The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [114]
INTERMEDIARIES
BY THE TIME Piya had organized her notes, washed her clothes and cleaned her equipment, the day was over and night had fallen. She decided to turn in without waiting for dinner. There was no telling how long it would be before she slept in a real bed again. She might as well make the most of this one and get a good night’s sleep. She decided not to interrupt Kanai, who was upstairs in the study. She mixed a tumbler of Ovaltine for herself and took it downstairs, into the open.
The moon was up, and in the silvery light Piya spotted Nilima standing outside her door. She appeared to be deep in thought, but her head turned as Piya approached.
Piya sketched a wave with her free hand: “Hello.”
Nilima answered with a smile and a few words of Bengali. This drew a rueful response from Piya. “I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Of course,” said Nilima. “I’m the one who should apologize. I always forget. It’s your appearance that gets me mixed up — I keep having to remind myself not to speak to you in Bangla.”
Piya smiled. “My mother used to say that a day would come when I’d regret not knowing the language. And I guess she was right.”
“But tell me, my dear,” Nilima said. “Just as a matter of interest: why is it your parents never taught you any Bangla?”
“My mother tried a little,” said Piya. “But I was not an eager student. And as for my father, I think he had some doubts.”
“Doubts? About teaching you his language?”
“Yes,” said Piya. “It’s a complicated story. You see, my father’s parents were Bengalis who’d settled in Burma — they came to India as refugees during the Second World War. Having moved around a lot, my father has all these theories about immigrants and refugees. He believes that Indians — Bengalis in particular — don’t travel well because their eyes are always turned backward, toward home. When we moved to America, he decided he wasn’t going to make that mistake: he was going to try to fit in.”
“So he always spoke English to you?”
“Yes,” said Piya, “and it was a real sacrifice for him because he doesn’t speak English very well, even to this day. He’s an engineer and he tends to sound a bit like an instruction manual.”
“So what did he speak with your mother?”
“They spoke Bengali to each other,” said Piya with a laugh. “But that was when they were speaking, of course. When they weren’t, I was their sole means of communication. And I always made them translate their messages into English — or else I wouldn’t carry them.”
Nilima made no response and her silence led Piya to wonder whether she had taken offense at something she had said. But just then Nilima reached for the hem of her sari and brought it up to her face. Piya saw that her eyes had filled with tears.
“I’m sorry,” Piya said quickly. “Did I say something wrong?”
“No, my dear,” said Nilima. “You said nothing wrong. I was just thinking of you as a little girl, carrying your parents’ words from one to the other. It’s a terrible thing, my dear, when a husband and wife can’t speak to each other. But your parents were lucky: at least they had you to run between them. Imagine if they had no one —”
She let the sentence die unfinished and fell silent again. Piya knew she had unwittingly touched on some private grief and she waited quietly while Nilima composed herself.
“Only once was there ever a child in our home,” Nilima said presently. “That was when Kanai came to stay with us as a boy. To my husband it meant more than I could ever have imagined. More than anything else he longed to have someone to whom he could pass on his words. For years afterward he would say to me, ‘I wish Kanai would come again.’ I’d remind him that Kanai wasn’t a boy anymore: he was a grown man. But that didn’t stop my husband. He wrote to Kanai many times, asking him to come.”
“And Kanai never came?”
“No,” said Nilima. She sighed. “Kanai was on the way to success and that takes its own toll. He didn