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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 (#ulink_7cb482a7-4077-5199-929b-0802285e2b7b)
‘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 (#ulink_824975dd-5858-5a11-8f48-873748029deb)
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 (#ulink_22fe6a4a-6337-5db1-b13a-7dca580c48be)
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?’
