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By Root 971 0

shipping inspector, an Ingrej shaheb by the name of Henry Piddington. Before coming to India, Piddingtonshaheb had lived in the Caribbean, and somewhere in those islands he had fallen in love — not with a woman nor even with a dog, as is often the case with lonely Englishmen living in faraway places. No, Mr. Piddington fell in love with storms. Out there, of course, they call them hurricanes, and Piddington-shaheb’s love for them knew no limits. He loved them not in the way you might love the mountains or the stars: for him they were like books or music, and he felt for them the same affection a devotee might feel for his favorite authors or musicians. He read them, listened to them, studied them and tried to understand them. He loved them so much that he invented a new word to describe them: “cyclone.”

Now, our Kolkata may not be as romantic a place as the West Indies, but for the cultivation of Piddington-shaheb’s love affair it was just as good. In the violence of its storms the Bay of Bengal, let it be said, is second to none — not to the Caribbean, not to the South China Sea. Wasn’t it our tufaan, after all, that gave birth to the word “typhoon”?

When Mr. Piddington learned of the viceroy’s new port, he understood at once the madness the river had in mind. Standing on its banks, he spoke his mind. “Maybe you could trick those surveyors,” he said, “but you can’t make a fool of me. I’ve seen through your little game and I’m going to make sure that they know too.”

And the Matla laughed its mental laugh and said, “Go on, do it. Do it now, tell them. It’s you they’ll call Matla — a man who thinks he can look into the hearts of rivers and storms.”

Sitting in his rooms in Kolkata, Piddington-shaheb drafted dozens of letters; he wrote to the planners and surveyors and warned of the dangers; he told them it was crazy to build a town so deep in the tide country. The mangroves were Bengal’s defense against the bay, he said — they served as a barrier against nature’s fury, absorbing the initial onslaught of cyclonic winds, waves and tidal surges. If not for the tide country, the plains would have been drowned long before: it was the mangroves that kept the hinterland alive. Kolkata’s long, winding sea-lane was thus its natural defense against the turbulent energies of the bay; the new port, on the other hand, was dangerously exposed. Given an unfortunate conjunction of winds and tides, even a minor storm would suffice to wash it away; all it would take was a wave stirred up by a cyclone. Driven to desperation, Mr. Piddington even wrote to the viceroy. Begging him to rethink the matter, he made a prediction: if the port was built at this location, he said, it would not last more than fifteen years. There would come a day when a great mass of salt water would rise up in the midst of a cyclone and drown the whole settlement; on this he would stake his reputation, as a man and as a scientist.

Of course, no one paid any attention; neither the planners nor the laat shaheb had the time to listen. Mr. Piddington, after all, was nothing but a lowly shipping inspector and he stood very low in the Ingrej scale of caste. People began to whisper that he was, well, he was a man so mental, who could blame him if there was a little gondogol in his mind; wasn’t he the one who’d once been heard to say that storms were “wonderful meteors”?

So the work went on and the port was built. Its streets and strand were laid out, its hotels and houses were painted and made ready, and everything went exactly as planned. One day, with much noise and drum beating the viceroy planted his feet on the Matla’s flanks and gave the town its new name, Port Canning.

Piddington-shaheb was not invited to the ceremony. On the streets of Kolkata, people laughed and sniggered now when they saw him pass by: Oh, there goes that old matal Piddington. Wasn’t he the one who kept bothering the laat shaheb about his new port? Hadn’t he made a prediction of some kind, staking his reputation?

Wait, said Piddington, wait — I said fifteen years.

The Matla took pity on this