The Hungry Tide (2 page)

“
Aré moshai,
can I just say a word?” Kanai smiled as he bore down on his neighbor 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.

I
n 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 two hundred miles, 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 miles long and only a thousand feet 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 rumor 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 two hundred miles inland and every day thousands of acres of forest disappear underwater, only to reemerge 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 Sundarbans, 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, midwifed 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

T
HE 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 gray 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 maneuver 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 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 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 comprehensive 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 candor 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 renaming 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.”