The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [113]
He looked startled. “Why Saar,” he said, “I’ve known it as long as I can remember. I heard my father reciting it, and I learned from him.”
“So is this legend passed on from mouth to mouth and held only in memory?”
“Why no, Saar,” he said. “There’s a book in which it was printed. I have a copy.” He reached down into that part of his boat where he stored his things and pulled out a tattered old pamphlet. “Here,” he said, “have a look.”
I opened the first page and saw it bore the title Bon Bibir Karamoti orthat Bon Bibi Johuranama (The Miracles of Bon Bibi or The Narrative of Her Glory). When I tried to open the book, I had another surprise: the pages opened to the right, as in Arabic, not to the left, as in Bangla. Yet the prosody was that of much of Bangla folklore: the legend was recounted in the verse form called dwipodi poyar — with rhymed couplets in which each line is of roughly twelve syllables, each with a break, or caesura, toward the middle.
The booklet was written by a Muslim whose name was given simply as Abdur-Rahim. By the usual literary standards the work did not have great merit. Although the lines rhymed, in a kind of doggerel fashion, they did not appear to be verse; they flowed into each other, being broken only by slashes and asterisks. In other words they looked like prose and read like verse, a strange hybrid, I thought at first, and then it occurred to me that no, this was something remarkable and wonderful — prose that had mounted the ladder of meter in order to ascend above the prosaic.
“When was this book written?” I asked Horen. “Do you know?”
“Oh, it’s old,” said Horen. “Very, very old.”
Very, very old? But on the first page was a couplet that read, “There are those who travel with an atlas in hand / while others use carriages to wander the land.”
It struck me that this legend had perhaps taken shape in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, just as new waves of settlers were moving into the tide country. And was it possible that this accounted for the way it was formed, from elements of legend and scripture, from the near and the far, Bangla and Arabic?
How could it be otherwise? For this I have seen confirmed many times, that the mudbanks of the tide country are shaped not only by rivers of silt, but also by rivers of language: Bengali, English, Arabic, Hindi, Arakanese and who knows what else? Flowing into one another they create a proliferation of small worlds that hang suspended in the flow. And so it dawned on me: the tide country’s faith is something like one of its great mohonas, a meeting not just of many rivers, but a roundabout people can use to pass in many directions — from country to country and even between faiths and religions.
I was so taken with this idea that I began to copy some passages of the pamphlet into the back of a notebook I was carrying in my jhola — this very one, as it happens. The print was tiny and I had to squint hard at the page to decipher it. Absent-mindedly, I handed the booklet to Fokir, as I might have to one of my pupils. I said, “Read it out aloud so I can copy it.”
He began to speak the words out aloud while I wrote them down. Suddenly a thought struck me and I said to Kusum, “But you told me Fokir can neither write nor read.”
“That’s right, Saar,” she said. “He can’t.”
“Then?”
She smiled and patted him on the head. “It’s all inside here. I’ve told it to him so often that the words have become a part of him.”
It is evening now and Kusum has given me a candle so I can go on writing. Horen is impatient to leave: he has been entrusted with the task of taking Fokir to safety. Only Kusum and I will remain. We can hear the patrol boats, which have encircled the island. Horen will use the cover of darkness to slip past.
He wants to go now. I say to him, “Just a few more hours. There’s a whole night ahead.