The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [136]
“What did you say?”
Kanai smiled. “Horen and I adopted a policy of unyielding denial. It seemed to be working until they spotted Fokir. One of the guards recognized him and said you were last seen on his boat.”
“Oh my God!” said Piya. “Was it a kind of weasel-looking guy?”
“Yes,” said Kanai. “That’s the one. I don’t know what he told the others, but they were all set to drag Fokir off to jail. Fortunately I was able to persuade them to change their minds.”
“And how did you do that?”
Kanai’s voice became very dry. “Shall we say I mentioned the names of a few friends and parted with a few notes?”
She guessed his ironic tone was intended to downplay the seriousness of the situation and she was suddenly grateful for his calm, urbane presence. What would have happened if he hadn’t been there? She knew that in all likelihood she would have ended up on one of those official motorboats.
She put a hand on Kanai’s arm. “Thank you. I appreciate it. I really do. And I’m sure Fokir does too.”
Kanai acknowledged this by dipping his head ironically. “Always glad to oblige.” In a graver tone of voice he added, “However, I do have to say, Piya, you really should think seriously of turning back. If they find you, there could be trouble. You could end up in jail and there’s not much I or anyone else could do. The proximity of the border changes everything.”
Piya looked into the distance as she considered this. She thought of Blyth and Roxburgh and the naturalists who had crossed these waters a hundred years before and found them teeming with cetaceans. She thought of all the years in between when, for one reason or another, no one had paid any heed to these creatures and so no one had known of their decimation. It had fallen to her to be the first to carry back a report of the current situation and she knew she could not turn back from the responsibility.
“I can’t return right now, Kanai,” she said. “It’s hard to explain to you how important my work is. If I leave, who knows how long it’ll be before another cetologist can come here? I’ve got to stay as long as I possibly can.”
Kanai frowned. “And what if they take you off to jail?”
Piya shrugged. “How long could they keep me, anyway? And when they let me out, the material will still be in my head.”
AT MIDDAY, with the sun blazing overhead, Piya took a break and came to sit beside Kanai in the shade of the awning. There was a troubled look in her eyes that prompted Kanai to say, “Are you still thinking about the forest guards?”
This seemed to startle her. “Oh, no. Not that.”
“Then?”
She tipped her head back to drink from her water bottle. “The village,” she said, wiping her mouth. “Last night: I still can’t get it out of my head. I keep seeing it again and again — the people, the flames. It was like something from some other time — before recorded history. I feel like I’ll never be able to get my mind around the —”
Kanai prompted her as she faltered. “The horror?”
“The horror. Yes. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to forget it.”
“Probably not.”
“But for Fokir and Horen and the others it was just a part of everyday life, wasn’t it?”
“I imagine they’ve learned to take it in their stride, Piya. They’ve had to.”
“That’s what haunts me,” said Piya. “In a way that makes them a part of the horror too, doesn’t it?”
Kanai snapped shut the notebook. “To be fair to Fokir and Horen, I don’t think it’s quite that simple, Piya. I mean, aren’t we a part of the horror as well? You and me and people like us?”
Piya ran a hand through her hair. “I don’t see how.”
“That tiger had killed two people, Piya,” Kanai said. “And that was just in one village. It happens every week that people are killed by tigers. How about the horror of that? If there were killings on that scale anywhere else on earth it would be called a genocide, and yet here it goes almost unremarked: these killings are never reported, never written about in the papers. And the reason is just