The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [134]
For a moment the man was too surprised to respond. Then he began to shout at the top of his voice, shaking his fist in Piya’s face. In a minute he was joined by some half-dozen others — young men with shawls wrapped around their heads, shouting words she could not understand. She felt a hand closing on her elbow and looked around to find Fokir standing behind her. At the sight of him, her heart lifted and she was assailed by both hope and a sense of relief: she was certain he would know what to do, that he would find a way to put a stop to what was going on. But instead of coming to her aid, he put his arm around her, pinning her to his chest. He carried her away, retreating through the crowd as she kicked his knees and clawed at his hands. Then she saw a knot of flame arcing over the crowd and falling on the thatch: almost at once, branches of flame sprouted from the roof of the pen. There was another roar, and this was matched a moment later by the voices of the crowd, screaming in a kind of maddened blood lust, “Maar! Maar!” The flames leapt up and people began to stoke them with sticks and straw.
Piya began to scream as she tried to throw off Fokir’s grip. “Let me go! Let me go!”
But instead of unloosing her, he turned her around, pinned her to his body and half dragged and half carried her to the embankment. In the light of the leaping flames she saw that Kanai and Horen were already standing there. They gathered around her and led her down the embankment toward the boat.
Stumbling down the bank, she managed to control herself to the point where she was able to say, in an icy voice, “Fokir! Let me go. Kanai, tell him to let me go.”
Fokir loosened his grip, but gingerly, and as she stepped away from him, he made a motion as if to prevent her from running back toward the village.
She could hear the flames crackling in the distance and she smelled the reek of burning fur and flesh. Then Fokir said something to her directly, in her ear, and she turned to Kanai: “What was that? What did he say?”
“Fokir says you shouldn’t be so upset.”
“How can I not be upset? That’s the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen — a tiger set on fire.”
“He says when a tiger comes into a human settlement, it’s because it wants to die.”
She turned on Fokir, covering her ears with both hands. “Stop it. I don’t want to hear any more of this. Let’s just go.”
INTERROGATIONS
DAYLIGHT WAS BREAKING when they stepped back on the Megha, and Horen lost no time in raising the anchor and starting the engine. It was best to get away quickly, he said; there was bound to be trouble once news of the killing reached the Forest Department. In the past, similar incidents had led to riots, shootings and large-scale arrests.
As the bhotbhoti was making its turn, Kanai headed toward his cabin to change, while Piya went, as if by habit, to her usual place at the head of the upper deck. Kanai assumed she would be back “on effort” in a matter of minutes. But when he came out again she was sitting slumped on the deck, leaning listlessly against a rail, and he knew from her posture that she had been crying.
He went to sit beside her. “Look, Piya,” he said, “don’t torment yourself with this. There’s nothing we could have done.”
“We could have tried.”
“It would have made no difference.”
“I guess.” She wiped her eyes with the