possess great funds of local knowledge? In any event, there was no harm in seeing if they could be of help. In one of her backpacks she had a display card she had chosen especially for this survey. It pictured the two species of river dolphin known to inhabit these waters – the Gangetic dolphin and the Irrawaddy dolphin. The drawings were copied from a monograph that dated back to 1878. They were not the best or most lifelike pictures she had ever come across (she knew of innumerable more accurate or more realistic photographs and diagrams), but for some reason she’d always had good luck with these drawings: they seemed to make the animals more recognizable than other, more realistic representations.

In the past, on other rivers, display cards like these had sometimes been of great help in gathering information. When communication was possible, she would show them to fishermen and boatmen and ask questions about sightings, abundance, behaviour, seasonal distribution and so on. When there was no one to translate she would hold up the cards and wait for a response. This often worked; they would recognize the animal and point her to places where they were commonly seen. But as a rule only the most observant and experienced fishermen were able to make the connection between the pictures and the animals they represented. Relatively few had ever seen the whole, living creature, and their view of it was generally restricted to a momentary glimpse of a blowhole or a dorsal fin. This being so, it was not unusual for the cards to elicit unexpected reactions – but never before had this illustration provoked a response as strange as the one she got from Mej-da. First he turned the card around and looked at the picture upside down. Then, pointing to the illustration of the Gangetic dolphin he asked if it were a bird. She understood him because he used the English word: ‘Bird? Bird?’

Piya was so startled that she looked at the picture again, with fresh eyes, wondering what he might be thinking of. The mystery was resolved when he stabbed a finger at the animal’s long snout with its twin rows of needle-like teeth. Like an optical illusion, the picture seemed to change shape as she looked at it; she had the feeling that she was looking at it through his eyes. She understood how the mistake might be possible, given the animal’s plump, dove-like body and its spoon-shaped bill, not unlike a heron’s. And of course the Gangetic dolphin had no dorsal fin to speak of. But then the ludicrousness of the notion had hit her – the Gangetic dolphin a bird? She took the card back and put it away quickly, turning her face aside to hide her smile.

The smile lingered for the rest of the ride, vanishing only when her eyes alighted on Mej-da’s launch – it was a decrepit diesel steamer that had been adapted for the tourist trade, with rows of plastic chairs lined up behind the wheelhouse, under a soot-blackened awning. She would have liked a skiff or a light fibreglass shell, outfitted with an outboard motor. Experience had taught her that this was the kind of boat of greatest use in river surveys. She began to regret the impulse that had led her to agree to this arrangement, but now it was too late to turn back.

As she walked up the gangplank, the stench of diesel fuel struck her like a slap in the face. There were some half-dozen or so young helpers tinkering with the engine. When they started it up, the volume was deafening, even up on deck. Then, to her surprise, Mej-da ordered all the helpers to leave the launch. Evidently the crew was to consist of no one other than himself and the guard. Why just these two and no one else? There was something about this that was not quite right. She watched in concern as the boys filed off the launch and her misgivings only deepened when Mej-da proceeded to enact a curious little pantomime, as if to welcome her on to his vessel. It so happened that he was dressed exactly as she was, in blue pants and a white shirt. She hadn’t remarked on this herself, but the coincidence had evidently seized his interest. He made a series of gestures, pointing to himself and at her, providing a wordless inventory of the points of similarity in their appearance – their clothes, their skin colour, the dark tint of their eyes and the cut of their short, curly hair. But the performance ended with a gesture both puzzling and peculiarly obscene. Bursting into laughter, he gesticulated in the direction of his tongue and his crotch. She looked away quickly, frowning, puzzled as to the meaning of this bizarre coda. It was not till later that she realized that this pairing of the organs of language and sex was intended as a commentary on the twin mysteries of their difference.

The laughter that followed on this performance sharpened her doubts about this pair. It was not that she was unused to the company of watchers and minders. The year before, while surveying on the Irrawaddy, she had been forced – ‘advised’ was the government’s euphemism – to take on three extra men. They were identically dressed, the three men, in knit golf shirts and chequered sarongs, and they had all sported steel-rimmed aviator sunglasses. She had heard later that they were from military intelligence, government spies, but she had never felt any unease around them, nor any sense of personal threat. Besides, she had always felt herself to be protected by the sheer matter-of-factness of what she did: the long hours of standing in unsteady boats, under blazing skies, scanning the water’s surface with her binoculars, taking breaks only to fill in half-hourly data sheets. She had not realized then that on the Irrawaddy, as on the Mekong and the Mahakam, she had also been protected by her unmistakable foreignness. It was written all over her face, her black, close-cropped hair, the sun-darkened tint of her skin. It was ironic that here – in a place where she felt even more a stranger than elsewhere – her appearance had robbed her of that protection. Would these men have adopted the same attitude if she had been, say, a white European, or Japanese? She doubted it. Nor for that matter would they have dared to behave similarly with her Kolkata cousins, who wielded the insignia of their upper-middle-class upbringing like laser-guided weaponry. They would have known how to deploy those armaments against men like these and they would have called it ‘putting them in their place’. But as for herself, she had no more idea of what her own place was in the great scheme of things than she did of theirs – and it was exactly this, she knew, that had occasioned their behaviour.

Lusibari

The tide was running low when the Trust’s launch brought Kanai and Nilima to Lusibari and this seemed to augment the height of the tall embankment that ringed the island: from the water nothing could be seen of what lay on the far side. But on climbing the earthworks Kanai found himself looking down on Lusibari village and suddenly it was as if his memory had rolled out a map so that the whole island lay spread out before his eyes.

Lusibari was about two kilometres long from end to end, and was shaped somewhat like a conch shell. It was the most southerly of the inhabited islands of the tide country – in the fifty kilometres of mangrove that separated it from the open sea, there was no other settlement to be found. Although there were many other islands nearby, Lusibari was cut off from these by four encircling rivers. Of these rivers two were of medium size, while the third was so modest as almost to melt into the mud at low tide. But the pointed end of the island – the narrowest spiral of the conch – jutted into a river that was one of the mightiest in the tide country, the Raimangal.

Seen from Lusibari at high tide, the Raimangal did not look like a river at all: it looked more like a limb of the sea, a bay perhaps, or a very wide estuary. Five other channels flowed into the river here, forming an immense mohona. At low tide, the mouths of the other rivers were clearly visible in the distance – gigantic portals piercing the ring of green galleries that encircled the mohona. But Kanai knew that once the tide turned everything would disappear: the rising waters of the mohona would swallow up the jungle as well as the rivers and their openings. If it were not for the tips of a few kewra trees you would think you were gazing at a body of water that reached beyond the horizon. Depending on the level of the tide, he remembered, the view was either exhilarating or terrifying. At low tide, when the embankment, or bãdh, was riding high on the water, Lusibari looked like some gigantic earthen ark, floating serenely above its surroundings. Only at high tide was it evident that the interior of the island lay well below the level of the water. At such times the unsinkable ship of a few hours before took on the appearance of a flimsy saucer that could tip over at any moment and go circling down into the depths.

From the narrow end of the island a mudbank extended a long way into the water. This spit was like a terrestrial windsock, changing direction with the prevailing currents. But just as a windsock can generally be counted on to remain attached to its mast, the mudbank too was doggedly tenacious in keeping a hold upon the island. It formed a natural pier and that was where ferries and boats usually unloaded their passengers. There were no docks or jetties on Lusibari, for the currents and tides that flowed around it were too powerful to permit the construction of permanent structures.

The island’s main village – also known as Lusibari – was situated close to the base of the mudspit, in the lee of the embankment. A newcomer, looking down at Lusibari from the crest of the bãdh, would see a village that seemed at first glance no different from thousands of others in Bengal: a tightly packed settlement of palm-thatched huts and bamboo-walled stalls and shacks. But a closer examination would reveal a different and far from commonplace design.

At the centre of the village was a maidan, an open space not quite geometrical enough to be termed a square. At one end of this ragged-edged maidan was a marketplace, a jumble of stalls that lay unused through most of the week, coming alive only on Saturday, which was the market day. At the other end of the maidan, dominating the village, stood a school. This was the building that was chiefly responsible for endowing the village with an element of visual surprise. Although not large, it loomed like a cathedral over the shacks, huts and shanties that surrounded it. Outlined in brick, over the keystone of the main entrance were the school’s name and the date of its completion: ‘Sir Daniel Hamilton High School 1938’. The façade consisted of a long shaded veranda, equipped with fluted columns, neoclassical pediments, vaguely Saracenic arches and other such elements of the schoolhouse architecture of its time. The rooms were large and airy, with tall shuttered windows.

Not far from the school lay a compound cut off from public view by a screen of trees. The house that occupied the centre of this compound was much smaller and less visible than the school. Yet its appearance was, if anything, even more arresting. Built entirely of wood, it stood on a two-metre-tall trestle of stilts, as if to suggest it belonged more in the Himalayas than in the tide country. The roof was a steeply pitched wooden pyramid, sitting upon a grid of symmetrical lines: stilts and columns, windows and balustrades. Rows of French windows were set into the walls and their floor-to-ceiling shutters opened into a shaded veranda that ran all the way around the house. In front there was a lily-covered pond, skirted by a pathway of mossy bricks.

In 1970, Kanai recalled, this compound had seemed lonely and secluded. Although it was situated in the centre of the settlement there were few other dwellings nearby. It was as though some lingering attitude of deference or respect had prompted the islanders to keep their distance from that wooden house. But that had changed now. It was clear at a glance that the area was among the most heavily trafficked in the whole island. Clusters of huts, houses, stalls, sweetshops and the like had grown up around the compound. The lanes that snaked around its perimeter echoed to the sound of filmi music and the air was heavy with the smell of freshly fried jilipis.

Kanai glanced over his shoulder and saw that Nilima was busy discussing Trust business with a couple of office-holders of the Women’s Union. Slipping away, he pushed open the compound’s gate and went hurrying up the mossy pathway that led up to the house. To his surprise, none of the noise and bustle of the village seemed to filter into the compound and for a moment he felt as though he were stepping through a warp in time. The house seemed at once very old and very new. The wood, discoloured by the sun and rain, had acquired a silvery patina, like certain kinds of bark; it reflected the light in such a way as to appear almost translucent, like a skin of mirrored metal. It seemed now to be almost blue in colour, reflecting the tint of the sky.

On reaching the stilts, Kanai stopped to peer at the dappled underside of the house – the geometric pattern of shadows was exactly as he remembered. He went up the steps and was starting towards the front door when he heard his uncle’s voice, echoing back from the past.

‘You can’t go in that way,’ Nirmal was saying. ‘Don’t you remember? The key to the front door was lost years ago. We’ll have to go all the way around.’

Retracing the steps of that earlier visit, Kanai went down the veranda, around the corner of the balcony and along the next wing until he came to a small door at the rear of the house. The door opened at a touch and, on stepping in, the first object to meet his eyes was an old-fashioned porcelain toilet with a wooden seat. Next to it was an enormous cast-iron bathtub with clawed feet and a curling rim. A showerhead curled over it, like a flower drooping on a wilted stem.

The fittings seemed somewhat more rusty since he had first seen them, but they were otherwise unchanged. Kanai remembered how eagerly, as a boy, he’d taken them in. Since coming to Lusibari he’d had to bathe in a pond, just as Nirmal and Nilima did – he’d longed to step under that shower.

‘This is a shahebi choubachcha, a white man’s tank,’ Nirmal had said, pointing to the bathtub. ‘Shahebs use them to bathe in.’

Kanai remembered that he had been struck by the aptness of the description while also being offended at being spoken to as if he were a yokel who’d never seen such things. ‘I know what that is,’ he had said. ‘It’s a bathtub.’

A door led out from the bathroom, into the interior of the house. Pushing it open, Kanai found himself in a cavernous, wood-panelled room. Clouds of dust hung, as if frozen, in the angled shafts of light admitted by the louvred shutters. A huge iron bedstead stood marooned in the middle of the floor, like the remains of a drowned atoll. On the walls there were fading portraits in heavy frames; the pictures were of memsahibs in long dresses and men in knee-length breeches.

Kanai came to a stop in front of a portrait of a young woman in a lacy dress, sitting on a grassy moor dotted with yellow wildflowers. In the background were steep slopes covered with purple gorse and mountains flecked with snow. A grimy copper plate beneath the picture said, ‘Lucy McKay Hamilton, Isle of Arran.’

‘Who was she?’ Kanai could hear his voice echoing back from the past. ‘Who was this Lucy Hamilton?’

‘She’s the woman from whom this island takes its name.’

‘Did she live here? In this house?’

‘No. She was on her way here, from the far end of Europe, when her ship capsized. She never got to see the house but because it had been built for her, people used to call it Lusi’rbari. Then this was shortened to Lusibari and that was how the island took this name. But even though this house was the original Lusibari, people stopped calling it that. Now everyone speaks of it as the “Hamilton House”.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it was built by Sir Daniel MacKinnon Hamilton, Lucy’s uncle. Haven’t you seen his name on the school?’

‘And who was he?’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Yes.’

‘All right, then. Listen.’ The knob-knuckled finger rose to point to the heavens. ‘Now that you’ve asked you’ll have to listen. And pay attention, for all of this is true.’

The Fall

The day was drawing to an end when a distant fishing boat drew a scratch across Piya’s line of vision, interrupting the rhythm of her vigil. At first it was no more than a pinpoint on the lens of her binoculars, a stationary speck, anchored on the far side of a confluence of many rivers. After a while, when the dot had grown a little, Piya saw that it represented a small canoe-like craft with a hooped covering at the rear. There seemed to be only one fisherman on board. He was going through the motions of casting a net, standing upright to make his throw and stooping to pull his catch in.

Piya had now spent three hours in her ‘on effort’ position, in the bow of the launch. With her binoculars fitted to her eyes, she had scanned the water, waiting for a flash of black or grey to break through the dun surface. But so far her vigil had gone unrewarded: she had had no sightings all afternoon, not one. There had been one hopeful moment but it had ended with a glimpse of a gliding stingray, shooting into the air, with its tail trailing behind it like the string of a kite. Soon afterwards there was another false alarm. Mej-da had come running up in great excitement, pointing and gesticulating, giving her the impression that he had seen a dolphin. But it turned out that his attention had been caught by a group of crocodiles that were sunning themselves on a mudbank. Mej-da’s motives for bringing them to her notice were made evident when he rubbed his fingers together to let her know that he deserved a tip. This had annoyed her and she had brushed him off with a peremptory gesture.

She had spotted the crocodiles long before him of course – she had seen them when they were a couple of kilometres away. There were four of them, and they were huge: from tip to tail, the largest of them was probably about the same length as the launch. She had wondered what it would be like to encounter one of these monsters up close and the thought had prompted an involuntary shudder.

But this was all. She had seen nothing else of note. Even though she hadn’t known what to expect, she had not foreseen as complete a blank as this. That these waters had once contained large numbers of dolphins was known beyond a doubt. Several nineteenth-century zoologists had testified to it. The ‘discoverer’ of the Gangetic dolphin, William Roxburgh, had said explicitly that the freshwater dolphins of the Ganges delighted in the ‘labyrinth of rivers, and creeks to the South and South-East of Calcutta’. This was exactly where she was and yet, after hours of careful surveillance she had still to spot her first dolphin. Nor had she seen many fishermen: Piya had been hoping that the trip would yield a few encounters with knowledgeable boat people but such opportunities had been scarce today. She had seen many overcrowded ferries and steamers but very few fishing boats – so few as to suggest that the area was off-limits for fishing. The canoe-like craft in the distance was the first boat she had seen in a long time and it was clear the launch would pass within a couple of hundred metres of it. She began to wonder if it was worth a detour.

Reaching for her belt, Piya unhooked her rangefinder. The instrument had the look of a pair of truncated binoculars, with two eyepieces at one end but only a single Cyclopean lens at the other. She focused this lens on the fishing boat and pressed a button to get a reading of the distance between them. A moment later, to the accompaniment of an exclamatory beep, the instrument posted the answer: 1.1 kilometres.

Piya could not see the fisherman clearly but it seemed to her that he had the grizzled look of an experienced hand: around his chin and mouth was a dusting of white that suggested stubble or a beard. There was some kind of turban wrapped around his head but his body was bare except for a single twist of cloth, wound between his legs and around his waist. His frame was skeletal, almost wasted, in the way of a man who’d grown old on the water, slowly yielding his flesh to the wind and the sun. She had come across many such fishermen on other rivers and they had often been sources of good tips and useful information. She decided it would be well worth her while to take a few minutes to show him her flashcards.

Twice before she had asked for detours, but Mej-da, who was steering, had grown increasingly hostile after the incident with the crocodiles; he had ignored her on both occasions. But this time she was determined to have her way.

Mej-da and the guard were in the boat’s glass-fronted wheelhouse, sitting shoulder to shoulder. Stepping away from the bow, she turned to face the two men. Mej-da was at the wheel and he dropped his eyes on her approach – the furtiveness of his manner indicated all too plainly that he had been talking about her.

Pulling out a flashcard, she went to the wheelhouse and positioned herself directly in front of Mej-da. ‘Stop!’ she said, pressing an open palm on the glass. Mej-da’s eyes followed her finger to the boat, now clearly visible ahead. ‘Head over there,’ she said. ‘Toward that boat. I want to see if he recognizes this.’ She held up the card, in explanation.

The wheelhouse door swung open and the guard stepped out, hitching up his khaki trousers. He made his way across the deck and leaned on the gunwale, shading his eyes. A frown appeared on his face as he squinted at the boat. Spitting into the water, he muttered something to the pilot. There was a quick exchange of words and then Mej-da nodded and spun the wheel. The bow of the launch began to turn in the direction of the boat.

‘Good,’ said Piya but the guard ignored her; his attention was now wholly focused on the boat. The intensity of his expression puzzled her; there was a predatory look in his eye that made it hard to believe he was doing this solely out of deference to her wishes.

In the distance the fisherman was standing up to make another cast: the boat had stayed where it was, growing a little larger each time it crossed her line of vision. It was now less than a kilometre away and she kept her binoculars trained on it as the launch turned. The fisherman had so far seemed unaware of their presence, but when it became apparent that the launch was changing course he checked himself in the act of casting his net and turned to look in their direction. Suddenly his eyes flared in alarm. She could see them through her glasses, outlined against the darkness of his skin. He turned to one side and his lips seemed to move as though he were speaking to someone. Shifting focus, Piya saw that the fisherman was not alone in the boat, as she had thought: there was a child with him – a nephew or grandson? The boy was sitting crouched in the prow. She guessed it was he who had alerted the fisherman to the launch’s approach. He was pointing in their direction and cowering, as though in terror.

Within moments it became clear that both man and boy had taken fright. The man pulled out a pair of oars and began to row, furiously, while the boy scurried down the length of the boat and hid under the hooped covering at its rear. The boat had been positioned some fifty metres from the mouth of a narrow creek – a distance that could be covered with a few dozen oarstrokes. It was towards this opening that they were heading. The forests that lined the creek’s banks had been half-submerged by the tide and the boat was small enough to give the launch the slip by heading directly into the mangroves. The water was still at a height where it would carry them deep into the forest in perfect concealment. They would be well hidden and would be able to make an escape.

There was something about the situation that puzzled Piya. On the Irrawaddy and the Mekong too, fishermen had sometimes taken fright at the prospect of being interrogated by strangers, especially when there was a whiff of an official connection. Yet she had never known a fishing boat actually to attempt an escape.

Piya looked to her right. The guard was standing in the bow of the launch now and his rifle was slung over his shoulder. He had fetched it while her attention was fixed on the boat. Suddenly the fisherman’s response made sense. Turning on the guard, she stabbed a finger at his gun. ‘What’s that for?’ she said. ‘Why do you need that?’ The guard ignored her and she raised her voice: ‘Put that gun away. It’s not necessary.’ He waved her away with a brusque gesture and turned to shout something to Mej-da. At once, the pitch of the engine rose and the launch lurched forward, closing in on the boat.

She understood now that the situation, although of her own making, was wholly outside her control and even her comprehension. The one explanation she could think of was that the fisherman had been working in an off-limits area, which might account for this pursuit. Whatever the reason, it was up to her to put a stop to this chase – her work would be in jeopardy if word got out that she was interfering with local people.

Turning to the wheelhouse, she signalled urgently to Mej-da, ‘Stop! We’re not going any further; this is it.’ She was about to walk over to him when the guard began to bellow at the boat. The rifle was at his shoulder now, upraised, and he was evidently threatening to open fire.

She was appalled. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ She rushed at him and lunged at his arm, trying to push away the barrel of the gun. He saw her coming and thrust out his elbow. It caught her in the collarbone and sent her reeling back. The display card went flying from her grip as she steadied herself, clutching her shoulder.

The fisherman had stopped rowing now and Mej-da cut the engine as the launch pulled up to the boat. Shouting an order, the guard threw over a rope and the fisherman tethered it to his boat. The child, Piya noticed, was watching everything from his hiding place under the boat’s hooped covering.

The guard barked a question that elicited a muttered response from the fisherman. The answer was clearly much to the guard’s liking for he turned to Mej-da and smiled, as if in satisfaction. The two men had a quick exchange of words and then the guard turned to Piya and spat out the word ‘poacher’ in a tone of accusation.

‘What?’ said Piya. Even if she had been disposed to believe him, this charge would not have been credible. She shook her head dismissively. ‘He was just fishing – that’s all he was doing.’

‘Poacher,’ the guard said again, pointing his rifle at the fisherman. ‘Poacher.’

It was all clear to her now: just as she had thought, the fisherman had been casting his net in an off-limits area. He had chosen that spot so he would be able to get away if an official boat came along. He had assumed the launch to be just another tourist boat and hadn’t realized until too late that there was an armed forest guard on board. Now he was going to have to pay either a bribe or a fine.

The fisherman was standing wearily upright in the boat, leaning on his oar. The sight of him startled Piya, for it was evident at close quarters that he was not at all the elderly greybeard she had taken him to be – he was about her own age, in his late twenties. His frame was not wasted but very lean and his long, stringy limbs were almost fleshless in their muscularity. Nor was it because of a beard that his chin sported a dusting of white: the flakes were salt crystals, left behind by a long day’s deposits of brackish water. His face was narrow and angular and its gauntness seemed to exaggerate the size of his eyes. The cloth tied around his middle was no more than a faded rag and it gave his skeletal frame a look of utter destitution. Yet there was a defiance in his stance at odds with the seeming defencelessness of his unclothed chest and his protruding bones. He was watching the guard with wary eyes, as though he were trying to reckon exactly how much money he was going to lose. At least a week’s earnings, Piya guessed, if not a whole month’s.

As if to remind her of her part in the situation, the guard stooped to pick her display card off the deck. He seemed to be in no hurry, now that he had caught up with his prey. Handing her the card, he made a gesture in the direction of the boat, urging her to show it to the fisherman.

Piya could scarcely believe that he was asking her to carry on as if nothing had happened. She drew her hands back, shaking her head. He thrust the card at her again and this time his rifle seemed to move with his arm, as if to prod her in the direction of the fisherman. She shrugged. ‘All right.’ Undoing her equipment belt, she stowed it in her backpack along with her binoculars. Then she picked up the display card and stepped up to the gunwale. The boat was directly below, tethered close to the launch, and the fisherman’s face was now on a level with her knee.

On catching sight of her, the fisherman started. His attention had been focused on the guard and he hadn’t realized there was a woman on the launch. Her presence seemed to make him suddenly self-conscious. He reached for the cloth tied around his head and yanked it down. It sprang apart and fell open around him, unrolling over his body like a curtain. When he had fastened it at the waist, she saw that the twist of cloth that she had taken to be a turban was, in fact, a rolled-up sarong. There was a consideration in this gesture, an acknowledgement of her presence, that touched her: it seemed like the first normal human contact she had had since stepping on the launch. Despite the strangeness of the circumstances, she was eager to see his response to the pictures.

She lowered herself to one knee and when their heads were level she held out the card. She tried to give him a smile of reassurance but he would not meet her eye. He glanced from the card to her face and raised a hand to point upriver. The gesture was so quick and matter-of-fact that for a moment she thought he had misunderstood. Then she looked into his eyes and he nodded, as if to say, yes, that’s where I saw them. But which ones? She thrust the card at him again, expecting that he would point to the picture of the Gangetic dolphin, the more common of the two species. To her astonishment, his finger dropped to the illustration of the Irrawaddy dolphin, Orcaella brevirostris. He said something in Bengali and held up six fingers.

‘Six?’ she said. She was now very excited. ‘You’re sure?’

She was interrupted by a child’s cry. Looking up, she saw that the guard had taken advantage of her conversation with the fisherman to board the boat. Now he was rifling through the possessions that lay bundled under the hooped covering. The child was cowering against the side of the boat, clutching his hands to his chest. With a sudden lunge, the guard caught hold of the child and pried his hands open: evidently the boy had been trying to conceal a thin wad of banknotes. The guard tore the money from his grip and slipped it into his own pocket. Then he gave the boy a parting slap and climbed back into the launch.

Piya, looking on from above, suddenly recalled her own wad of money, stashed in the money-belt she was wearing around her waist. She undid the zip surreptitiously, slipped her hand in and pulled out a handful of notes. Rolling them tight in her palm, she waited until the launch had started up again. When the guard had turned his back, she leaned over the side and stretched her arm towards the fisherman. ‘Here! Here!’ She kept her voice low and it was drowned out by the hammering of the engine. Now a wedge of water had opened up between the boat and the launch but she felt sure she would be able to throw the money over if only she could climb a little higher. There was a plastic chair nearby and she pushed it to the side of the deck. Then she climbed up, balancing her weight against the gunwale. ‘Here!’ She threw over the money, and accompanied it with a loud hissing sound. This time she succeeded in catching the fisherman’s attention and he jumped to his feet in surprise. But the guard had heard her too and he came barrelling across the deck. One of his feet crashed into the chair, throwing her forward, tipping her weight over the gunwale. Suddenly she was falling and the muddy brown water was rushing up to meet her face.

S’Daniel

‘One of the many ways,’ said Nirmal, ‘in which the tide country resembles a desert is that it can trick the eye with mirages. This is what it did to Sir Daniel Hamilton. When this Scotsman looked upon the crab-covered shores of the tide country, he saw not mud, but something that shone brighter than gold. “Look how much this mud is worth,” he said. “A single acre of Bengal’s mud yields fifteen maunds of rice. What does a square mile of gold yield? Nothing.”’

Nirmal raised a hand to point to one of the portraits on the wall. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘That’s him, Daniel Hamilton, on the day when he became a knight. After that, his name was forever S’Daniel.’

The picture was of a man in stockings and knee breeches, wearing buckled shoes and a jacket with brass buttons. On his upper lip was a bushy white moustache and at his waist hung something that looked like the hilt of a sword. His eyes stared directly into the viewer’s, at once stern and kindly, austere and somewhat eccentric. There was something about his gaze that discomfited Kanai. As if by instinct, he slipped behind his uncle to elude those penetrating eyes.

‘S’Daniel’s schooling,’ Nirmal said, ‘was in Scotland, which was a harsh and rocky place, cold and unforgiving. In school his teachers taught him that life’s most important lesson is “labour conquers everything”, even rocks and stones if need be – even mud. As with many of his countrymen, a time came when Daniel Hamilton had to leave his native land to seek his fortune, and what better place to do that than India? He came to Calcutta and joined MacKinnon & McKenzie, a company with which he had a family connection. This company sold tickets for the P&O shipping line, which was then one of the largest in the world. Young Daniel worked hard and sold many, many tickets: first class, second class, third class, steerage. For every ship that sailed from Calcutta there were hundreds of tickets to be sold and only one ticket agent. Soon S’Daniel was the head of the company and master of an immense fortune, one of the richest men in India. He was, in other words, what we call a monopolikapitalist. Another man might have taken his money and left – or spent it all on palaces and luxury. But not S’Daniel.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m getting to it. Wait. Look at the picture on the wall and close your eyes. Think of that man, S’Daniel, standing on the prow of a P&O liner as it sails away from Calcutta and makes its way towards the Bay of Bengal. The other shahebs and mems are laughing and drinking, shouting and dancing, but not S’Daniel. He stands on deck, his eyes drinking in these vast rivers, these mudflats, these mangrove-covered islands, and it occurs to him to ask, “Why does no one live here? Why are these islands empty of people? Why is this valuable soil allowed to lie fallow?” A crewman sees him peering into the forest and points out the ruins of an old temple and a mosque. See, he says, people lived here once, but they were driven away by tempests and tides, tigers and crocodiles. “Tai naki?” says S’Daniel. Is that so? “But if people lived here once, why shouldn’t they again?” This is, after all, no remote and lonely frontier – this is India’s doormat, the threshold of a teeming subcontinent. Everyone who has ever taken the eastern route into the Gangetic heartland has had to pass through it – the Arakanese, the Khmer, the Javanese, the Dutch, the Malays, the Chinese, the Portuguese, the English. It is common knowledge that almost every island in the tide country has been inhabited at some time or another. But to look at them you would never know: the speciality of mangroves is that they do not merely recolonize land; they erase time. Every generation creates its own population of ghosts.

‘On his return to Calcutta S’Daniel sought out knowledgeable people. He learnt that of all the hazards of the Sundarbans none is more dangerous than the Forest Department, which treats the area as its own kingdom. But S’Daniel cared nothing for the Forest Department. In 1903 he bought ten thousand acres of the tide country from the British sarkar.’

‘Ten thousand acres! How much land is that?’

‘Many islands’ worth, Kanai. Many islands. The British sarkar was happy to let him have them. Gosaba, Rangabelia, Satjelia – these were all his. And to these he later added this island you’re standing on: Lusibari. S’Daniel wanted his newly bought lands to be called Andrewpur, after St Andrew of Scotland – a poor man, who, having neither silver nor gold, found the money to create it. But that name never took; people grew used to speaking of these islands as Hamilton-abad. And as the population grew, villages sprouted and S’Daniel gave them names. One village became “Shobnomoskar”, “Welcome to All”, and another became “Rajat Jubilee”, to mark the Silver Jubilee of some king or the other. And to some he gave the names of his relatives – that’s why we have here a Jamespur, an Annpur and an Emilybari. Lusibari was another such.’

‘And who lived in those places?’

‘No one – in the beginning. Remember, at that time there was nothing but forest here. There were no people, no embankments, no fields. Just kada ar bada, mud and mangrove. At high tide most of the land vanished under water. And everywhere you looked there were predators – tigers, crocodiles, sharks, leopards.’

‘So why did people come, then?’

‘For the land, Kanai. What else? This was at a time when people were so desperate for land that they were willing to sell themselves in exchange for a bigha or two. And this land here was in their own country, not far from Calcutta: they didn’t need to take a boat to Burma or Malaya or Fiji or Trinidad. And what was more, it was free.’

‘So they came?’

‘By the thousand. Everyone who was willing to work was welcome, S’Daniel said, but on one condition. They could not bring all their petty little divisions and differences. Here there would be no Brahmins or Untouchables, no Bengalis and no Oriyas. Everyone would have to live and work together. When the news of this spread, people came pouring in, from northern Orissa, from eastern Bengal, from the Santhal Parganas. They came in boats and dinghies and whatever else they could lay their hands on. When the waters fell the settlers hacked at the forest with their daas, and when the tides rose they waited out the flood on stilt-mounted platforms. At night they slept in hammocks that were hung so as to keep them safe from the high tide.

‘Think of what it was like: think of the tigers, crocodiles and snakes that lived in the creeks and nalas that covered the islands. This was a feast for them. They killed hundreds of people. So many were killed that S’Daniel began to give out rewards to anyone who killed a tiger or crocodile.’

‘But what did they kill them with?’

‘With their hands. With knives. With bamboo spears. Whatever they could find at hand. Do you remember Horen, the boatman, who brought us here from Canning?’

‘Yes.’ Kanai nodded.

‘His uncle Bolai killed a tiger once, while he was out fishing. S’Daniel gave him two bighas of land, right here in Lusibari. For years afterwards, Bolai was the hero of the island.’

‘But what was the purpose of all this?’ said Kanai. ‘Was it money?’

‘No,’ said Nirmal. ‘Money S’Daniel already had. What he wanted was to build a new society, a new kind of country. It would be a country run by co-operatives, he said. Here people wouldn’t exploit each other and everyone would have a share in the land. S’Daniel spoke with Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Thakur and many other bujuwa nationalists. The bourgeoisie all agreed with S’Daniel that this place could be a model for all of India; it could be a new kind of country.’

‘But how could this be a country?’ said Kanai in disbelief. ‘There’s nothing here – no electricity, no roads, nothing.’

Nirmal smiled. ‘All that was to come,’ he said. ‘Look.’ He pointed to a discoloured wire that ran along the wall. ‘See. S’Daniel had made arrangements for electricity. In the beginning there was a huge generator, right next to the school. But after his death it broke down and no one ever replaced it.’

Kneeling beside a table, Nirmal pointed to another set of wires. ‘Look: there were even telephone lines here. Long before phones had come to Calcutta, S’Daniel had put in phones in Gosaba. Everything was provided for; nothing was left to chance. There was a Central Bank of Gosaba and there was even a Gosaba currency.’

Nirmal reached into one of the bookshelves that lined the wall and took out a torn and dusty piece of paper. ‘Look, here is one of his banknotes. See what it says: “The Note is based on the living man, not on the dead coin. It costs practically nothing, and yields a dividend of One Hundred Per Cent in land reclaimed, tanks excavated, houses built, &c. and in a more healthy and abundant LIFE.”’

Nirmal held the paper out to Kanai. ‘See!’ he said. ‘The words could have been written by Marx himself: it is just the Labour Theory of Value. But look at the signature. What does it say? Sir Daniel MacKinnon Hamilton.’

Kanai turned the piece of paper over in his hands. ‘But what was it all for? If it wasn’t to make money, then why did he go to all the trouble? I don’t understand.’

‘It was a dream, Kanai,’ said Nirmal. ‘What he wanted was no different from what dreamers have always wanted. He wanted to build a place where no one would exploit anyone and people would live together without petty social distinctions and differences. He dreamed of a place where men and women could be farmers in the morning, poets in the afternoon and carpenters in the evening.’

Kanai burst into laughter. ‘And look what he ended up with,’ he said. ‘These rat-eaten islands.’

That a child could be so self-assuredly cynical came as a shock to Nirmal. After opening and shutting his mouth several times, he said weakly, ‘Don’t laugh, Kanai – it was just that the tide country wasn’t ready yet. Some day, who knows? It may yet come to be.’

Snell’s Window

In the clear waters of the open sea the light of the sun wells downwards from the surface in an inverted cone that ends in the beholder’s eye. The base of this cone is a transparent disk that hangs above the observer’s head like a floating halo. It is through this prism, known as Snell’s window, that the oceanic dolphin perceives the world beyond the water; in submersion, this circular portal follows it everywhere, creating a single clear opening in the unbroken expanse of shimmering silver that forms the water’s surface as seen from below.

Rivers like the Ganga and the Brahmaputra shroud this window with a curtain of silt: in their occluded waters light loses its directionality within a few centimetres of the surface. Beneath this lies a flowing stream of suspended matter in which visibility does not extend beyond an arm’s length. With no lighted portal to point the way, top and bottom and up and down become very quickly confused. As if to address this, the Gangetic dolphin habitually swims on its side, parallel to the surface, with one of its lateral fins trailing the bottom, as though to anchor itself in its darkened world by keeping a hold upon its floor.

In the open sea Piya would have had no difficulty dealing with a fall such as the one she had just sustained. She was a competent swimmer and would have been able to hold her own against the current. It was the disorientation caused by the peculiar conditions of light in the silted water that made her panic. With her breath running out, she felt herself to be enveloped inside a cocoon of eerily glowing murk and could not tell whether she was looking up or down. In her head there was a smell, or rather, a metallic savour she knew to be, not blood, but inhaled mud. It had entered her mouth, her nose, her throat, her eyes – it had become a shroud closing in on her, folding her in its cloudy wrappings. She threw her hands at it, scratching, lunging and pummelling, but its edges seemed always to recede, like the slippery walls of a placental sac. Then she felt something brush against her back and at that moment there was no touch that would not have made her respond as if to the probing of a reptilian snout. Her body began to twitch convulsively, and she tried to look over her shoulder, but could see nothing except that impenetrable sepia glow. Although her limbs were growing rigid and her strength was ebbing, she tried to defend herself by hitting out and flailing her arms. But then something came shooting through the water and struck her in the face: she felt herself being propelled forward and was unable to resist. Suddenly her head broke free and there was a lightness on her skin that she knew to be the touch of air. But still she could not breathe: her nose and her mouth were swamped with mud and water.

Thrashing her arms, she tried to lift herself from the water, only to be struck on the face again, by another powerful blow. Then, to her amazement, a pair of arms appeared around her chest. A hand caught hold of her neck, jerking back her head, and another set of teeth were clamped against her own. There was a sucking sensation in her mouth and something seemed to shoot out of her gullet. A moment later she felt a whiff of air in her throat and began to gasp for more. A clasped arm was holding her upright in the water and on her left shoulder was a sharp, prickling sensation. Even as she was struggling to swallow mouthfuls of air, it filtered through to her consciousness that it was the fisherman who was holding her and that his stubble was abrading her skin. The stinging seemed to clear her mind and she forced herself to loosen her panicked muscles, calming her body to the point where he could begin to swim.

The current had carried them a long way from the boat and she knew that he would not be able to tow her unless she lay still. Rolling over in the water, she arched her back, to stay afloat, and hooked her arm through his, making herself almost weightless. Even then the push of the current was like a gravitational force, and she could feel him straining for each inch, as though he were dragging her up a steep slope.

At last, when her hands were on the gunwale, he corkscrewed his body under her, pushing her out of the water and into the boat. She landed on her belly and instantly a jet of swallowed water rose to choke her gorge. Suddenly it was as if she were drowning all over again. With water streaming from her mouth and her nose, she clutched at her throat, clawing at the base of her neck with her fingers as though she were trying to loosen a garrotte. Then again, his hands gripped her shoulders, flipping her over. Throwing a leg across her hips, he weighed her down with his body and fastened his mouth on hers, sucking the water from her throat and pumping air into her lungs.

When her windpipe was clear again, he broke away. She heard him spitting into the water and knew he was cleaning the taste of her vomit from his mouth.

As the rhythm of her breathing returned, she caught the sound of voices and opened her eyes. It was the forest guard and his friend, the pilot: they were leering at her from the launch, lounging against the rails and exchanging whispers as they watched her fighting for breath. When the guard saw she had opened her eyes, he began to point to his watch and to the sun, which was now slipping below the horizon in a blaze of crimson. At first she could make no sense of these gesticulations but when he started to make beckoning motions, she understood: darkness was fast approaching and he wanted her to hurry up and get back to the launch so they could proceed to wherever it was they were going.

The abruptness of this summons made Piya’s hackles rise. The man had evidently assumed she had no choice but to follow his orders, that she would put up with whatever demands he chose to make. From the start she had sensed a threat from the guard and his friend: she knew that to return to the launch in these circumstances would be an acknowledgement of helplessness. If she placed herself in their power now, she would be marked as an acquiescent victim. She could not board that launch again – and yet, what else could she do?

A word flashed through her mind, taking her by surprise. She sat up and tried to enunciate it before it could escape. The fisherman was squatting in the bow, bare-bodied except for his loincloth. He had torn off his lungi before plunging into the water, and the little boy was using it now to mop the water from his head. When Piya sat up, the boy whispered something and the fisherman turned to look at her. Quickly, before the word could slip away, she said, ‘Lusibari?’ He frowned as if to say that he hadn’t heard her right, so she said the word again, ‘Lusibari?’ and added, ‘Mashima?’ At this, he gave her a nod that seemed to indicate he knew those names.

Piya’s eyes widened: could it really be that he knew this woman? To confirm, she said again, ‘Mashima?’ He nodded once more and gave her a smile, as if to say, yes, he knew exactly whom she was referring to. But she still could not tell whether he had understood the full import of what she was asking of him. So, just to be sure, she made a sign, pointing first to herself and then at the horizon, to tell him she wanted him to take her there, in his boat. He nodded again, and added, as if in confirmation, ‘Lusibari.’

‘Yes.’ Shutting her eyes in relief, she unclenched her stomach and let her breath flow out.

Standing on the launch, the guard snapped his fingers at Piya as if to wake her from a long sleep. She pulled herself to her feet, leaning against the boat’s bamboo awning for support, and signalled to him to pass over her backpacks. He handed over the first without demur, and it was only when she asked for the second that he understood she was not coming back to the launch. His smirk changed into a scowl, and he began to shout, not at her, but at the fisherman, whose response was nothing more than a quiet shrug and a murmur. This seemed to make the guard angrier still, and he began to threaten the fisherman with gestures of his fist.

Piya tried to intervene with a shout of her own. ‘It’s not his fault. Why’re you yelling at him?’ Now, unexpectedly, the pilot added his voice to hers. He too began to remonstrate with the guard, pointing to the horizon to remind him of the fast-approaching sunset. This jolted the guard’s attention back to Piya. He held up her second backpack and rubbed his finger and thumb together, to indicate that it would not be given over without a payment.

Her money, she remembered, was inside her waterproofed money-belt. She reached for the zip and was relieved to find the belt intact, its contents undamaged. She counted out the equivalent of a day’s hire for the boat and a day’s wages for the guard. Then, as she was handing the money over, just to ensure herself of a quick riddance, she added a few extra notes. Without another word, the guard grabbed the money and tossed over her backpack.

She could scarcely believe she had succeeded in ridding herself of them. She had expected more scenes and more yelling, fresh demands for money. On cue, as if to show her that she had not got off lightly, the guard held up her Walkman – he had managed to extricate it from her belongings before handing them over. Then, to celebrate his theft, he began to make lurid gestures, pumping his pelvis and milking his finger with his fist.

Piya was as oblivious to these obscenities as to the loss of her music: she would be grateful just to see the guard and his friend depart. She shut her eyes and waited till the sound of the launch had faded away.

The Trust

Despite its small size, the island of Lusibari supported a population of several thousand. Some of its people were descended from the first settlers, who had arrived in the 1920s. Others had come in successive waves, some after the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 and some after the Bangladesh war of 1971. Many had come even more recently, when other nearby islands were forcibly depopulated in order to make room for wildlife conservation projects. As a result, the pressure of population in Lusibari was such that no patch of land was allowed to lie fallow. The green fields that quilted the island were dotted with clusters of mud huts and crossed by many well-trodden pathways. The broadest of these paths were even paved with bricks and shaded with rows of casuarina trees. But these elements of an ordinary rural existence did not entirely conceal the fact that life in Lusibari was lived at the sufferance of a single feature of its topography. This was its bãdh, the tall embankment that encircled its perimeter, holding back the twice-daily flood.

The compound of the Badabon Trust was at the rounded end of the conch-shaped island, a kilometre’s distance from Lusibari village. Nilima lived there in a small building that doubled as a guest house for the Trust’s visitors.

It took a while for Kanai and Nilima to make their way to this end of the island. They had disembarked on the mudspit, near Lusibari village, and by the time they departed for the Trust’s compound, it was near sunset. The vehicle that had been arranged for their transport was new to Kanai – there had been none on the island at the time of his last visit. It was a cycle-van, a bicycle-trolley with a square platform mounted behind the driver’s saddle. The platform served to carry luggage and livestock as well as passengers, who sat on it either with their legs folded or with their feet dangling over the edge. Since the platform was flat, with no handholds, passengers had to cling on as best they could. When the vehicles hit a bump or a pothole, they locked arms to hold each other in place.

‘Are you sure we’ll all fit on that?’ said Kanai dubiously, eyeing the vehicle.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Nilima. ‘Just get on and we’ll hold you down.’

They set off with Kanai’s suitcase lodged among baskets of vegetables and squawking clutches of fowl. The van turned on to a path paved with uncemented bricks, many of which had come loose, leaving gaps in the track’s surface. When the wheels hit these holes, the platform flew up as if to catapult its passengers from the vehicle. Kanai would have gone rocketing off if the others hadn’t kept him in place by holding on to his shirt.

‘I hope you’ll be comfortable in our Guest House,’ said Nilima anxiously. ‘Our set-up is very simple, so don’t expect any luxuries. A room’s been prepared for you and your dinner should be waiting, in a tiffin carrier. I’ve told one of our trainee nurses to make arrangements for your food. If you need anything, just let her know. Her name is Moyna – she should be there now, waiting for us.’

At the mention of the name, the van’s driver corkscrewed around in his seat. ‘Mashima, are you talking about Moyna Mandol?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you won’t find her at the Guest House, Mashima,’ the driver said. ‘Haven’t you heard yet?’

‘What?’

‘Moyna’s husband, that fellow Fokir, has gone missing again. And he’s taken the boy too – their son. Moyna’s running all over the place, asking after them.’

‘No! Is that true?’

‘Yes.’ A couple of other passengers confirmed this with vigorous nods.

Mashima clicked her tongue. ‘Poor Moyna. That fellow gives her so much trouble.’

Kanai had been listening to this exchange and, on seeing the look of consternation on Mashima’s face, said, ‘Will this upset all the arrangements?’

‘No,’ said Mashima. ‘We’ll manage one way or the other. I’m just worried about Moyna. That husband of hers is going to drive her mad one day.’

‘Who is he? Her husband, I mean?’

‘You won’t know him—’ Breaking off in mid-sentence Nilima clutched at Kanai’s arm. ‘Wait! Actually you do know him – not him, I mean, but his mother.’

‘His mother?’

‘Yes. Do you remember a girl called Kusum?’

‘Of course,’ said Kanai. ‘Of course I remember her. She was the only friend I had in this place.’

Nilima gave a slow nod. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I remember now: you two used to play together. Anyway, this man we’re talking about – Fokir? He’s Kusum’s son. He’s married to Moyna.’

‘Is he the one who’s missing?’

‘Yes, that’s him.’

‘And what about Kusum? What became of her?’

Nilima let out a deep sigh. ‘She ran off, Kanai; it must have been some months after you visited us. For years we didn’t have any news of her, but then she showed up again. It was very unfortunate.’

‘Why? What happened?’

Nilima closed her eyes as if to shut out the memory. ‘She was killed.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll tell you later,’ said Nilima in an undertone. ‘Not now.’

‘And her son?’ Kanai persisted. ‘How old was he when Kusum died?’

‘He was just a child,’ Nilima said. ‘Maybe five years old or so. He was brought up by Horen, who was a relative.’

A large building suddenly came into view, capturing Kanai’s attention. ‘What’s that, over there?’

‘That’s the hospital,’ said Nilima. ‘Is this the first time you’re seeing it?’

‘Yes,’ said Kanai. ‘I haven’t been to Lusibari since it was built.’

The lights that flanked the hospital’s entrance each seemed to be enclosed within a moving, buzzing halo of its own. When the cycle-van rolled past, Kanai saw that this effect was created by clouds of insects. Also clustered beneath the bulbs were groups of schoolchildren, with books open on their laps.

‘Aren’t those electric lights?’ Kanai said in surprise.

‘Yes, they are.’

‘But I thought Lusibari hadn’t got electricity yet?’

‘We have electricity within this compound,’ said Nilima. ‘But just for a few hours each day, from sunset till about nine.’

One of the Trust’s benefactors, Nilima explained, had donated a generator, and the machine was turned on for a few hours each evening so that the hospital’s staff could have a period of heightened activity in which to prepare for the stillness of the night. As for the children, they too were drawn to the hospital by its lights. It was easier to study there than at home, and cheaper too, since it saved oil and candles.

‘And that’s where we’re going,’ said Nilima, pointing ahead, to a two-storey house separated from the hospital by a pond and a stand of coconut trees. Small and brightly painted, the house had the cheerful look of a whitewashed elementary school. The guest rooms were upstairs, Nilima explained, while the flat on the ground floor was the home in which she and her late husband had lived since the mid-1970s. Nirmal’s study, where all his papers were stored, was on the roof.

After Nilima had dismounted from the cycle-van, she handed Kanai a key: ‘This opens the door to your uncle’s study. You should go upstairs and have a look – you’ll find the packet on his desk. I wanted to take you there myself but I’m too tired.’

‘I’ll manage on my own,’ said Kanai. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll see you in the morning.’

Kanai was heading for the stairs with his suitcase, when Nilima called out, as an afterthought, ‘The generator will be switched off at nine, so be prepared. Don’t be caught off guard when the lights go off.’

Fokir

Only after the launch had disappeared from view was Piya able to breathe freely again. But now, as her muscles loosened, the delayed shock she had been half-expecting set in as well. Her limbs began to quiver and all of a sudden her chin was knocking a drumbeat on her kneecaps; in a moment she was shivering hard enough to shake the boat, sending ripples across the water.

There was a touch on her shoulder and she turned sideways to see the child, standing beside her. He put his arm around her and clung to her back, hugging her, trying to warm her body with his own. She closed her eyes and did not open them again until the chattering of her teeth had stopped.

Now it was the fisherman who was in front of her, squatting on his haunches and looking into her face with an inquiring frown. Slowly, as her shivering passed, his face relaxed into a smile. With a finger on his chest, pointing at himself, he said, ‘Fokir.’ She understood that this was his name and responded with her own: ‘Piya.’ With a nod of acknowledgement, he turned to the boy and said, ‘Tutul.’ Then his forefinger moved, from himself to the boy and back again, and she knew he was telling her the boy was his son.

‘Tutul.’

Looking closely at the child she saw he was even younger than she had thought, perhaps no more than five years old. He was wearing a threadbare sweater, against the November chill. Below this hung a pair of huge, discoloured shorts that looked as though they had once belonged to a school uniform. He had something in his hands, and when he held it up she saw it was her laminated placard. She had no idea where he had found it but was pleased to see it again. He brought it to her, holding it in front of him like a tray, and gave her fingers a squeeze, as though to assure her of his protection.

The gesture had the paradoxical effect of making her aware of her own vulnerability. This was not a feeling she was accustomed to – she was used to being on her own in out-of-the-way places, with only strangers for company. But her experience with the guard had bruised her confidence and she felt as though she were recovering from an assault. This made her all the more grateful for the child’s presence: she knew that if it weren’t for him it would have been much harder for her to put her trust in a complete stranger as she had done. It was true, then, that in a way the boy was her protector. The recognition of this made her do something that did not come easily. She was not given to displays of affection but now, in a brief gesture of gratitude, she opened her arms and gave the boy a hug.

As she released the child, she noticed he was looking intently at her hands – her wallet was still wedged between her fingers. With a guilty start, she remembered that she had made no mention of money to the fisherman. Opening the wallet, she took out a wad of Indian currency and separated a thin sheaf of notes from the rest. She was counting out the money when she became aware of their attention and looked up. They appeared to be transfixed and their eyes were following her fingers as though she were performing some intricate feat of jugglery. There was a wonderment in their faces that told her that their absorption was not a function of greed; it was just that they had never before been in the proximity of so large a sum of money and so many crisp currency notes. Yet, despite the closeness of this scrutiny, Fokir seemed not to have understood that it was for him that she was counting the money: when she offered the notes to him, he recoiled guiltily, as though she’d offered him some kind of contraband.

The sum she had counted out was small, no more than she might elsewhere have paid for a few sandwiches and a couple of coffees. Her research grant was too tight to allow her to be lavish, but this small token, at least, she felt she did owe him, and if he had had a shirt she would have tucked the money right into his pocket. As it happened, apart from his wet loincloth he was wearing nothing but a small cylindrical medallion tied to his arm with a string, just above the bicep. Unable to think of any other expedient, she twisted the notes into a roll and thrust them under the medallion. His skin, she noticed, was bristling with goosebumps and she could not tell whether this was a reaction to her touch or to the chilly evening wind.

A loud exclamation followed as Fokir retrieved the money. When the notes were in his hands, he examined them as if in disbelief, holding them at a distance from his face. Presently, with a gesture in the direction of the recently departed launch, he peeled a single note from the bundle and held it aloft. She understood that he was telling her that he would accept that one note as compensation for the money that had been taken from him. He handed this to the boy, who darted off to hide it somewhere in the thatch of the boat’s hood.

The other notes he gave back to her, and when she attempted to protest, he pointed towards the horizon and repeated the word she herself had uttered earlier: ‘Lusibari.’ She recognized he was deferring the matter of payment until they arrived at Lusibari, and there she was content to let the matter rest.

The Letter

The Guest House occupied the whole of the second floor and was accessed by a narrow staircase. There were four rooms, all identically furnished with two narrow beds, a desk and a chair. They opened into a space that was part corridor, part dining room, part kitchen. At the far end of the corridor lay the building’s one claim to luxury, a bathroom with a shower, a toilet and running water. Kanai had been dreading the thought of bathing in a pond and heaved a sigh of relief on catching sight of these unexpected amenities.

On the dining table stood a stainless-steel tiffin carrier and Kanai guessed it contained his dinner. Evidently, despite her cares, Moyna had not neglected to provide his evening meal. Exploring further, he deposited his suitcase in the room that appeared to have been readied for him and headed for the stairs.

On making his way up to the roof, Kanai was rewarded with a fine view of a tide country sunset: with the rivers running low, the surrounding islands were riding high on the reddening water. With his first circumambulation of the roof, Kanai found he could count no fewer than six islands and eight ‘rivers’ in the immediate vicinity of Lusibari. He saw also that Lusibari was the most southerly of the inhabited islands; on the islands beyond were no fields or houses, nothing other than dense forests of mangrove.

On one side of the roof was a long, tin-roofed room with a locked door. This, Kanai realized, was Nirmal’s study. He unlocked the door with the key Nilima had given him and pushed the door open. Stepping inside he found himself facing a wall stacked with books and papers. There was only one window and on opening it Kanai saw it looked westwards, in the direction of the Raimangal’s mohona. The desk beneath this window was laid out as if for Nirmal’s use, with an inkwell, a stack of fountain pens and an old-fashioned, crescent-shaped blotter. Under the blotter was a large sealed packet that had Kanai’s name written on it. The packet was wrapped in layers of plastic that had been pasted together with some kind of crude industrial glue. On top was a piece of paper that looked as if it had been torn from a notebook, and written upon it, in his uncle’s hand, were Kanai’s name and his address of twenty years before. Kanai squeezed the packet between his fingers but could not make out exactly what lay inside. Nor could he see how he was to open it; the layers of plastic seemed almost to be fused together. Looking around him, he saw half a razor blade lying on the window sill. He picked up the sharp-edged sliver of metal and applied it to the plastic sheets, pinching it carefully between his fingertips. After cutting through a few layers, he saw, lying inside, like an egg in a nest, a small cardboard-covered notebook, a khata, of the kind generally used by schoolchildren. This surprised him for he had been expecting loose sheets – poems, essays – anything but a single notebook. He flipped it open and saw that it was covered in Bengali lettering, in Nirmal’s hand. The writing was cramped, as if in order to save space, and the penmanship was so unruly as to suggest that the lines had been written in great haste. In places there was much crossing out and filling in, and the words often spilled into the thin margin. Despite the many layers of plastic, the paper was covered with damp spots. In some places, the ink too had begun to fade.

Kanai had to raise the notebook to within a couple of inches of his eyes before he could decipher the first few letters. There was a date in the top left-hand corner, written in English: May 15, 1979, 5.30 a.m. Immediately below this was Kanai’s name. Although there were none of the customary salutations of a letter, it was clear these pages had been addressed directly to him, Kanai, in the form of some kind of extended letter.

This was confirmed when Kanai read the first few lines: ‘I am writing these words in a place that you will probably never have heard of: an island on the southern edge of the tide country, a place called Morichjhãpi …’

Kanai looked up from the page and turned the name over in his mind: Morichjhãpi. As if by habit, he found himself translating the word: ‘Pepper-island’.

He lowered his eyes once more to the notebook:

The hours are slow in passing as they always are when you are waiting in fear for you know not what: I am reminded of the moments before the coming of a cyclone, when you have barricaded yourself into your dwelling and have nothing else to do but wait. The moments will not pass; the air hangs still and heavy; it is as though time itself has been slowed by the friction of fear.

In other circumstances perhaps I would have tried to read. But I have nothing with me here except this notebook, one ballpoint pen, one pencil, and my copies of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, in Bangla and English translation. Nor, in the hours preceding this, would it have been possible to read, for it is daybreak and I am in a thatch-roofed hut with no candles available. From a chink in the bamboo wall, I can see the Gãral, one of the rivers that flows past this island. The sun has shown itself in the east and, as if to meet it, the tide too is quickly rising. The nearby islands are sliding gradually beneath the water and soon, like icebergs in a polar sea, they will be mostly hidden; only the tops of their tallest trees will remain in sight. Already their mudbanks and the webbed roots that hold them together have become ghostly discolorations, shimmering under the surface, like shoals of wave-stirred seaweed. In the distance a flock of herons can be seen heading across the water in preparation for the coming inundation: driven from a drowning island they have taken wing in search of a more secure perch. It is, in other words, a dawn that is beautiful in the way only a tide country dawn can be.

This hut is not mine; I am a guest. It belongs to someone you once knew: Kusum. She has lived in it with her son for almost a year.

As I look on the scene before me I cannot help wondering what it has meant to them – to Fokir, to Kusum – to wake to this sight, through the better part of a year. Has it provided any recompense for everything they have had to live through? Who could presume to know the answer? At this moment, lying in wait, I can think only of the Poet’s words:

‘beauty is nothing

but the start of terror we can hardly bear,

and we adore it because of the serene scorn

it could kill us with …’

All night long, I have been asking myself, what is it I am afraid of? Now, with the rising of the sun, I have understood what it is: I am afraid because I know that after the storm passes, the events that have preceded its coming will be forgotten. No one knows better than I how skilful the tide country is in silting over its past.

There is nothing I can do to stop what lies ahead. But I was once a writer; perhaps I can make sure at least that what happened here leaves some trace, some hold upon the memory of the world. The thought of this, along with the fear that preceded it, has made it possible for me to do what I have not been able to for the last thirty years – to put my pen to paper again.

I do not know how much time I have; maybe not much more than the course of this day. In this time, I will try to write what I can in the hope that somehow these words will find their way to you. You will be asking, why me? All I need say, for the time being, is that this is not my story. It concerns, rather, the only friend you made when you were here in Lusibari: Kusum. If not for my sake, then for hers, read on.

The Boat

Fokir’s five-metre-long boat was just about broad enough in the middle to allow two people to squat side by side. Once Piya had taken stock of her immediate surroundings she realized the boat was the nautical equivalent of a shanty, put together out of bits of bamboo thatch, splintered wood and torn sheets of polythene. The planks of the outer shell were unplaned and had been caulked with what appeared to be tar. The deck was fashioned out of plywood strips that had been ripped from discarded tea-crates: some still bore remnants of their old markings. These improvised deck-slats were not nailed in: they rested on a ledge and could be moved at will. There were storage spaces in the bilges below and, in the hold at the fore end of the boat, crabs could be seen crawling about in a jumble of mangrove branches and decaying sea-grass. This was where the day’s catch was stored – the vegetation provided moisture for the crabs and kept them from tearing each other apart.

The hooped awning at the rear of the boat was made of thatch and bent spokes of bamboo. This hood was just large enough to shelter a couple of people from the rain and the sun. As waterproofing, a sheet of speckled grey plastic had been tucked between the hoops and the thatch. Piya recognized the markings on this sheet: they were from a mailbag, of a kind that she herself had often used in posting surface mail from the US. At the stern end of the boat, between the shelter and the curved sternpost, was a small, flat platform, covered with a plank of wood pocked with burn marks.

The deck beneath the shelter concealed yet another hold, and when Fokir moved the slats, Piya saw that this was the boat’s equivalent of a storage cupboard. It was separated from the forehold by an internal bulwark, and was crudely but effectively waterproofed with a sheet of blue tarpaulin. It held a small, neatly packed cargo of dry clothes, cooking utensils, food and drinking water. Reaching into this space now, Fokir pulled out a length of folded fabric. When he shook it out Piya saw it was a cheap, printed sari.

The manoeuvres that followed caused Piya some initial puzzlement. After sending Tutul to the bow, Fokir reached for her backpacks and stowed them under the shelter. Then he slipped out himself and motioned to her to go in. Once she had squirmed inside, he draped the sari over the mouth of the shelter, hiding her from view.

It took her a while to understand that he had created an enclosure to give her the privacy to change out of her wet clothes. In absorbing this, she was at first a little embarrassed to think that it was he rather than she herself, who had been the first to pay heed to the matter of her modesty. But the very thought of this – even the word itself, ‘modesty’, with its evocation of fluttering veils and old comic strips – made her want to smile: after years of sharing showers in co-ed dorms and living with men in cramped seaboard quarters, the idea seemed quaint but also, somehow, touching. It was not just that he had thought to create a space for her; it was as if he had chosen to include her in some simple, practised family ritual, found a way to let her know that despite the inescapable muteness of their exchanges, she was a person to him and not, as it were, a representative of a species, a faceless, tongueless foreigner. But where had this recognition come from? He had probably never met anyone like her before, any more than she had ever met anyone like him.

After she had finished changing, she reached out to touch the sari. Running the cloth between her fingers, she could tell that it had gone through many rigorous washings. She remembered the feel of the cloth. This was exactly the texture of the saris her mother had worn at home, in Seattle – soft, crumpled, worn thin. They had been a great grievance for her once, those faded greying saris: it was impossible to bring friends to a home where the mother was dressed in something that looked like an old bedsheet.

Whom did the sari belong to? His wife? The boy’s mother? Were the two the same? Although she would have liked to know, it caused her no great regret that she lacked the means of finding out. In a way, it was a relief to be spared the responsibilities that came with a knowledge of the details of another life.

Crawling out of the boat’s shelter, Piya saw that Fokir had already drawn in the anchor and was lowering his oars. He too had changed, she noticed, and had even taken the time to comb his hair. It lay flat on his head, parted down the middle. With the salt gone from his face, he looked unexpectedly youthful, almost impish. He was dressed in a faded, buff-coloured T-shirt and a fresh lungi. The old one – the one he had been wearing when she first spotted him with her binoculars – had been laid out to dry on the boat’s hood.

Meanwhile, the sun had begun to set, and a comet of colour had come shooting over the horizon and plunged, flaming, into the heart of the mohona. With darkness fast approaching, Piya knew they would soon have to find a place to wait out the night. Only in the light of day could a boat of this size hope to find its way through this watery labyrinth. She guessed that Fokir had probably already decided on an anchorage and was trying to get them there as quickly as possible.

When the boat started to move, Piya stood up and began to scan the water ahead. Her binoculars’ gaze seemed to fall on the landscape like a shower of rain, mellowing its edges, diminishing her sense of disorientation and unpreparedness. The boat’s rolling did nothing to interrupt the metronomic precision of her movements; her binoculars held to their course, turning from right to left and back again, as steady as the beam of a lighthouse. Over years of practice, her musculature had become attuned to the water and she had learned to keep her balance almost without effort, flexing her knees instinctively to counteract the rolling.

This was what Piya loved best about her work: being out on the water, alert and on watch, with the wind in her face and her equipment at her fingertips. Buckled to her waist was a rock-climber’s belt, which she had adapted so that the hooks served to attach a clipboard as well as a few instruments. The first and most important of these was the hand-held monitor that kept track of her location, through the Global Positioning System. When she was ‘on effort’, actively searching for dolphins, this instrument recorded her movements down to every metre and every second. With its help, she could, if necessary, find her way across the open ocean, back to the very spot where, at a certain moment on a certain day, she had caught a momentary glimpse of a dolphin’s flukes before they disappeared under the waves.

Along with the GPS monitor was a rangefinder and a depth-sounder, which could provide an exact reading of the water’s depth when its sensor was dipped beneath the surface. Although these instruments were all essential to her work, none was as valuable as the binoculars strapped around her neck. Piya had had to reach deep into her pocket to pay for them but the money had not been ill spent. The glasses’ outer casing had been bleached by the sun and dulled by the gnawing of sand and salt, yet the waterproofing had done its job in protecting the instrument’s essential functions. After six years of constant use the lens still delivered an image of undiminished sharpness. The left eye-piece had a built-in compass that displayed its readings through an aperture. This allowed Piya to calibrate her movements so that the sweep of her gaze covered a precise one hundred and eighty degrees.

Piya had acquired her binoculars long before she had any real need of them, when she was barely a year into her graduate programme at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. Early though it was then, she had had no doubts about the purchase; by that time she was already sure of her mind and knew exactly what she was going to be doing in the years ahead. She had wanted to be absolutely sure about getting the best and had gone through dozens of catalogues before sending her cheque to the mail-order company.

When the package arrived she was surprised by its weight. At the time she was living in a room that looked down on one of the busier walkways in the university. She had stood by the window and turned the glasses on the throngs of students below, focusing on their faces and even their books and newspapers, marvelling at the clarity of the resolution and the brilliance of the image. She had tried turning the instrument from side to side and was surprised by the effort it took: it came as a discovery that you could not do a hundred and eighty degree turn just by swivelling your head – the movement had to torque through the whole of your body, beginning at the ankles and extending through the hips and shoulders, reaching almost as far as your temples. Within a few minutes she had grown tired and her arms had begun to ache. Would she ever be able to heft an instrument of this weight over the course of a twelve-hour day? It didn’t seem possible. How did they do it, the others?

She was used to being dwarfed by her contemporaries. Through her childhood and adolescence she had always been among the smallest in her age group. But she had never in her life felt as tiny as she did that day in La Jolla when she walked into her first cetology lecture – ‘a minnow among the whale-watchers’ one of her professors had said. The others were natural athletes, raw-boned and finely muscled. The women especially, seemed all to have come of age on the warm, surf-spangled beaches of southern California or Hawaii or New Zealand; they had grown up diving, snorkelling, kayaking, canoeing, playing volleyball in the sand. Against their golden tans the fine hair on their forearms shone like powdered silica. Piya had never cared for sport and this had added to her sense of apartness. She had become a kind of departmental mascot – ‘the little East Indian girl’.

It was not until her first survey cruise, off the coast of Costa Rica, that her doubts about her strength were put to rest. For the first few days they had seen nothing and she had laboured under the weight of the binoculars – to the point where her coworkers had taken pity on her, giving her extra turns on the ‘Big Eye’, the deck-mounted binoculars. On the fourth day, they had caught up with what they had thought was a small herd of maybe twenty spinners. But the number had kept growing, from twenty to a hundred to possibly as many as seven thousand – there were so many that the numbers were beyond accurate estimation; they filled the sea from horizon to horizon, so that even the white caps of the waves seemed to be outnumbered by the glint of pointed beaks and shining dorsal fins. That was when she learned how it happened – how at a certain moment, the binoculars’ weight ceased to matter. It was not just that your arms developed huge ropy muscles (which they did), it was also that the glasses fetched you the water with such vividness and particularity that you could not think of anything else.

Nirmal and Nilima

Nirmal and Nilima Bose first came to Lusibari in search of a safe haven. This was in 1950 and they had been married less than a year.

Nirmal was originally from Dhaka but had come to Calcutta as a student. The events of Partition had cut him off from his family and he had elected to stay on in Calcutta where he had made a name for himself as a leftist intellectual and a writer of promise. He was teaching English literature at Ashutosh College when his path crossed Nilima’s: she happened to be a student in one of his classes.

Nilima’s circumstances were utterly unlike Nirmal’s. She was from a family well known for its tradition of public service. Her grandfather was one of the founding members of the Congress Party and her father (Kanai’s grandfather) was an eminent barrister at the Calcutta High Court. As an adolescent Nilima had developed severe asthma and when it came time to send her to college her family had decided to spare her the rigours of a long daily commute. They had enrolled her in Ashutosh College, which was just a short drive from their home in Ballygunge Place. The family car, a Packard, made the trip twice a day, dropping her off in the morning and picking her up in the afternoon.

One day she sent the driver away, on a pretext, and followed her English teacher on to a bus: it was as if the light of idealism in his eye were a flame and she a moth. Many other girls in her class had been mesmerized by Nirmal’s fiery lectures and impassioned recitations; although many of them claimed to be in love with him, none of them had Nilima’s resolve and resourcefulness. That day on the bus, she managed to find a seat next to Nirmal and within the space of a few months was able to announce to her outraged family that she knew whom she wanted to marry. Her family’s opposition served only to strengthen her resolve and in 1949 the young couple were married in a civil ceremony. The wedding was presided over by one of Nirmal’s comrades and was solemnized by readings of Blake, Mayakovsky and Jibanananda Das.

They had not been married a month when the police came knocking at the door of their tiny flat in Mudiali. It so happened that the year before Nirmal had participated in a conference convened by the Socialist International, in Calcutta. (In telling this story Nirmal would pause here, to note parenthetically that this conference was one of the pivotal events of the postwar world: within a decade or two, Western intelligence agencies and their clients were to trace every major Asian uprising – the Vietnamese insurrection, the Malayan insurgency, the Red Flag rebellion in Burma and much else – to the policy of ‘armed struggle’ adopted in Calcutta in 1948. There was no reason, he would add, why anyone should know or remember this: yet in the tide country, where life was lived on the margins of greater events, it was useful also to be reminded that no place was so remote as to escape the flood of history.)

Nirmal had played only a small part in the conference, serving merely as a guide and general dogsbody for the Burmese delegation. But now, with a Communist insurgency raging in Burma, the authorities were keen to know whether he had picked up anything of interest from his Burmese contacts.

Although he was detained for only a day or two, the experience had a profoundly unsettling effect on Nirmal, following as it did on his rejection by Nilima’s family and his separation from his own. He could not bring himself to go to the college and there were days when he would not even get out of bed. Recognizing that something had snapped, Nilima threw herself upon her family’s mercies and went to see her mother. Although her marriage was never quite forgiven, Nilima’s family rallied to her side and promised to help in whatever way they could. At her father’s bidding, a couple of doctors came to see Nirmal and their advice was that he would do well to spend some time outside the city. This view was endorsed by Nirmal’s comrades who had come to recognize that he was of too frail a temperament to be of much use to their cause. For her part, Nilima welcomed the idea of putting distance between herself and the city – as much for her own asthma as for Nirmal’s sake. The problem was, where were they to go? It so happened that Nilima’s father handled some of the affairs of the Hamilton Estate and he learnt that the estate’s managers were looking for a teacher to run the Lusibari school.

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 initially 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 travelled 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 scepticism. 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 ninety-seven kilometres 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 Co-operative 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 learnt 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 labour 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 meagre 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 rumour 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 nor 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 learnt 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 learnt, 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 rates charged by Lusibari’s shopkeepers were exorbitant; even after the fares for the ferry the women would save a considerable amount. Half of this, the woman 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 from 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, several kilometres 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 a kilometre 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 centre 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 welcomed 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 enforced good humour. 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 practised 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 bidi from the flame. After he had smoked it down to a stub, he went aft, and showed Piya, by indication and gesture, how the squared 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 chequered 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 load 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 tea-shops 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 honour. 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, squatting on the wet boards and hugging her knees, did she remember that she had no towel nor anything else with which to dry herself. But a further search revealed that even this had been provided for: one of those rectangles of chequered 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 where 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.

Kusum

From the far side of the Guest House roof Kanai could see all the way across the island to the 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 overground for short distances. It had found its way into the bed only to suffocate on the mattress.

To preclude night-time 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 window sill at the other end of the room. Being short, as well as very short-sighted, 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 any 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 just 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 simple-minded, silent or inexplicably hostile. Knowing that his suspension from school would be over in a few weeks, he felt no compulsion to unbend towards 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.

One day, during a 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 offence 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 up 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 shoulder, 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 up 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 backwards, 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 chequered 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 intrigued 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 cupboard, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?

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