Loe raamatut: «The Hungry Tide»

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.’