The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [128]
“Yes. I finished it, actually. I was just looking it over again.”
“Can I have a look?”
“Certainly.”
Kanai closed the book and held it out to her. She took the notebook gingerly and allowed it to fall open.
“The writing’s very small,” she said.
“Yes,” said Kanai. “It’s not easy to read.”
“And is it all in Bengali?”
“Yes.”
She closed the book carefully and handed it back to Kanai. “So what’s it about?”
Kanai scratched his head as he wondered how best to describe the notebook. “It’s about all kinds of things: places, people —”
“Anyone you know?”
“Yes. Actually, Fokir’s mother figures in it a lot. Fokir too — though Nirmal only knew him when he was very small.”
Piya’s eyes widened. “Fokir and his mother? How come they’re in it?”
“I told you, didn’t I, that Kusum, Fokir’s mother, was involved in an effort to resettle one of these islands?”
“Yes, you did.”
Kanai smiled. “I think, without knowing it, he may have been half in love with Kusum.”
“Does he say so in the book?”
“No,” said Kanai. “But then he wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Being what he was,” Kanai said, “a man of his time and place, with his convictions — he’d have thought it frivolous.”
Piya ran her fingers through her short, curly hair. “I don’t get it,” she said. “What were his convictions?”
Kanai leaned back in his chair as he thought this over. “He was a radical at one time,” he said. “In fact, if you were to ask my aunt Nilima, she would tell you that the reason he got mixed up with the settlers in Morichjhãpi was because he couldn’t let go of the idea of revolution.”
“I take it you don’t agree with her?”
“No,” said Kanai. “I think she’s wrong. As I see it, Nirmal was possessed more by words than by politics. There are people who live through poetry, and he was one of them. For Nilima, a person like that is very hard to understand — but that’s the kind of man Nirmal was. He loved the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, a great German poet, whose work has been translated into Bangla by some of our own best-known poets. Rilke said ‘life is lived in transformation,’ and I think Nirmal soaked this idea into himself in the way cloth absorbs ink. To him, what Kusum stood for was the embodiment of Rilke’s idea of transformation.”
“Marxism and poetry?” Piya said drily, raising her eyebrows. “It seems like an odd combination.”
“It was,” Kanai agreed. “But those contradictions were typical of his generation. Nirmal was perhaps the least materialistic person I’ve ever known. But it was very important for him to believe that he was a historical materialist.”
“And what exactly does that mean?”
“For him it meant that everything which existed was interconnected: the trees, the sky, the weather, people, poetry, science, nature. He hunted down facts in the way a magpie collects shiny things. Yet when he strung them all together, somehow they did become stories — of a kind.”
Piya rested her chin on her fist. “Can you give me an example?”
Kanai thought about this for a minute. “I remember one of his stories — it has always stuck in my mind.”
“What’s it about?”
“Do you remember Canning, the town where we got off the train?”
“Sure I remember Canning,” Piya said. “That’s where I got my permit. It’s not what I’d call a memorable place.”
“Exactly,” said Kanai. “The first time I went there was in 1970, when Nirmal and Nilima brought me to Lusibari. I was disgusted by the place — I thought it was a horrible, muddy little town. I happened to say something to that effect and Nirmal was outraged. He shouted at me, ‘A place is what you make of it.’ And then he told a story so unlikely I thought he’d made it up. But after I went back home, I took the trouble to look into it and discovered it was true.”
“What was the story?” Piya said. “Do you remember? I’d love to hear it.”
“All right,