The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [127]
Look, I’m alive. On what? Neither childhood nor the future grows less . . . More being than I’ll ever need springs up in my heart.
KANAI FOUND THAT his hands were shaking as he put down the notebook. The lamp had filled the cabin with kerosene fumes; he felt he was stifling. Picking a blanket off the bunk, he wrapped it around his shoulders and stepped out into the gangway. The sharp smell of a bidi came to his nose and he looked to his left, toward the bow.
Horen was seated there in one of the two armchairs. He was smoking with his feet up on the gunwale. He looked around as Kanai closed the door of his cabin.
“Still up?”
“Yes,” said Kanai. “I just finished reading my uncle’s notebook.”
Horen acknowledged this with an indifferent grunt.
Kanai seated himself in the adjoining chair. “It ends with you taking Fokir away in your boat.”
Horen angled his gaze downward, into the water, as if he were looking into the past. “We should have left a little earlier,” he said matter-of-factly. “We would have had the currents behind us.”
“And what happened in Morichjhãpi after that? Do you know?”
Horen sucked on the end of his bidi. “I know no more than anyone else knows. It was all just rumor.”
“And what were the rumors?”
A wisp of smoke curled out of Horen’s nose. “What we heard,” he said, “was that the assault began the next day. The gangsters who’d been assembling around the island were carried over in boats and dinghies and bhotbhotis. They burnt the settlers’ huts, they sank their boats, they laid waste to their fields.” He grunted in his laconic way. “Whatever you can imagine them doing, they did.”
“And Kusum and my uncle? What happened to them?”
“No one knows for sure, but what I’ve heard is that a group of women were taken away by force, Kusum among them. People say they were used and then thrown into the rivers, so they would be washed away by the tides. Dozens of settlers were killed that day. The sea claimed them all.”
“And my uncle?”
“He was put on a bus with the other refugees. They were to be sent back to the place they had come from — in Madhya Pradesh or wherever it was. But at some point they must have let him off because he found his way back to Canning.”
Here Horen broke off and proceeded to search his pockets with much fumbling and many muttered curses. By the time he’d found and lit another bidi it had become clear to Kanai that he was trying to create a diversion so as to lead the conversation away from Nirmal and Kusum. Kanai was not surprised when he said, in a comfortably affable tone, “What time do you want to leave tomorrow morning?”
Kanai decided he would not let him change the subject. “Tell me something, Horen-da,” he said, “about my uncle. You were the one who took him to Morichjhãpi. Why do you think he got so involved with that place?”
“Same as anyone else,” Horen said with a shrug.
“But after all, Kusum and Fokir were your relatives,” Kanai said. “So it’s understandable that you were concerned about them. But what about Saar? Why did it mean so much to him?”
Horen pulled on his bidi. “Your uncle was a very unusual man,” he said at last. “People say he was mad. As we say, you can’t explain what a madman will do, any more than you can account for what a goat will eat.”
“But tell me this, Horen-da,” Kanai persisted. “Do you think it possible he was in love with Kusum?”
Horen rose to his feet and snorted in such a way as to indicate that he had been goaded beyond toleration. “Kanai-babu,” he said in a sharp, irritated voice, “I’m an unlettered man. You’re talking about things city people think about. I don’t have time for such things.”
He flicked his bidi away and they heard it hiss as it hit the water. “You’d better go to sleep now,” Horen said. “We’ll make an early start tomorrow.”
A POST OFFICE ON SUNDAY
PIYA HAD GONE to bed too early and around midnight found herself wide awake, sitting up in her bunk. She spent a few minutes trying to drift off again and then gave up. Wrapping a blanket around her shoulders, she stepped out on deck. The light of the waxing moon was so