The Hungry Tide (25 page)

I didn't begrudge him his attitude; it seemed to me he was right to take this approach. “There was a time once,” I said regretfully, “when I knew people in the press. But no more.”

“Then do you know anyone with power? Policemen? Forest rangers? Politicians?”

“No,” I said. “No one.”

“Then what can you do for us?” he said, growing peevish. “Of what use could you be?”

What use indeed, was I? There are people in this world who are truly useful, who lead useful lives: Nilima for instance. But a schoolteacher such as me?

“There's only one thing I know to do,” I said. “And that is to teach.”

“Teach?” I could see he was struggling to suppress a smile. “What could you teach here?”

“I could teach your children about this place that you've come to, the tide country. I have time — I am soon to retire.”

He lost interest in me. “Our children here have no time to waste,” he said. “Most of them have to help their families find food to eat.” Then, after a little more thought, he added, “However, if you can find pupils who're willing, then why should I prevent you? It's up to you: teach all you want.”

I went back to Kusum triumphantly and told her what had transpired. In evident alarm, she said, “But whom will you teach, Saar?”

“Why?” I said. “There's your son, Fokir. There must be others like him. Mustn't there?” A look of reluctance had come into her face, so I added, almost pleading, “It wouldn't be every day. Maybe just for a little while each week. I'll come over from Lusibari.”

“But Saar,” she said, “Fokir can't write or read, and that's true of many of these children. What will you teach them?”

I hadn't given this matter any thought, but the answer came to me at once. I said, “Kusum, I'll teach them to dream.”

PURSUED

W
HILE THE DOLPHIN
and its calf foraged in the creek, Fokir was fighting hard to hold his boat steady in the adjoining channel. The water was flowing fast here and he was turning the boat around in circles so that Piya could keep the dolphins in view. Even though there was no wind, the water's surface was so densely marked with ripples and eddies that it seemed almost to be simmering as it flowed.

Having filled in six data sheets, Piya decided to measure the water's depth. She was in the bow, as usual, while Fokir was in the midsection, turning rapidly from left to right as he dipped his oars alternately on either side of the boat. He happened to look up just as Piya was lowering her depth sounder into the water. His eyes flared and he uttered a shout that made her freeze, with her wrist still submerged beneath the surface. Pulling his oars into the boat, Fokir threw himself at Piya, diving forward, snatching wildly at her wrist. Piya fell over backward and her arm snapped out of the water, catapulting the depth sounder over the boat.

Suddenly the water boiled over and a pair of huge jaws came shooting out of the river, breaking the surface exactly where Piya's wrist had been a moment before. From the corner of one eye, Piya saw two sets of interlocking teeth make a snatching, twisting movement as they lunged at her still extended arm: they passed so close that the hard tip of the snout grazed her elbow and the spray from the nostrils wetted her forearm. A second later the boat shook under the impact of a massive underwater blow. The shock was powerful enough to send bilge water shooting up out of the innards of the craft; there was a creaking sound and the boat tipped to such an angle that it seemed almost inevitable it would roll over. Piya's clipboard, which was lying at her feet, slipped into the water, and many of the plywood slats that covered the deck tumbled out like falling dominoes.

Tutul, who'd been sitting in the shade of the hood, curled himself into a ball and rolled forward to correct his balance. The boat righted itself with a thump that threw up a curtain of water. A moment later there was another massive blow to its underside, somewhere near the stern. With the boat rolling wildly, Fokir rose to a kneeling position and took hold of one of his oars. Raising it above his head, he turned it so that its head became a blade and brought it crashing down into the water. The oar hammered into the head of the crocodile just as it was surfacing to make another lunge, and the force of the impact snapped shut the gaping jaws. The oar splintered and the blade broke from the handle and went cartwheeling across the water. The river bubbled again as the reptile sank out of sight: for a moment after its submersion a ghostly outline of its shape remained imprinted on the surface and Piya saw that it was almost as large as the boat.

Meanwhile, Fokir had dropped to his haunches and seized a pair of oars. The current had already carried the boat several hundred feet from the creek where the dolphins had been foraging. Now Fokir began to heave at the oars, turning the boat from one creek into another, laboring to lengthen the distance.

After some twenty minutes of furious rowing they came to an inlet that curved deep into the interior of a thickly forested island. Fokir kept the boat moving until they reached a spot where the boat was well sheltered from the currents of the main channel. Here, after dropping anchor, he tore off his drenched T-shirt and reached for a gamchha to wipe away the sweat that was pouring down his chest.

After he had caught his breath, he glanced at Piya and said, “Lusibari?”

Piya was only too glad to assent. “Yes,” she said. “Let's head for Lusibari. It's time.”

Part Two

The Flood:
Jowar

BEGINNING AGAIN

I
had thought that on the way to Lusibari my face would lose the flush it had acquired in Morichjhãpi: the brisk air of the river would cool my skin and the rocking of Horen's boat would slow the pace of my heart. But no, exactly the opposite happened: with every turn a new vista seemed to open in front of me. I could not keep still. I put away my umbrella and stood up, opening my arms as if to embrace the wind. My dhoti became a sail and I a mast, tugging the boat toward the horizon.

“S
aar,” cried Horen, “sit down! The boat will roll over — you'll fall.”

“Horen, you are the best of boatmen. You'll find a way of keeping us afloat.”

“Saar,” said Horen, “what's the matter with you today? You don't seem like your old self.”

“You are right, Horen. I am not my old self anymore. And it's you who's responsible.”

“And how's that, Saar?”

“Wasn't it you who took me to Morichjhãpi?”

“No, Saar. It was the storm.”

Forever modest, our Horen. “All right, then. It was the storm.” I laughed. “It was the storm that showed me that a man can be transformed even in retirement, that he can begin again.”

“Begin what, Saar?”

“Begin a new life, Horen, a new life. The next time we come to Morichjhãpi my students will be waiting. I'll teach as I have never taught before.”

“And what will you teach them, Saar? What will the lesson be?”

“Why, I'll tell them about —”

And what indeed was I to tell them about? Expert boatman that he was, Horen had found a way of spilling the wind from my sails.

I sat down. This was a matter that needed careful thought.

I would start, I decided, with magical tales of the kind to which these children were accustomed. “Tell me, children,” I would begin, “what do our old myths have in common with geology?”

This would catch their interest. Their eyes would narrow, they would puzzle over my question for a minute or two before giving up.

“Tell us, Saar.”

“Goddesses, children,” I would announce in triumph. “Don't you see? Goddesses are what they have in common.”

They would look at each other and whisper, “Is he teasing? Is this a joke?” Presently a small, hesitant voice would speak up: “But Saar, what do you mean?”

“Think about it,” I would say, “and you'll see. It's not just the goddesses
— there's a lot more in common between myth and geology. Look at the size of their heroes, how immense they are — heavenly deities on the one hand, and on the other the titanic stirrings of the earth itself — both equally otherworldly, equally remote from us. Then there is the way in which the plots go round and round in both kinds of story, so that every episode is both a beginning and an end and every outcome leads to others. And then, of course, there is the scale of time — yugas and epochs, Kaliyuga and the Quaternary. And yet — mind this! — in both, these vast durations are telescoped in such a way as to permit the telling of a story.”

“How, Saar, how? Tell us one of these stories.”

And so I would begin.

Maybe I would start with the story of Vishnu, in his incarnation as a divine dwarf, measuring out the universe in three giant strides. I would tell them about the god's misstep and how an errant toenail on one of his feet created a tiny scratch on the fabric of creation. It was this pore, I'd tell them, that became the source of the immortal and eternal Ganga that flows through the heavens, washing away the sins of the universe — this was the stream that would become the greatest of all the earth's rivers.

“The Ganga? Greatest of all rivers?” They would rise, provoked beyond endurance by my mischievous phrasings. “But Saar, many rivers are longer than our Ganga: the Nile, the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Yangtze.”

And
the
n I
woul
d
produc
e
m
y
secre
t
treasure
, a
presen
t
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t
t
o
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e
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y a
forme
r
studen
t — a
ma
p
o
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e
se
a
floo
r
mad
e
b
y
geologists
.
I
n
th
e
reverse
d
relie
f
o
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the
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wit
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ow
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Gang
a
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t
com
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a
n
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afte
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i
t
flow
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int
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Ba
y
o
f
Bengal
.
I
t
join
s
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Brahmaputr
a
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scourin
g a
long
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clearl
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l
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g
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o
f the
bay
.
Th
e
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p
woul
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revea
l
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o
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m
wha
t
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otherwis
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hidde
n
underwater
:
an
d
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i
s
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o
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underwate
r
rive
r
exceed
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b
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th
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lengt
h
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f
th
e
river'
s
overlan
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channel
.

“Look, comrades, look,” I would say. “This map shows that in geology, as in myth, there is a visible Ganga and a hidden Ganga: one flows on land and one beneath the water. Put them together and you have what is by far the greatest of the earth's rivers.”

And, to follow this, I decided, I'd tell them the story of the Greek goddess who was the Ganga's mother. I would take them back to the deep, deep time of geology and I would show them that where the Ganga now runs there was once a coastline — a shore that marked the southern extremity of the Asian landmass. India was far, far away then, in another hemisphere. It was attached to Australia and Antarctica. I would show them the sea and tell them about its name, Tethys, in Greek mythology the wife of Oceanus. There were no Himalayas then and no holy rivers, no Jamuna, no Ganga, no Saraswati, no Brahmaputra. And since there were no rivers, there was also no delta, no floodplain, no silting, no mangroves — no Bengal, in other words. The green coastline of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh was then a frozen waste with ice running to a depth of two hundred feet. Where the southern shore of the Ganga now lies was a length of frozen beach that dipped gently into the waters of the now vanished Tethys Sea.

I would show them how it happened that India broke away 140 million years ago and began its journey north from Antarctica. They would see how their subcontinent had moved, at a speed no other landmass had ever attained before; they would see how its weight forced the rise of the Himalayas; they would see the Ganga emerging as a brook on a rising hill. In front of their eyes they would see how, as India traveled, the Tethys shrank, how she grew thinner and thinner as the channel closed. They would watch as she withered, the two landmasses finally colliding at the expense of the mother ocean; they would see her dying but they would shed no tears, for they would see also the birth of the two rivers in which her memory would be preserved, her twin children — the Indus and the Ganga.