The Hungry Tide (8 page)

“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 and O liner as it sails away from Calcutta and makes its way toward 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 mangrovecovered 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 learned 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 Saint 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 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
kādā ār bādā
,
mud and mangrove. At high tide most of the land vanished underwater. 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
dás,
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 afterward, 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 cooperatives, 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 discolored 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 labor 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. Someday, who knows? It may yet come to be.”

SNELL'S WINDOW

I
N THE CLEAR WATERS
of the open sea the light of the sun wells downward 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 inches 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 on 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 savor, 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 pummeling, 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 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 acknowledgment 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.