The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [104]
Kanai burst into laughter. “A cetacean pilgrimage?”
“Yes,” said Piya. “My cousins laughed too. But that’s just what it was, a pilgrimage.”
“And who are these cousins of yours?” said Kanai.
“My mashima’s daughters,” Piya said. “They’re younger than me; one’s in high school and one’s in college — both really bright, smart kids. They had a car and driver and they said they’d take me wherever I wanted to go in Calcutta. I guess they figured that I’d want to buy some souvenirs or something. When I told them where I wanted to go, they were like, ‘The Botanical Gardens! What are you going to do there?’”
“I can see the point of that question,” Kanai said. “What do the Botanical Gardens have to do with dolphins?”
“Everything,” said Piya. “You see, in the nineteenth century the gardens were run by some very good naturalists. One of them was William Roxburgh, the man who identified the Gangetic dolphin.”
It was in Calcutta’s Botanical Gardens, Piya explained, that Roxburgh had written his famous article of 1801 announcing the discovery of the first-known river dolphin. He had called it Delphinus gangeticus (“Soosoo is the name it is known by among the Bengalese around Calcutta”), but the name had been changed later, when it was discovered that Pliny the Elder had already named the Indian river dolphin, as far back as the first century C.E. — he had called it Platanista. In the zoological inventory the Gangetic dolphin had come to be listed as Platanista gangetica (Roxburgh, 1801). Years later, John Anderson, one of Roxburgh’s successors at the gardens, actually adopted an infant Gangetic dolphin. He kept it in his bathtub, and it lived for several weeks.
“But you know what?” Piya said. “Although he had a dolphin in his bathtub, Anderson never found out that Platanista are blind — or that they prefer to swim on their side.”
“Is that what they do?”
“Yes.”
“So did you find the bathtub?” said Kanai, reaching across the table for the rice.
Piya laughed. “No. But I wasn’t too disappointed. It was good just to be there.”
“So what was the next station in your pilgrimage?” Kanai said.
“This one will surprise you even more,” said Piya. “Salt Lake.”
Kanai’s eyebrows shot up. “You mean the Kolkata suburb?”
“It wasn’t always a suburb, you know,” Piya said, peeling another banana. “In 1852 it was just a wetland with a few scattered ponds.”
In July that year, Piya said, an unusually high tide caused a sudden surge in the rivers of the delta. The wave traveled deep into the hinterland, flooding the swamps and wetlands that surrounded Calcutta. When the tide turned and the waters began to recede, a rumor swept the streets of the city: a school of giant sea creatures had been stranded in one of the salt lakes on the city’s western outskirts. The then superintendent of the Botanical Gardens was one Edward Blyth, an English naturalist. The news worried him. The year before on the Malabar coast a stranded whale, a full eighty-eight feet in length, had been dismembered by the local people: they had set upon it with knives, axes and spears and hacked it apart. A nearby English clergyman was shown the meat, both dried and fresh, and was told that it was “first chop beef.” What if these creatures were cut up and consumed before they had been subjected to a proper examination? The thought of this sent Blyth hurrying across town to the salt lake.
“It wasn’t that he cared about their being killed,” Piya said. “He just wanted to do it himself.”
The marshes were steaming under a blazing sun and the water had fallen back to its accustomed level. He arrived to find some twenty animals floundering in a shallow pond. Their heads were rounded and their bodies black with white undersides. The adult males were over thirteen feet long. The water was too low to keep them fully submerged and their short, sharply raked dorsal fins were exposed to the sun. They were in great distress and their moans could be clearly heard. Blyth was inclined to identify the animals