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‘He was just a child,’ Nilima said. ‘Maybe five years old or so. He was brought up by Horen, who was a relative.’
A large building suddenly came into view, capturing Kanai’s attention. ‘What’s that, over there?’
‘That’s the hospital,’ said Nilima. ‘Is this the first time you’re seeing it?’
‘Yes,’ said Kanai. ‘I haven’t been to Lusibari since it was built.’
The lights that flanked the hospital’s entrance each seemed to be enclosed within a moving, buzzing halo of its own. When the cycle-van rolled past, Kanai saw that this effect was created by clouds of insects. Also clustered beneath the bulbs were groups of schoolchildren, with books open on their laps.
‘Aren’t those electric lights?’ Kanai said in surprise.
‘Yes, they are.’
‘But I thought Lusibari hadn’t got electricity yet?’
‘We have electricity within this compound,’ said Nilima. ‘But just for a few hours each day, from sunset till about nine.’
One of the Trust’s benefactors, Nilima explained, had donated a generator, and the machine was turned on for a few hours each evening so that the hospital’s staff could have a period of heightened activity in which to prepare for the stillness of the night. As for the children, they too were drawn to the hospital by its lights. It was easier to study there than at home, and cheaper too, since it saved oil and candles.
‘And that’s where we’re going,’ said Nilima, pointing ahead, to a two-storey house separated from the hospital by a pond and a stand of coconut trees. Small and brightly painted, the house had the cheerful look of a whitewashed elementary school. The guest rooms were upstairs, Nilima explained, while the flat on the ground floor was the home in which she and her late husband had lived since the mid-1970s. Nirmal’s study, where all his papers were stored, was on the roof.
After Nilima had dismounted from the cycle-van, she handed Kanai a key: ‘This opens the door to your uncle’s study. You should go upstairs and have a look – you’ll find the packet on his desk. I wanted to take you there myself but I’m too tired.’
‘I’ll manage on my own,’ said Kanai. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll see you in the morning.’
Kanai was heading for the stairs with his suitcase, when Nilima called out, as an afterthought, ‘The generator will be switched off at nine, so be prepared. Don’t be caught off guard when the lights go off.’
Fokir (#ulink_959e1c1c-ccba-57d3-90cc-7aff1ba23607)
Only after the launch had disappeared from view was Piya able to breathe freely again. But now, as her muscles loosened, the delayed shock she had been half-expecting set in as well. Her limbs began to quiver and all of a sudden her chin was knocking a drumbeat on her kneecaps; in a moment she was shivering hard enough to shake the boat, sending ripples across the water.
There was a touch on her shoulder and she turned sideways to see the child, standing beside her. He put his arm around her and clung to her back, hugging her, trying to warm her body with his own. She closed her eyes and did not open them again until the chattering of her teeth had stopped.
Now it was the fisherman who was in front of her, squatting on his haunches and looking into her face with an inquiring frown. Slowly, as her shivering passed, his face relaxed into a smile. With a finger on his chest, pointing at himself, he said, ‘Fokir.’ She understood that this was his name and responded with her own: ‘Piya.’ With a nod of acknowledgement, he turned to the boy and said, ‘Tutul.’ Then his forefinger moved, from himself to the boy and back again, and she knew he was telling her the boy was his son.
‘Tutul.’
Looking closely at the child she saw he was even younger than she had thought, perhaps no more than five years old. He was wearing a threadbare sweater, against the November chill. Below this hung a pair of huge, discoloured shorts that looked as though they had once belonged to a school uniform. He had something in his hands, and when he held it up she saw it was her laminated placard. She had no idea where he had found it but was pleased to see it again. He brought it to her, holding it in front of him like a tray, and gave her fingers a squeeze, as though to assure her of his protection.
The gesture had the paradoxical effect of making her aware of her own vulnerability. This was not a feeling she was accustomed to – she was used to being on her own in out-of-the-way places, with only strangers for company. But her experience with the guard had bruised her confidence and she felt as though she were recovering from an assault. This made her all the more grateful for the child’s presence: she knew that if it weren’t for him it would have been much harder for her to put her trust in a complete stranger as she had done. It was true, then, that in a way the boy was her protector. The recognition of this made her do something that did not come easily. She was not given to displays of affection but now, in a brief gesture of gratitude, she opened her arms and gave the boy a hug.
As she released the child, she noticed he was looking intently at her hands – her wallet was still wedged between her fingers. With a guilty start, she remembered that she had made no mention of money to the fisherman. Opening the wallet, she took out a wad of Indian currency and separated a thin sheaf of notes from the rest. She was counting out the money when she became aware of their attention and looked up. They appeared to be transfixed and their eyes were following her fingers as though she were performing some intricate feat of jugglery. There was a wonderment in their faces that told her that their absorption was not a function of greed; it was just that they had never before been in the proximity of so large a sum of money and so many crisp currency notes. Yet, despite the closeness of this scrutiny, Fokir seemed not to have understood that it was for him that she was counting the money: when she offered the notes to him, he recoiled guiltily, as though she’d offered him some kind of contraband.
The sum she had counted out was small, no more than she might elsewhere have paid for a few sandwiches and a couple of coffees. Her research grant was too tight to allow her to be lavish, but this small token, at least, she felt she did owe him, and if he had had a shirt she would have tucked the money right into his pocket. As it happened, apart from his wet loincloth he was wearing nothing but a small cylindrical medallion tied to his arm with a string, just above the bicep. Unable to think of any other expedient, she twisted the notes into a roll and thrust them under the medallion. His skin, she noticed, was bristling with goosebumps and she could not tell whether this was a reaction to her touch or to the chilly evening wind.
A loud exclamation followed as Fokir retrieved the money. When the notes were in his hands, he examined them as if in disbelief, holding them at a distance from his face. Presently, with a gesture in the direction of the recently departed launch, he peeled a single note from the bundle and held it aloft. She understood that he was telling her that he would accept that one note as compensation for the money that had been taken from him. He handed this to the boy, who darted off to hide it somewhere in the thatch of the boat’s hood.
The other notes he gave back to her, and when she attempted to protest, he pointed towards the horizon and repeated the word she herself had uttered earlier: ‘Lusibari.’ She recognized he was deferring the matter of payment until they arrived at Lusibari, and there she was content to let the matter rest.
The Letter (#ulink_065d1afe-bb4d-5130-984b-144a21b045f0)
The Guest House occupied the whole of the second floor and was accessed by a narrow staircase. There were four rooms, all identically furnished with two narrow beds, a desk and a chair. They opened into a space that was part corridor, part dining room, part kitchen. At the far end of the corridor lay the building’s one claim to luxury, a bathroom with a shower, a toilet and running water. Kanai had been dreading the thought of bathing in a pond and heaved a sigh of relief on catching sight of these unexpected amenities.
On the dining table stood a stainless-steel tiffin carrier and Kanai guessed it contained his dinner. Evidently, despite her cares, Moyna had not neglected to provide his evening meal. Exploring further, he deposited his suitcase in the room that appeared to have been readied for him and headed for the stairs.
On making his way up to the roof, Kanai was rewarded with a fine view of a tide country sunset: with the rivers running low, the surrounding islands were riding high on the reddening water. With his first circumambulation of the roof, Kanai found he could count no fewer than six islands and eight ‘rivers’ in the immediate vicinity of Lusibari. He saw also that Lusibari was the most southerly of the inhabited islands; on the islands beyond were no fields or houses, nothing other than dense forests of mangrove.
On one side of the roof was a long, tin-roofed room with a locked door. This, Kanai realized, was Nirmal’s study. He unlocked the door with the key Nilima had given him and pushed the door open. Stepping inside he found himself facing a wall stacked with books and papers. There was only one window and on opening it Kanai saw it looked westwards, in the direction of the Raimangal’s mohona. The desk beneath this window was laid out as if for Nirmal’s use, with an inkwell, a stack of fountain pens and an old-fashioned, crescent-shaped blotter. Under the blotter was a large sealed packet that had Kanai’s name written on it. The packet was wrapped in layers of plastic that had been pasted together with some kind of crude industrial glue. On top was a piece of paper that looked as if it had been torn from a notebook, and written upon it, in his uncle’s hand, were Kanai’s name and his address of twenty years before. Kanai squeezed the packet between his fingers but could not make out exactly what lay inside. Nor could he see how he was to open it; the layers of plastic seemed almost to be fused together. Looking around him, he saw half a razor blade lying on the window sill. He picked up the sharp-edged sliver of metal and applied it to the plastic sheets, pinching it carefully between his fingertips. After cutting through a few layers, he saw, lying inside, like an egg in a nest, a small cardboard-covered notebook, a khata, of the kind generally used by schoolchildren. This surprised him for he had been expecting loose sheets – poems, essays – anything but a single notebook. He flipped it open and saw that it was covered in Bengali lettering, in Nirmal’s hand. The writing was cramped, as if in order to save space, and the penmanship was so unruly as to suggest that the lines had been written in great haste. In places there was much crossing out and filling in, and the words often spilled into the thin margin. Despite the many layers of plastic, the paper was covered with damp spots. In some places, the ink too had begun to fade.
Kanai had to raise the notebook to within a couple of inches of his eyes before he could decipher the first few letters. There was a date in the top left-hand corner, written in English: May 15, 1979, 5.30 a.m. Immediately below this was Kanai’s name. Although there were none of the customary salutations of a letter, it was clear these pages had been addressed directly to him, Kanai, in the form of some kind of extended letter.
This was confirmed when Kanai read the first few lines: ‘I am writing these words in a place that you will probably never have heard of: an island on the southern edge of the tide country, a place called Morichjhãpi …’
Kanai looked up from the page and turned the name over in his mind: Morichjhãpi. As if by habit, he found himself translating the word: ‘Pepper-island’.
He lowered his eyes once more to the notebook:
The hours are slow in passing as they always are when you are waiting in fear for you know not what: I am reminded of the moments before the coming of a cyclone, when you have barricaded yourself into your dwelling and have nothing else to do but wait. The moments will not pass; the air hangs still and heavy; it is as though time itself has been slowed by the friction of fear.
In other circumstances perhaps I would have tried to read. But I have nothing with me here except this notebook, one ballpoint pen, one pencil, and my copies of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, in Bangla and English translation. Nor, in the hours preceding this, would it have been possible to read, for it is daybreak and I am in a thatch-roofed hut with no candles available. From a chink in the bamboo wall, I can see the Gãral, one of the rivers that flows past this island. The sun has shown itself in the east and, as if to meet it, the tide too is quickly rising. The nearby islands are sliding gradually beneath the water and soon, like icebergs in a polar sea, they will be mostly hidden; only the tops of their tallest trees will remain in sight. Already their mudbanks and the webbed roots that hold them together have become ghostly discolorations, shimmering under the surface, like shoals of wave-stirred seaweed. In the distance a flock of herons can be seen heading across the water in preparation for the coming inundation: driven from a drowning island they have taken wing in search of a more secure perch. It is, in other words, a dawn that is beautiful in the way only a tide country dawn can be.
This hut is not mine; I am a guest. It belongs to someone you once knew: Kusum. She has lived in it with her son for almost a year.
As I look on the scene before me I cannot help wondering what it has meant to them – to Fokir, to Kusum – to wake to this sight, through the better part of a year. Has it provided any recompense for everything they have had to live through? Who could presume to know the answer? At this moment, lying in wait, I can think only of the Poet’s words:
‘beauty is nothing
but the start of terror we can hardly bear,
and we adore it because of the serene scorn
it could kill us with …’
All night long, I have been asking myself, what is it I am afraid of? Now, with the rising of the sun, I have understood what it is: I am afraid because I know that after the storm passes, the events that have preceded its coming will be forgotten. No one knows better than I how skilful the tide country is in silting over its past.
There is nothing I can do to stop what lies ahead. But I was once a writer; perhaps I can make sure at least that what happened here leaves some trace, some hold upon the memory of the world. The thought of this, along with the fear that preceded it, has made it possible for me to do what I have not been able to for the last thirty years – to put my pen to paper again.
I do not know how much time I have; maybe not much more than the course of this day. In this time, I will try to write what I can in the hope that somehow these words will find their way to you. You will be asking, why me? All I need say, for the time being, is that this is not my story. It concerns, rather, the only friend you made when you were here in Lusibari: Kusum. If not for my sake, then for hers, read on.
The Boat (#ulink_fbcd8dc3-7d5f-574d-8b71-6e46cb80f981)
Fokir’s five-metre-long boat was just about broad enough in the middle to allow two people to squat side by side. Once Piya had taken stock of her immediate surroundings she realized the boat was the nautical equivalent of a shanty, put together out of bits of bamboo thatch, splintered wood and torn sheets of polythene. The planks of the outer shell were unplaned and had been caulked with what appeared to be tar. The deck was fashioned out of plywood strips that had been ripped from discarded tea-crates: some still bore remnants of their old markings. These improvised deck-slats were not nailed in: they rested on a ledge and could be moved at will. There were storage spaces in the bilges below and, in the hold at the fore end of the boat, crabs could be seen crawling about in a jumble of mangrove branches and decaying sea-grass. This was where the day’s catch was stored – the vegetation provided moisture for the crabs and kept them from tearing each other apart.
The hooped awning at the rear of the boat was made of thatch and bent spokes of bamboo. This hood was just large enough to shelter a couple of people from the rain and the sun. As waterproofing, a sheet of speckled grey plastic had been tucked between the hoops and the thatch. Piya recognized the markings on this sheet: they were from a mailbag, of a kind that she herself had often used in posting surface mail from the US. At the stern end of the boat, between the shelter and the curved sternpost, was a small, flat platform, covered with a plank of wood pocked with burn marks.
The deck beneath the shelter concealed yet another hold, and when Fokir moved the slats, Piya saw that this was the boat’s equivalent of a storage cupboard. It was separated from the forehold by an internal bulwark, and was crudely but effectively waterproofed with a sheet of blue tarpaulin. It held a small, neatly packed cargo of dry clothes, cooking utensils, food and drinking water. Reaching into this space now, Fokir pulled out a length of folded fabric. When he shook it out Piya saw it was a cheap, printed sari.
The manoeuvres that followed caused Piya some initial puzzlement. After sending Tutul to the bow, Fokir reached for her backpacks and stowed them under the shelter. Then he slipped out himself and motioned to her to go in. Once she had squirmed inside, he draped the sari over the mouth of the shelter, hiding her from view.
It took her a while to understand that he had created an enclosure to give her the privacy to change out of her wet clothes. In absorbing this, she was at first a little embarrassed to think that it was he rather than she herself, who had been the first to pay heed to the matter of her modesty. But the very thought of this – even the word itself, ‘modesty’, with its evocation of fluttering veils and old comic strips – made her want to smile: after years of sharing showers in co-ed dorms and living with men in cramped seaboard quarters, the idea seemed quaint but also, somehow, touching. It was not just that he had thought to create a space for her; it was as if he had chosen to include her in some simple, practised family ritual, found a way to let her know that despite the inescapable muteness of their exchanges, she was a person to him and not, as it were, a representative of a species, a faceless, tongueless foreigner. But where had this recognition come from? He had probably never met anyone like her before, any more than she had ever met anyone like him.
After she had finished changing, she reached out to touch the sari. Running the cloth between her fingers, she could tell that it had gone through many rigorous washings. She remembered the feel of the cloth. This was exactly the texture of the saris her mother had worn at home, in Seattle – soft, crumpled, worn thin. They had been a great grievance for her once, those faded greying saris: it was impossible to bring friends to a home where the mother was dressed in something that looked like an old bedsheet.
Whom did the sari belong to? His wife? The boy’s mother? Were the two the same? Although she would have liked to know, it caused her no great regret that she lacked the means of finding out. In a way, it was a relief to be spared the responsibilities that came with a knowledge of the details of another life.
Crawling out of the boat’s shelter, Piya saw that Fokir had already drawn in the anchor and was lowering his oars. He too had changed, she noticed, and had even taken the time to comb his hair. It lay flat on his head, parted down the middle. With the salt gone from his face, he looked unexpectedly youthful, almost impish. He was dressed in a faded, buff-coloured T-shirt and a fresh lungi. The old one – the one he had been wearing when she first spotted him with her binoculars – had been laid out to dry on the boat’s hood.
Meanwhile, the sun had begun to set, and a comet of colour had come shooting over the horizon and plunged, flaming, into the heart of the mohona. With darkness fast approaching, Piya knew they would soon have to find a place to wait out the night. Only in the light of day could a boat of this size hope to find its way through this watery labyrinth. She guessed that Fokir had probably already decided on an anchorage and was trying to get them there as quickly as possible.
When the boat started to move, Piya stood up and began to scan the water ahead. Her binoculars’ gaze seemed to fall on the landscape like a shower of rain, mellowing its edges, diminishing her sense of disorientation and unpreparedness. The boat’s rolling did nothing to interrupt the metronomic precision of her movements; her binoculars held to their course, turning from right to left and back again, as steady as the beam of a lighthouse. Over years of practice, her musculature had become attuned to the water and she had learned to keep her balance almost without effort, flexing her knees instinctively to counteract the rolling.
This was what Piya loved best about her work: being out on the water, alert and on watch, with the wind in her face and her equipment at her fingertips. Buckled to her waist was a rock-climber’s belt, which she had adapted so that the hooks served to attach a clipboard as well as a few instruments. The first and most important of these was the hand-held monitor that kept track of her location, through the Global Positioning System. When she was ‘on effort’, actively searching for dolphins, this instrument recorded her movements down to every metre and every second. With its help, she could, if necessary, find her way across the open ocean, back to the very spot where, at a certain moment on a certain day, she had caught a momentary glimpse of a dolphin’s flukes before they disappeared under the waves.
Along with the GPS monitor was a rangefinder and a depth-sounder, which could provide an exact reading of the water’s depth when its sensor was dipped beneath the surface. Although these instruments were all essential to her work, none was as valuable as the binoculars strapped around her neck. Piya had had to reach deep into her pocket to pay for them but the money had not been ill spent. The glasses’ outer casing had been bleached by the sun and dulled by the gnawing of sand and salt, yet the waterproofing had done its job in protecting the instrument’s essential functions. After six years of constant use the lens still delivered an image of undiminished sharpness. The left eye-piece had a built-in compass that displayed its readings through an aperture. This allowed Piya to calibrate her movements so that the sweep of her gaze covered a precise one hundred and eighty degrees.
Piya had acquired her binoculars long before she had any real need of them, when she was barely a year into her graduate programme at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. Early though it was then, she had had no doubts about the purchase; by that time she was already sure of her mind and knew exactly what she was going to be doing in the years ahead. She had wanted to be absolutely sure about getting the best and had gone through dozens of catalogues before sending her cheque to the mail-order company.
When the package arrived she was surprised by its weight. At the time she was living in a room that looked down on one of the busier walkways in the university. She had stood by the window and turned the glasses on the throngs of students below, focusing on their faces and even their books and newspapers, marvelling at the clarity of the resolution and the brilliance of the image. She had tried turning the instrument from side to side and was surprised by the effort it took: it came as a discovery that you could not do a hundred and eighty degree turn just by swivelling your head – the movement had to torque through the whole of your body, beginning at the ankles and extending through the hips and shoulders, reaching almost as far as your temples. Within a few minutes she had grown tired and her arms had begun to ache. Would she ever be able to heft an instrument of this weight over the course of a twelve-hour day? It didn’t seem possible. How did they do it, the others?
She was used to being dwarfed by her contemporaries. Through her childhood and adolescence she had always been among the smallest in her age group. But she had never in her life felt as tiny as she did that day in La Jolla when she walked into her first cetology lecture – ‘a minnow among the whale-watchers’ one of her professors had said. The others were natural athletes, raw-boned and finely muscled. The women especially, seemed all to have come of age on the warm, surf-spangled beaches of southern California or Hawaii or New Zealand; they had grown up diving, snorkelling, kayaking, canoeing, playing volleyball in the sand. Against their golden tans the fine hair on their forearms shone like powdered silica. Piya had never cared for sport and this had added to her sense of apartness. She had become a kind of departmental mascot – ‘the little East Indian girl’.
It was not until her first survey cruise, off the coast of Costa Rica, that her doubts about her strength were put to rest. For the first few days they had seen nothing and she had laboured under the weight of the binoculars – to the point where her coworkers had taken pity on her, giving her extra turns on the ‘Big Eye’, the deck-mounted binoculars. On the fourth day, they had caught up with what they had thought was a small herd of maybe twenty spinners. But the number had kept growing, from twenty to a hundred to possibly as many as seven thousand – there were so many that the numbers were beyond accurate estimation; they filled the sea from horizon to horizon, so that even the white caps of the waves seemed to be outnumbered by the glint of pointed beaks and shining dorsal fins. That was when she learned how it happened – how at a certain moment, the binoculars’ weight ceased to matter. It was not just that your arms developed huge ropy muscles (which they did), it was also that the glasses fetched you the water with such vividness and particularity that you could not think of anything else.
Nirmal and Nilima (#ulink_3ccce943-dffa-5c0d-a82b-8bb1612e8612)
Nirmal and Nilima Bose first came to Lusibari in search of a safe haven. This was in 1950 and they had been married less than a year.
Nirmal was originally from Dhaka but had come to Calcutta as a student. The events of Partition had cut him off from his family and he had elected to stay on in Calcutta where he had made a name for himself as a leftist intellectual and a writer of promise. He was teaching English literature at Ashutosh College when his path crossed Nilima’s: she happened to be a student in one of his classes.
Nilima’s circumstances were utterly unlike Nirmal’s. She was from a family well known for its tradition of public service. Her grandfather was one of the founding members of the Congress Party and her father (Kanai’s grandfather) was an eminent barrister at the Calcutta High Court. As an adolescent Nilima had developed severe asthma and when it came time to send her to college her family had decided to spare her the rigours of a long daily commute. They had enrolled her in Ashutosh College, which was just a short drive from their home in Ballygunge Place. The family car, a Packard, made the trip twice a day, dropping her off in the morning and picking her up in the afternoon.
One day she sent the driver away, on a pretext, and followed her English teacher on to a bus: it was as if the light of idealism in his eye were a flame and she a moth. Many other girls in her class had been mesmerized by Nirmal’s fiery lectures and impassioned recitations; although many of them claimed to be in love with him, none of them had Nilima’s resolve and resourcefulness. That day on the bus, she managed to find a seat next to Nirmal and within the space of a few months was able to announce to her outraged family that she knew whom she wanted to marry. Her family’s opposition served only to strengthen her resolve and in 1949 the young couple were married in a civil ceremony. The wedding was presided over by one of Nirmal’s comrades and was solemnized by readings of Blake, Mayakovsky and Jibanananda Das.
They had not been married a month when the police came knocking at the door of their tiny flat in Mudiali. It so happened that the year before Nirmal had participated in a conference convened by the Socialist International, in Calcutta. (In telling this story Nirmal would pause here, to note parenthetically that this conference was one of the pivotal events of the postwar world: within a decade or two, Western intelligence agencies and their clients were to trace every major Asian uprising – the Vietnamese insurrection, the Malayan insurgency, the Red Flag rebellion in Burma and much else – to the policy of ‘armed struggle’ adopted in Calcutta in 1948. There was no reason, he would add, why anyone should know or remember this: yet in the tide country, where life was lived on the margins of greater events, it was useful also to be reminded that no place was so remote as to escape the flood of history.)
Nirmal had played only a small part in the conference, serving merely as a guide and general dogsbody for the Burmese delegation. But now, with a Communist insurgency raging in Burma, the authorities were keen to know whether he had picked up anything of interest from his Burmese contacts.
Although he was detained for only a day or two, the experience had a profoundly unsettling effect on Nirmal, following as it did on his rejection by Nilima’s family and his separation from his own. He could not bring himself to go to the college and there were days when he would not even get out of bed. Recognizing that something had snapped, Nilima threw herself upon her family’s mercies and went to see her mother. Although her marriage was never quite forgiven, Nilima’s family rallied to her side and promised to help in whatever way they could. At her father’s bidding, a couple of doctors came to see Nirmal and their advice was that he would do well to spend some time outside the city. This view was endorsed by Nirmal’s comrades who had come to recognize that he was of too frail a temperament to be of much use to their cause. For her part, Nilima welcomed the idea of putting distance between herself and the city – as much for her own asthma as for Nirmal’s sake. The problem was, where were they to go? It so happened that Nilima’s father handled some of the affairs of the Hamilton Estate and he learnt that the estate’s managers were looking for a teacher to run the Lusibari school.
Sir Daniel Hamilton had died in 1939 and the estate had since passed into the possession of his nephew, James Hamilton. The new owner lived on the isle of Arran in Scotland and had never been to India before coming into his inheritance. After Sir Daniel’s death he had paid a brief visit to Gosaba but for all practical purposes the estate was now entirely in the hands of its management: if Nilima’s father put in a word, Nirmal was sure to get the job.
Nirmal was initially horrified at the thought of being associated with an enterprise founded by a leading capitalist, but after much pleading from Nilima he eventually agreed to go to Gosaba for an exploratory visit. They travelled down to the estate together and their stay happened to coincide with the annual celebration of the founder’s birthday. They discovered, to their astonishment, that this occasion was observed with many of the ceremonial trappings of a puja. Statues of Sir Daniel, of which there were many scattered around the estate, were garlanded, smeared with vermilion and accorded many other marks of reverence. It was clear that in the eyes of the local people the visionary Scotsman was, if not quite a deity, then certainly a venerated ancestral spirit. In listening to the settlers’ remembrances of the estate’s idealistic founder, Nirmal and Nilima were forced to revise their initial scepticism. It shamed them to think that this man – a foreigner, a Burra Sahib, a rich capitalist – had taken it upon himself to address the issue of rural poverty when they themselves, despite all their radical talk, had scarcely any knowledge of life outside the city.
It took them just a couple of days to make up their minds: without so much as setting foot in Lusibari they decided that they would spend a couple of years on the island. They went back to Calcutta, packed their few belongings and left immediately after the monsoons.
For their first few months on the island they were in a state akin to shock. Nothing was familiar; everything was new. What little they knew of rural life was derived from the villages of the plains: the realities of the tide country were of a strangeness beyond reckoning. How was it possible that these islands were a mere ninety-seven kilometres from home and yet so little was known about them? How was it possible that people spoke so much about the immemorial traditions of village India and yet no one knew about this other world, where it was impossible to tell who was who, and what the inhabitants’ castes and religions and beliefs were? And where was the shared wealth of the Republic of Co-operative Credit? What had become of its currency and banks? Where was the gold that was to have been distilled from the tide country’s mud?
The destitution of the tide country was such as to remind them of the terrible famine that had devastated Bengal in 1942 – except that in Lusibari hunger and catastrophe were a way of life. They learnt that after decades of settlement, the land had still not been wholly leached of its salt. The soil bore poor crops and could not be farmed all year round. Most families subsisted on a single daily meal. Despite all the labour that had been invested in the embankments, there were still periodic breaches because of floods and storms: each such inundation rendered the land infertile for several years at a time. The settlers were mainly of farming stock who had been drawn to Lusibari by the promise of free farmland. Hunger drove them to hunting and fishing and the results were often disastrous. Many died of drowning, and many more were picked off by crocodiles and estuarine sharks. Nor did the mangroves offer much of immediate value to human beings – yet thousands risked death in order to collect meagre quantities of honey, wax, firewood and the sour fruit of the kewra tree. No day seemed to pass without news of someone being killed by a tiger, a snake or a crocodile.
As for the school, it had little to offer other than its roof and walls. The estate was almost bankrupt. Although funds were said to have been earmarked for clinics, education and public works, very little evidence was ever seen of these. The rumour was that this money went to the estate’s managers, and the overseers’ henchmen savagely beat settlers who protested or attempted to resist. The methods were those of a penal colony and the atmosphere that of a prison camp.
They had not expected a utopia but nor had they expected such destitution. Faced with this situation they saw what it really meant to ask a question such as ‘What is to be done?’
Nirmal, overwhelmed, read and reread Lenin’s pamphlet without being able to find any definite answers. Nilima, ever practical, began to talk to the women who gathered at the wells and the ponds.
Within a few weeks of her arrival in Lusibari, Nilima noticed that a startlingly large proportion of the island’s women were dressed as widows. These women were easily identified because of their borderless white saris and their lack of adornment: no bangles or vermilion. At the wells and by the ghats there often seemed to be no one who was not a widow. Making inquiries, she learnt that in the tide country girls were brought up on the assumption that if they married, they would be widowed in their twenties – their thirties if they were lucky. This assumption was woven, like a skein of dark wool, into the fabric of their lives: when the menfolk went fishing it was the custom for their wives to change into the garments of widowhood. They would put away their marital reds and dress in white saris; they would take off their bangles and wash the vermilion from their heads. It was as though they were trying to hold misfortune at bay by living through it over and over again. Or was it merely a way of preparing themselves for that which they knew to be inevitable?
There was an enormity in these acts that appalled Nilima. She knew that for her mother, her sisters, her friends, the deliberate shedding of these symbols of marriage would have been unthinkable, equivalent to wishing death upon their husbands. Even she, who believed herself to be a revolutionary, could no more have broken her marital bangles than she could have driven a stake through her husband’s heart. But for these women the imagining of early widowhood was not a wasted effort: the hazards of life in the tide country were so great; so many people perished in their youth, men especially, that almost without exception the fate they had prepared themselves for did indeed befall them. It was true that here, on the margins of the Hindu world, widows were not condemned to lifelong bereavement: they were free to remarry if they could. But in a place where men of marriageable age were few, this meant little. Here, Nilima learnt, even more than on the mainland, widowhood often meant a lifetime of dependence and years of abuse and exploitation.
What to make of these women and their plight? Searching for a collective noun for them, Nilima was tempted to settle on sreni, class. But Nirmal would not hear of it. Workers were a class, he said, but to speak of workers’ widows as a class was to introduce a false and unsustainable division.
But if they were not a class, what were they?
It was thus, when reality ran afoul of her vocabulary, that Nilima had her epiphany. It did not matter what they were; what mattered was that they should not remain what they were. She knew a widow who lived near the school, a young woman of twenty-five. One day she asked her if she would be willing to go to Gosaba, to buy soap, matches and provisions. The rates charged by Lusibari’s shopkeepers were exorbitant; even after the fares for the ferry the women would save a considerable amount. Half of this, the woman could keep for herself. This tiny seedling of an idea was to lead to the foundation of the island’s Mohila Sangothon – the Women’s Union – and ultimately to the Badabon Trust.
Within a few years of Nirmal and Nilima’s arrival in Lusibari, zamindaris were abolished and large landholdings were broken up by law. What remained of the Hamilton Estate was soon crippled by lawsuits. The Union Nilima had founded, on the other hand, continued to grow, drawing in more and more members and offering an ever-increasing number of services – medical, paralegal, agricultural. At a certain point the movement grew so large that it had to be reorganized, and that was when the Badabon Development Trust was formed.
Nirmal was by no means wholly supportive of Nilima’s efforts – for him they bore the ineradicable stigma of ‘social service’, shomaj sheba – but it was he who gave the Trust its name, which came from the Bengali word for ‘mangrove’.
Badabon was a word Nirmal loved. He liked to point out that like the English ‘Bedouin’, badabon derived from the Arabic badiya, which means ‘desert’. ‘But “Bedouin” is merely an anglicizing of Arabic,’ he said to Nilima, ‘while our Bangla word joins Arabic to Sanskrit – “bada” to “bon”, or “forest”. It is as though the word itself were an island, born of the meeting of two great rivers of language – just as the tide country is begotten of the Ganga’s union with the Brahmaputra. What better name could there be for your “Trust”?’ And so was the Trust’s name decided upon.
One of the Badabon Trust’s first acts was to acquire a tract of land in the interior of the island. There, in the late 1970s, its hospital, workshops, offices and Guest House were to be built. But in 1970, the year of Kanai’s first visit, these developments were still a decade in the offing. At that time, the meetings of the Women’s Union were still held in the courtyard of Nirmal’s bungalow. It was there that Kanai met Kusum.
At Anchor (#ulink_39893810-3728-5e39-a8fc-d62b63d085a7)
In the failing light the boat approached a bend that led into a wide channel. The far shore, several kilometres away, had already been obscured, but in midstream something lay anchored that seemed to suggest a floating stockade. Fetching her binoculars, Piya saw that this object was actually a cluster of six fishing boats, similar in size and design to the one she was in. The boats were tied tightly together, side by side, and they were tethered against the current by a battery of ropes. Although they were more than a kilometre away, her binoculars provided a clear view of the crewmen as they went about their business. Some were sitting alone, smoking bidis; others were drinking tea or playing cards; a few were washing clothes and utensils, drawing water from the river in steel buckets. A boat in the centre of the cluster was sending up puffs of smoke and she guessed that this was where the communal dinner was being cooked. The sight was both familiar and puzzling. She was reminded of riverside hamlets on the Mekong and the Irrawaddy: there too, at the approach of nightfall, time had seemed to both accelerate and stand still, with lazy spirals of smoke rising into the twilight while bathers came hurrying down the banks to wash off the day’s dust. But the difference here was that this village had taken leave of the shore and tethered itself in midstream. Why?
Catching sight of the boats, Tutul gave a shout and launched into an animated conversation with his father. She could tell that they had recognized the boats in the little flotilla. Perhaps they belonged to friends or relatives? She had spent enough time on rivers to know that the people who lived on their shores were rarely strangers to each other. It was almost a certainty that Fokir and his son knew the people in that floating hamlet and that they would be welcomed there. It was easy to imagine how, for them, this might well be the best possible conclusion to the day – an opportunity to mull over the day’s events and to show off the stranger who had landed in their midst. Maybe this had been the plan all along – to anchor here, with their friends?
As the boat rounded the bend, she became convinced of this and found herself thinking of the hours that lay ahead. She had long experience of such encounters, having been on many river surveys where the days ended in unforeseen meetings of this kind. She knew what would follow, the surprise that would be occasioned by her presence, the questions, the explanations, the words of welcome she didn’t understand but would have to respond to with enforced good humour. The prospect dismayed her, not because of any concern for her own safety – she knew she had nothing to fear from these fishermen – but because, for the moment, all she wanted was to be in this boat, in this small island of silence, afloat on the muteness of the river. It was all she could do to restrain herself from appealing to Fokir to keep on going, to hug the shore and keep their boat well hidden.
Of course, none of this could have been said, not even if she had had the words, and it was precisely because nothing was said, that she was taken by surprise when she saw the boat’s bow turning in the direction she had hoped for. Fokir was steering them away from the floating hamlet, slipping by along the shadows of the shore. She did not betray her relief by any outward alteration of her stance and nor did her practised hands fail to keep her binoculars fixed to her eyes – but inside, it was as though there were a child leaping up to celebrate an unexpected treat.
Shortly after the last flicker of daylight had faded Fokir pulled the boat over and dropped anchor in a channel that the ebb-tide had turned into a sheltered creek. It was clear that they could not have gone much farther that night, and yet there was something about his manner that told Piya that he was disappointed – that he had decided on another spot in which to anchor and was annoyed with himself for not having reached it.
But now that they were at anchor, with the surprises of the day behind them, a sense of unhurried lassitude descended on the boat. Fokir put a match to an oil-blackened lamp and lit a bidi from the flame. After he had smoked it down to a stub, he went aft, and showed Piya, by indication and gesture, how the squared platform at the stern end of the boat could be screened off, for use as a lavatory and bathroom. By way of example, he drew a bucket of water and proceeded to bathe Tutul, using the brackish water of the river to soap him, and dipping sparsely into a fresh-water canister to wash off the suds.
With the setting of the sun, the night had turned chilly and the boy’s teeth chattered as he stood dripping on deck. Producing a chequered cloth, Fokir rubbed him down before bundling him into his clothes. This towel was made of reddish cotton and was one of several similar pieces Piya had seen around the boat; they had stirred a faint sense of recognition but she could not recall where from.
Once Tutul was done with dressing, it was his turn to bathe his father. After Fokir had stripped down to his breechcloth, Tutul upended streams of cold water over his head, to the accompaniment of much laughter and many loud yells. Piya could see the bones of Fokir’s chest, pushing against his skin, like the ribs of a tin can that had been stripped of its label. The water made patterns around him, sluicing off the contours of his body as though it were tumbling down the tiers of a fountain.
When both father and son were finished it was Piya’s turn. A bucket load of water was pulled up and the shelter was screened off with the sari. In the confines of the boat it was no easy matter to change places; it was impossible for all three of them to be on their feet at the same time, so they had to lie prone and squirm through the hooped hood, in a jumble of elbows, hips and bellies, with Fokir holding down his lungi to prevent it from riding up. As they were wriggling past each other Piya caught his eye and they both laughed.
Piya emerged at the far end to find the river glowing like quicksilver. All but the brightest of the stars had been obscured by the moon and, apart from their one lamp, no other light was to be seen, either on land or on the water. Nor was there any sound, other than the lapping of the water, for the shore was so distant that even the insects of the forest were inaudible. Except at sea, she had never known the human trace to be so faint, so close to undetectable. Yet on looking around her tiny bathroom, she discovered, by the yellow light of the lamp, that amenities far beyond her expectations had been provided. There was a half-canister of fresh water and next to it a bucket filled with the brackish water of the river; there was a cake of soap on a ledge, and beside it, a tiny but astonishing object – a plastic sachet of shampoo. She had seen strings of these dangling in the tea-shops in Canning and yet, when she picked it up to examine it, its presence seemed oddly intrusive. She would have liked to throw it away, except she knew that here, on the island that was this boat, the sachet was a treasure of a kind (bought at the expense of how many crabs?) and that it had been put there in her honour. To throw it away would be to abuse this offering; so even though she had never felt less inclined to use shampoo, she put a little bit of it in her hair and washed it into the water, hoping they would see, from the bubbles flowing past the bow, that she had accepted the gift and put it to use.
Only when it was too late and she was shivering against the chill, squatting on the wet boards and hugging her knees, did she remember that she had no towel nor anything else with which to dry herself. But a further search revealed that even this had been provided for: one of those rectangles of chequered cloth had been left draped on the bamboo awning for her use. It was already dry, which suggested it had been there for some time. When she touched it, to pick it up, she had an intuition that this was what Fokir had been wearing when he had dived in after her. These lengths of cloth served many purposes, she knew, and when she put it to her nose she had the impression that she could smell, along with the tartness of the sun and the metallic muddiness of the river, the salty scent of his sweat.
Now, she recalled where it was that she had seen a towel like this before: it was tied to the doorknob of her father’s wardrobe, in the eleventh-floor apartment of her childhood. Through the years of her adolescence, the fabric had grown old and tattered and she would have thrown it away but for her father’s protests. He was, in general, the least sentimental of men, especially where it concerned ‘home’. Where others sought to preserve their memories of the ‘old country’, he had always tried to expunge them. His feet were in the present, he had liked to say, by which he meant they were planted firmly on the rungs of his company’s career ladder. But when she had asked whether she could throw away that rotting bit of old cloth, he had responded almost with shock. It had been with him for many years, he said, it was almost a part of his body, like his hair or his nail clippings; his luck was woven into it; he could not think of parting with it, of throwing away this—. What was it he had called it? She had known the word once, but time had erased it from her memory.
